All in your head - The strong Chronos List

This is the chronos protocol list I´ve been playing for a while now with a surprising amount of success, winning a 7 person tournament, a 4 person tournament, and getting 2nd in a 22 person tournament. All in all winning 10/13 tournament games so far.

This started out as a way to justify the inclusion of complete image in a jinteki deck, in general the card is straight up bad, but in chronos protocol it is beautiful. :) If you know any of the cards in your opponents hand it is a 100% kill with two cards, 50% with three, with four and up the odds start getting really bad. Naturally the main threat is to play it when your opponent has two or fewer cards.

So what does this deck do? Why play this deck?

The three main perks of this deck are:

• Runners will be extra scared of running early due to the threat of losing key cards like breakers to a hokusai grid or something. This buys you time to develop your board and score agendas.
• The threat of complete image forces the runner to either take a lot of precautions or take on a lot of risk. This helps you get scoring windows for obokata and makes snare a bigger issue.
• The deck is a lot of fun to play, flatlining with complete image feels amazing.

Notable choices:

• Only 3-pointers to always enable complete image on steal, and gene splicer to get that last point.
• Archived memories to bring back complete image if needed, and recur gene splicer over and over again when on 6 points to tax out the runners hand. This is often also great for recurring rashida.
• Slot machine is good in general, but even better here as knowing what your opponent draws enables complete image in situations where your opponent goes down to 0 cards and then draws back up.
• Saisentan: Not great in most decks, but really shines here. Facechecking into what is basically a guaranteed 4 damage is absolutely crazy and makes running early very risky for the runner. I´ve had this card flatline a runner with 5 cards in hand! MK ultra breaks it for 6 credits(!!!), yes a setup crim with bukghalter is very strong against it but the perks make up for it IMO.
• Engram flush: Extra strong in chronos since you are more likely to know the contents of your opponents hand. Also the reveal synergizes with complete image.
• The deck runs cheap ice because it´s not very rich, but the ice does its job very well. You want to have enough money left over for snares and complete image.

General strategy:

• Usually you want the remote to be taxing in terms of cards and centrals to be taxing in terms of credits. Kakugos and border controls most often go in the remote.
• Hokusai is often good in the remote, but especially great for centrals where you expect the runner to skip access due to cards like diversion of funds or stargate. Definitely get this on a central against apoc to snipe that apoc. Great detterent for runs, steep trash cost and guaranteed net damage. Great card 10/10 would play in Chronos again.
• If the game gets to a point where the runner is starting to run out of cards in the deck then you should consider using and recurring complete image simply to drain the last few cards to make it impossible for the runner to steal Obokatas or trash your splicer. Remember that as long as you know one of the cards in the runners hand complete image is a guaranteed two damage.
• Really try to exploit windows early on in the game to score out an agenda or two while the runner struggles to set up. If you are facing a deck featuring nasty hate cards the best way to beat that is to play fast and not let the runner get a comfortable setup, or to try to wiggle out of it with some well timed bluffs. As the runner stabilizes you will want to have a card taxing remote ready to finish off the game with.
• Always take notes while playing this to keep tabs on your opponents hand and top of deck.

Why not play neural emp and salems to make the kill threat stronger?:

I found that this just clogs up the deck without making the kill threat that much stronger, in a a lot of cases neural EMP + salems will only deal one extra damage in total. While those combo pieces are sitting in your hand they do absolutely nothing. Complete image is the real star, in the normal cases it deals three or four net damage by itself and you dont need to include more than the three copies to keep that threat alive. Therefore, keep it clean, keep it simple.

This deck will naturally be slightly worse if people are aware of it, but I dont view this as a gimicky deck. The gameplan is solid and there are many threats for the runner to dodge.

The events I´ve brought this to so far: https://alwaysberunning.net/tournaments/2734/onlineturnering-netrunner https://alwaysberunning.net/tournaments/2717/iberian-lockdown-1-an-online-event https://alwaysberunning.net/tournaments/2722/online-gnk-the-neo-thameside-inn https://alwaysberunning.net/tournaments/2659/malm-standard-q4-gnk