One (1) Valentina is all you need to beat NBN (4th at AMT)

AugustusCaesar 1491

Seb vs NBN

This is where my early testing of Seb concluded, I took it to the March AMT, where it went 2-1, facing only NBN decks. The loss was a very silly punt into a lethal bankhar when there was winning number of agenda points in archives, which will haunt my nightmares for a long time (replays at the end of the writeup). I will have to take this archetype to another tournament to demonstrate its power to outspeed PD and OB rush decks, but for now you'll have to take my word for it that it does that.

How to organise a successful workers Revolution

Step 1: Evade Police in high speed bike chases

My seb brewing was stuck on Rogue Trading for a long time, and it does seem like an incredible card, like it has been for CS decks in the past. The problem is that it is much too slow. You are pretty light in multiaccess, so it is more important that usual to keep remotes managed, and Rogue Trading doesn't consistently let you do that. The first time I had a turn that was install Rogue Trading, click it, use Friendo, pass, and my opponent scored an ADT, it was eminently clear that the card needed to go.

Hot Pursuit on the other hand, is good in exactly all of the places where Rogue Trading feels bad. It puts on incredible levels of turn 1 pressure, making it really hard for corps to push turn 1 Rashidas unless they have exactly ice costing less than 5. Even in an endgame Hot Pursuit outperforms the slower card, letting you run HQ for DJ Steve value, while still having 3 (or 5) clicks to pressure elsewhere.

As icing on top of this, the tricks you can pull with Hot Pursuit are incredible. Have you run out of ways to clear tags well? Steve back a Hannah and immediately put it down for free with Hot Pursuit. Do you have a Manu needing to be deployed, Hot Pursuit gives you the click to install him and the HQ run in one.

It is important to not that the role of Hot Pursuit in this deck is not as the load bearing econ card (see step 2), you don't rely on landing it in the early turns. There are games where the corp disrespects it and lets you use it T1, but I doubt they'll do that for long, and you don't care if they protect HQ. We have Bankhar, so once we find it, we put corps in a real hard fork where they have to commit more and more resources to HQ to deny us this burst of econ, or give up and fight a loosing battle against our Arrus on the remote.

Step 2: Don't be on the corps radar 24/7

Tags are the cool thing to do, but constantly taking and clearing tags is only good as long as its pushing your game forward. You only have 6 (and an unreliable 7th) ways to clear tags efficiently, and when you run out, using the basic action is pretty disastrous for your tempo unless the corp is giving you infinite time. (The most important part of efficient tag removal is that it is clickless, so I don't think Networking or No Free Lunch are worth it.) (Friendo counts as clickless because it gives you Sure Fund value)

Because of this, you need a good economy base for the turns where you aren't doing tag stuff. Sure Fund and Daily Casts were enough for this low cost version of the deck. If you can manage to fit in something like an extra Liberated, that would allow for draw from Earthrise Hotel, which the deck is still light on. Fitting all of that is a WIP.

Step 3: Consoles are for runners that have to care about ice.

It is very unorthodox to see a deck with exactly 1 hardware. Consoles are usually really powerful, specially anarch ones. But I am very confident that the right play is to be on none. Maw would be very nice to have, but the economy to play it is lacking without access to Paladin. Amanuensis's main gameplan of floating tags is just untenable, the first time the corp trashes your bankhar to ensure an agenda push, you loose all interest in ever getting value off it.

Now, it is possible to play Amanuensis as a Mem Chip if you want the 5th MU for something, but I did not find that worth it. Using it to install an extra Leech is very inefficient, paying 2 clicks and 3 creds for too little of an effect.

As an added bonus to all of this, we get to absolutely dunk on Winchester. Not only because we never have hardware but also because we can go very long stretches of time without installing breakers if Arrus is doing good work.

Step 4: Trash all of the ice over and over again

It is very nice of corps to think they have can nice things, but until they start treating workers well, we wont have that stand, so down will all of their ice!.

