Angry Geist (67th @ Worlds, 5-0 @ King of Servers)

This is the list I piloted to a 67th place finish at Worlds 2016. I had a pairing screw-up in round 7 that resulted in a lower placement than I might have otherwise gotten, but I was still happy to have done significantly better than my 163rd place finish at Worlds 2015 and to have made Day 2. Also, Pacer Stringfellow (@pacer) borrowed this deck to play at King of Servers, where it went 5-0. Finally, Josh Brzinski (@Fruggles) played a very similar list and had great success as well.

I got the idea for this list while talking to Cory Hockman (@TheGentleShark), who was playing a list with Spy Camera at the time, and I felt like it was in a decent place in the meta. I played a Spy Cam version against Pacer a few times the week before Worlds, and he suggested cutting the Cams for the Fall Guy/New Angeles City Hall package (which I believe was a Zach Cavis idea for Pacer's Andy list), going in hard with Account Siphon/Crescentus and econ denial. After a bit more playtesting, I'd say it was the right decision.

One of things I was most concerned about going into Worlds was how to best deal with BOOM! decks, and with 5 tag-avoidance cards in addition to absurd on-demand draw, this deck felt pretty safe. Ironically I still ended up getting BOOM!'d twice during the tournament, but they were clearly due to my own extremely dumb mistakes and inexperience with the deck. Over the course of the tournament I got better practice with the deck, and every BOOM deck I played after those first two I beat handily.

I am actually not sold on 3x Temüjin Contract in this deck. 90% of the time I would install one turn 1 or 2, get close to using it up, and pitch the others to hand size. I think there was only one game I used all 3. Sure Gamble might be a better replacement for some of them, or maybe even a High-Stakes Job? Is that crazy?

For a while I was on 3x Employee Strike, 1x Paperclip, 1x Peregrine, and 2x Reflection. However, I found myself always hard-installing Paperclip instead of pitching it to install it later, since I needed to be sure I had the +1 strength on the B&E breakers. I was also unhappy with the high install cost of Peregrine, whose cost to break code gates was not significantly better than ZU.13 Key Master (and in some cases worse). Furthermore, there were a number of test games where I just couldn't find a second link, even with 5 sources. So making the Corroder/Zu.13 switch helped with all those issues since it also allowed me to switch to 3x Forger, which also helped with BOOM! matchups as well. I still would like 3x Employee Strike to play against Scarcity of Resources , but I ended up not seeing that it the whole day so it ended up not being an issue.

I'm pretty happy with the list, other than not knowing what to do about the Temujins. Josh's list played a Gingerbread as a 46th card for yellow matchups, which he was pretty happy with.

Thanks for reading! Worlds was a really fun event and you should try to go if you ever have the chance! The Netrunner community is full of awesome people and it's always a pleasure to see them.