221b Baker Street

The servers been breached at HB, and they’ll need an unconventional private detective to solve the mystery of how to score all the agendas

This is the silly Sherlock theme deck I took to UK nationals and was stunned to go 5-2 with (Spycam Hayley for runner deck let me down and I finished 9-5). However I think the concept of the deck is sound and a better player would have gone further as both losses were definitely due to play errors on my part. Also its pretty damn fun if you want to take it for a spin.

So tagging in Haas-Bioroid has been around for while despite the faction’s lack of both tagging and tag punishment, but has been restricted to high variance Scorch Glaciers (shout out to @Angedelo) and Midseasons nonsense in Custom Biotics.

With 23 Seconds, things have changed.

Those things are:

1. Sherlock 2.0 gives an in-faction tag ice that is just really solid all round (and lets me say this deck is a theme deck when combined with Psychographics). When you’re packing tag punishment they have to respect the third subroutine, and turns Sherlock on much earlier in the game.
2. HB has gotten some good rush tools (Assembly Lines, Magnet, Vanilla etc) that allow you to go really fast and pressure the runner. This has been shown to be pretty strong as a primary strategy by Ben Ni et al.
3. Hard Hitting News is amazing and only 2 influence. If they spend their money and clicks getting through your beefy HB ice, you can wreck them with the News. If they don’t, just rush out the win by scoring. You also have a lot of bullshit you can just slam in the scoring remote to tax them down into News range. Unlike Weyland importing HHN, HB taxes the runner enough that staying out of the danger zone is rather harder.
4. Several good runner decks (Siphon spam, DLR) tag themselves with abandon against HB. You only need one credit at the start of your turn to Psycho a 3/2

Notes on playing the deck:

1. Rush is the primary plan, the tagging is a backup that also enables rushing, hence the tag-punishment isn’t murder (though Boom! may change that). Don’t worry about anti-tag stuff as clicks they spend on NACH and link are clicks they are not contesting your remote.
2. Psycho-Vitruvous is one of the most absurd things you can do in netrunner – be sure to think through all the ridiculous plays you can make like scoring all 7 points in 1 turn. Though just closing their accounts for 5 turns running is pretty good too.
3. If they see the News or the tag punishment in the early turns, rush even harder whilst they’ve got the fear.
4. Almost always fire Beta Test – you have 1-of operations you want to dig for and 3 archived memories; you are bringing more of your deck into play even when you see no ice.
5. Archived Memories is an economy card, and the best thing to fetch back is Assembly Lines as the latter is click neutral (turning Archived Memories into a better Lateral Growth).

On the day I beat: 3 Spy cam Hayley, 1 Nexus Kate, and one other Kate (though the first round has been lost to the mists of time and I might be wrong on that). Lost against: Good Stuff Andy (where I forgot to use Jackson after discarding 4 agendas when there was a plop on table), and Dumblefork (where I kept a questionably ice light hand, wrecked them when they took Sherlock tags, and lost when they medium dug clicking through a Sherlock on R&D and I wasn’t able to find more ice).

Changes I’d make after the tournament:

1. Deck probably needs at least two more economy cards (maybe go down to 2 turing), and it’s possible that Adonis is too bad for the whizz meta (Eve certainly is).
2. Closed accounts did work, but All-Seeing Eye might have been better, against the shapers I probably spent at least 10 credits on trashing resources each game. I think it’s a meta call.
3. Fast track would have been good though I’m not sure what to cut for it.