Step 5: Put pinholes in this deck for gods sake

This is a "Do as I say, not as I do", but in a world of holo-mans, they are very important. Up to you if you prefer to downgrade Echelon to Mimic for it (with our ice destruction plan we can afford it), or to go down to 2 Hot Pursuit, it looses you a lot of lategame value from Steve, but is probably fine.

Unrelated Gameplay tips

  • Mulligan for Sure Funds, Daily Casts, Bankhar, Lago and Nuka. With an honorable mention of exactly double Friendo being an absurd amount of money.

  • Aggressively sacrifice cards to Bankhar, whether that be to land a Hot Pursuit, contest a remote, or just force rezzes. You have recursion through the roof with Praxis and DJ. Breakers are optional until the well into the midgame, since you can use bankhar and Arrus to get through early remotes.

  • Manuel isn't crucial, until he is the most important card to have. Try to save at least one Praxis for him.

Replays

12 comments
24 Mar 2024 HaverOfFun

Awesome showing! Nice job taking on the NBNs and thanks for all the info on how to make Seb take off!

Also I can't believe I missed the Privileged Access --> Praxis nickname, that's wicked as!

24 Mar 2024 revengeanceful

Love the list! If you’re squeezing in some Pinholes, what are you cutting for it? Any thoughts on finding room for a Juli or two?

25 Mar 2024 Council

That's what I've been finding too. Amazing stuff!

25 Mar 2024 jan tuno

"praxis" is beautiful

25 Mar 2024 AugustusCaesar

@revengeanceful I've found that Juli is pretty underwhelming, even if you are on Rogue Trading you do a lot of clicking 4 resources in one turn, rather than once every turn like Juli wants.

But she is pretty cool in Sebk's list of this engine in crim if you want to play around with her

25 Mar 2024 lopert

Weird idea to try and free up the inf / slots for Pinhole Threading...
Are the breakers worth playing? Or could you get away with ~4 copies of Matryoshka?

Also I saw your loss was the the damage spam from Tsakhia "Bankhar" Gantulga / Bladderwort, is that inf worth playing something like Buffer Drive or Ashen Epilogue for? Seems ok but could get randomly wrecked by Lago Paranoá Shelter.

25 Mar 2024 AugustusCaesar

@lopert I havent been convinced by aumakua only builds, but Matryoshka is pretty inspired, i might try that and report back.

I dont think the deck needs more recursion, with DJ and Praxis you have enough stuff most of the time. Even against the bladder NEH, I could have just not misplayed and easily won by running rnd or archives. But maybe Ashen is good just as a draw 5 that lets you even more aggresively lago. The issue is that you kind of want 2 to feel good about it, which is a lot of inf.

26 Mar 2024 ctz

10/10

26 Mar 2024 Aku22

Nice to see other folks comming to same conclusion - Hot Pursuit is just awesome & feels great in the deck with lacking economy options and high need for tags. My version is focused on Aumakua with virus backup - feel free to browse www.netrunnerdb.com I'll definietly check it out. Great writeup and congrats!

27 Apr 2024 m4trix87

Great deck! Did you consider, to find infl room for the Pinhole Threading, to replace the Echelon not with Mimic but with Boi-tatá?

Plenty of cards getting trashed in this deck, and one can easily Arruaceiras Crew one ICE (or simply "break our piggybank") and break the next with OUR snake?

27 Apr 2024 m4trix87

Not to mention pretty poetic an entity which is basically told by its theme text to be an agent of Chaos feeding off the actions and sacrifices of the revolutionaries :)

27 Apr 2024 AugustusCaesar

@m4trix87 that would be pretty thematic. Boi's problem ends up being that is not efficient enough when you activate him. Like, even an anansi will be 6 credits. -2 if you have a spare crew activation. Whereas paying 3 for an anansi without having to bother trashing something is very solid.

If I were to revisit this though, there are many more changes I'd make, including devil charms, and a consideration for aumakua.