[Startup] Zahya Sadeghi (2-1 at Ysengrin's August SU)

This is the decklist I used at Ysengrin’s August 2021 Startup tournament. Note that the card choices and reasoning are from the perspective of someone with very little experience. This was a really fun first Netrunner tournament for me and I would encourage everyone to give it a try if Startup interests you.

First, let’s get it out of the way. Yes, this is 45 cards. No, that was not an intentional design decision. This was originally a Ken deck I built that wasn’t performing well, so I swapped the ID and a few cards due to the 2 fewer influence, but completely forgot the minimum deck size was lower. After playing the deck some, I’d definitely cut a Leech, and then look at cutting Tread Lightly and some number of Flip Switches and Emergency Shutdowns, probably two of the former and one of the latter, though I’m unsure what to spend the newfound influence on.

After looking at some other Zahya lists, there isn’t much particularly noteworthy here. Your Bravados and Dirty Laundries are expected since they are excellent click compression. Emergency Shutdown was useful against ICE like Ansel and Bran, but I often don’t have a great use for it. Inside Job is just incredible. Jailbreak and The Maker’s Eye work great with Zahya’s ability, and provided enough multi-access for me. Tread Lightly is there because I had dreams of running a remote with four pieces of unrezzed ICE, but after playing for a bit, I think something must have gone wrong if a remote gets to that point.

The hardware is pretty standard, other than perhaps the Flip Switches. I think they are good as cards 44 and 45, but when I cut down to 40 I don’t see them sticking around. I do enjoy being able to run with impunity and not giving the corp the benefit of having the subroutines fire on expensive ICE.

As far as resources, Liberated Account is the only one that’s not present in most other decks. After listening to Ysengrin’s commentary on the stream, I might try Telework Contract here. Not being able to burst is worrisome, but after reviewing the replays, I often had to burst back up simply because I spent 6 credits on Liberated Account when perhaps I didn’t need to. Also, it’s possible just one is correct once the deck is cut down to 40 cards.

The breakers are all standard Criminal breakers, except for Cleaver. Based on what I went up against, Corroder might be better here, and possibly just one. I never played Cleaver during the tournament because it wasn’t good against anything I was seeing. With Boomerang and Inside Job, you can often get by with just not playing breakers for the majority of the game. That’s something I did not fully appreciate when I built the deck.

Below are the links to the replays from the tournament (shared with permission from my opponents), and a link to YsengrinSC’s stream with timestamps for when the deck was featured.

Round 1 vs. theKuehm22 (GameNET) - https://www.jinteki.net/replay/20981721-3401-472c-9063-70c815ccc389

After reviewing the replay, I realized I missed a win here. On turn 15, I didn't want to access the remote without 5 credits, thinking it was a Bellona, and I do think that it is correct to not access there unless you can do so with 5 credits, even though it was a Send a Message. The two lines I looked at were running HQ, paying 4 to F2P to go down to 1, back up to 2 after the access, Emergency Shutdown the outermost Tollboth down to 0 credits, Pennyshaver up to 6, and run, but that would only give me 3 credits on access after Tollbooth takes 3. Alternately, Pennyshaver up to 10, Liberated up to 14, play Abagnale down to 10, run and trash to bypass the outermost and Boomerang the innermost has me accessing at 4. I realized later that just not paying for the tag subroutine on F2P would allow me to do line 1 and access with 5. I call that out because it was a good reminder for me to pay attention to the subroutines that are nice to break, and the ones you actually have to break.

Round 3 vs. bassmanbigc (MirrorMorph) - https://www.jinteki.net/replay/4c785085-737b-426b-8051-c8fb67e7935a

Round 5 vs. YsengrinSC (Precision Design) - https://www.jinteki.net/replay/9854a96c-f91f-4c6f-9d0d-357db5d3f2c2

YsengrinSC’s Twitch VOD https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1111093341?t=27m00s (Round 1) https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1111093341?t=179m00s (Round 5)