One Trick Pony, 8-0 3rd Place at Portland, OR Regionals

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forktines 476

So this is a somewhat janky, but absolutely successful combo deck that got me 3rd place at the Portland Oregon regionals at Guardian Games. This deck went 8-0 throughout the whole day and most of the games that I played I went from 0 to 7 points in one turn.

The basic strategy is this: You want to have a DDoS installed and a number of False Echoes/Clone Chips installed or able to be installed equal to the number of ICE over R&D. You also want to have the the ability to have 3 Mediums installed, two can work in a pinch, but I recommend three. You get more cards that way. It tends to be helpful if you can hide the Mediums too so that they don't get wise. You're also going to want a couple Amped Ups in your hand.

Once you've got all that sorted, which really shouldn't take you that long (Inject helps with all this a lot), you're going to want to wait until the start of your next turn (so that you have all the clicks), trash DDoS and run on R&D. Once you pass the first piece of ICE, you'll want to trash a False Echo, which, due to DDoS, forces them to return the outermost piece of ICE to HQ, which makes the next piece of ICE in their lineup the outermost. Do this until they have only once piece of ICE left over R&D and then you can usually keep running, use your Amped Ups, and win.

There are some things that mess with this plan... Here is a list of bad things that could happen.

Executive Boot Camp

Accelerated Beta Test

Oversight AI

Eliza's Toybox

Shoot The Moon

Surat City Grid

Bioroid Efficiency Research

Awakening Center

Archangel

Snare!

Shock!

Personal Evolution

Fetal AI

House of Knives

Cyberdex Virus Suite

And these bad things do happen some of the time. But the thing is the bones of this dedicated combo deck are still flexible enough to not really need to do a deep dig against Personal Evolution. You're still Valencia, you've still got Blackmail, and they've still got to try and score out sooner or later. This deck still wins a pretty respectable amount of games against Haarpsichord considering what it is. If you've determined it to be nonviable to win in one turn, you're still a deck that's running 2 Clots and 3 Clone Chips and can get into virtually any server.

Bad Cards and Why They're Not:

Knight: This dumb, click inefficient, and expensive card allows you to still be able to pull off your combo, even if the corp fires off a lucky ABT over R&D. If you can get it out quickly enough, it can also deal with an Execute Boot Camp.

Earthrise Hotel: This is probably worse than Wyldcakes, but I've found that sometimes this deck really does not want to draw two cards, particularly when you've got a hand of 3 Amped Up, and 2 Blackmail. Also, I'm not entirely sure that I've got the deckspace for it. If you want to experiment with Wyldcakes here, I encourage it. Could be pretty good.

Trope: I probably install this card in about 5% of my games, but I kept getting decked against Thousand Cuts, and when you need to run R&D but your IHWs don't do anything, you pretty much have to concede. This slot used to be Showing Off.

Thanks to Guardian Games and everyone running and running in the tournament. This was my third tournament and I did not expect to do nearly this well. It was a very fun 11 hours of Netrunner.

Put Boot Camp in your deck.

10 comments
9 May 2016 kollapse

"There are some things that mess with this plan... Here is a list of bad things that could happen", then lists 15 things, 7 of which are reasonable to run into on a regular basis. <3

10 May 2016 benticurus

I was happy to be eliminated by a deck that also abused the DDoS/False Echo shenanigans, good games sir.

13 May 2016 w90043
  • Dejavu & - I've got worse, + 2 Making an entrance.

It was really fun to play against the creator of the deck!

13 May 2016 forktines

@w90043Good playing against you. Keep tinkering and try out Same Old Thing for Inject. It's good silly fun.

17 May 2016 hatsuyume

I really, really like this. Could you share any info about the games you played on the day? I'm curious how you fared against FA decks (triple Cyberdex Virus Suite).

21 May 2016 forktines

@hatsuyume Hello, sorry about the late reply. Windows 10 bricked my computer for a couple of days.

So CVS is occasionally a problem for this deck. Typically against Fast Advance decks, I'll try to Blackmail suspicious upgrades on weird remotes before The Big Turn to prevent someone rezzing and using a CVS when it really counts. I'm still messing around with the deck a little bit and am planning to fit a Councilman or two in here somewhere to help deal with CVSes in remotes that I wasn't dilligent enough to check.

In terms of running into them in R&D, it typically isn't much of a problem. If you run into them late in The Big Turn, you've probably scored at least 4 or so points off R&D. If you run into them early you can trash it and start over again.

Fast advance as a whole concept, independent of the obvious impediment of CVS is really weak against this deck. They don't have the ICE to protect against multiple Medium digs, and you're running too many Clots and Clone Chips for them to score out without you mucking things up for them.

In terms of the really troublesome matchups, aside from the obvious Executive Boot Camp decks, this deck can struggle with Snare!s, particularly out of biolock IG. I've recently slotted a couple of Sports Hoppers to trash before The Big Run to help with running into Snare!s in R&D. It's been pretty successful and has been working as a generic utility draw card as well.

On the day of the tournament there were a couple of somewhat nail-biting games, but nothing that threatening. If I recall correctly, by the time the game was over, no corp had more than two points in their score area (Important caveat, one person did get up to 4 points, but Turntable saw to that).

21 May 2016 hatsuyume

Nice, thanks for your reply @forktines! I assume you cut the Trope and something else to make room for Sports Hopper? If I have time this week I might try to play a Making An Entrance variant too - seems like it'd be handy if all your Mediums are in the bottom third of your deck!

Overall I am thinking of playing a DDoS/False Echo deck for the Seattle regionals next weekend but have yet to put in enough games with both this and Kate/Hyperdriver/Keyhole to make any conclusions.

21 May 2016 forktines

@hatsuyume I actually cut a Same Old Thing and a Daily Casts for 2x Sports Hopper. The Trope is becoming more and more of a staple as the meta shifts to long net-damagey games.

I've been tempted by Making an Entrance, but I typically find that Inject does the job just fine.

By Seattle regionals do you mean ETX? If so, I'll be there as well.

21 May 2016 hatsuyume

@forktines sweet, I'll have to keep my eyes peeled for you! Interesting that you have kept your Armitage Codebustings over Daily Casts. How have you found Hacktivist Meeting? It's a card that our testing has found to be pretty bad against IG but I guess it's probably pretty sick against Mumba Temple NEH and Gagarin decks.

22 May 2016 forktines

@hatsuyume Hactivist Meeting helps IG put facedown cards in Archives, which, yeah, isn't the best thing in the world if you plan to trash anything of theirs. This deck pretty rarely trashes IG assets, though, unless there's like an early Bio-ethics that's just going to keep hitting you for potentially important cards.

I don't really use Hacktivist to try to score agendas either, I don't think I've ever ran Archives against IG with this deck. What it kind of does pretty well is slow down the real Biolock, which is fairly crucial.

Since we're both effectively playing solitaire in the first half of the game, it's helpful to give them an impediment, even if it is somewhat minor.

As for DC/Armitage, you may be right. Armitage has been fairly helpful for getting myself into Liberated range after I trash a SanSan or something. It's good to have really cheap econ with this deck, especially since there isn't influence space here for Career Fair.