Hate Bear (3rd, 4th, 8th, 16th, 19th, 26th at Worlds)

JuneCuervo 2592

This deck was played by the entire San Francisco/Glass House/West Coast team at Worlds 2016. Lots of people have asked to see the list, so here it is!

The following folks are credited with making significant contributions to the list:

Weston Odom - @WestonOdom
Timmy Wong @tmoiynmwg
Brian Cronin - @Murphy
Adam Cabrera - @aleph_c
Eric Phetteplace - @phette23
Noah Mckee - @Nobo715

History

After Obelus came out, I knew there was a good Account Siphon anarch deck. The synergy between having tags, drawing cards, and increasing your hand size seemed pretty obvious to me, and I figured several other groups were working on something similar.

We tried pretty much everything for this deck. From Sucker/Parasite, to having a more traditional breaker suite. The operations changed a lot over time, but we all collectively liked what we ended up with after many hundreds of hours of cumulative testing.

Our collective meta predictions and testing pointed at playing against CtM/Sync about half of all games, ETF about 1/3rd, and with the rest of the corps being much less prevalent. This deck is largely tuned to fight those archetypes only, and definitely has random rough matchups against other decks. (Such as Palana with Snares! and Fetals) Overall, in the normalized competitive meta, it felt like a monster as each of us tore through yellow deck after yellow deck to put 4 players in the top16, and 6 players in the top 32.

Tech Cards

Day Job - This is largely a tech card for the ETF matchup. You need large bursts of credits to be able to install your cards, since Account Siphon is largely unreliable against good glacier players.

Forked - This is a tech card for ETF. Strong sentries like Ichi 1.0 are not very popular, and you often discard it against most decks you'll face.

Plascrete Carapace - We were very split on whether or not this card was relevant in the Bluesun matchup. For most of testing we did not play it, and won most of our Bluesun games. After seeing the prevalence of combo boom!, many of us decided to slot one. Most often times you have a massive hand size, so having a plascrete is often not relevant.

Black Orchestra - You have no answer to Turing on a central server without this card.

Eater - In grindy matchups where you need to trash a lot of ice to make plays, Eater is very helpful. I ended up cutting it for King of Servers, but its still often solid against ETF. I don't think I installed it for all of my 10 games played at Worlds, but it was a nice plan B.

Rebirth - This is several tech cards in one. Players on our team turned into a variety of Anarch IDs throughout the day. If resistors are keeping you down, Quetzal is a great choice. If operations are building up in HQ, Kim is there for you. I think the praises of turning into Omar in a cutlery deck have been said enough, but this deck heavily pressures the corporation's ice, and as such, they seldom have extra to throw on archives throughout the game.

Tricks

"Combat Tricks" as I call them, are cards you play that give you windows of opportunity where there would otherwise not be one. These cards surprise your opponent, give you bursts of accesses or siphons, and generally continue to force the corp to respect various aspects of your deck throughout a match.

Hades Shard - This card's interaction with Obelus is a bit controversial, but it is quite potent in a deck that strongly desires to gain an advantage and then snowball out of control for the rest of the game. Drawing 10+ cards on a siphon run, and then using all the cutlery you've drawn to trash their ice using Faust + extra cards is really amazing. Shoutouts to Weston Odom for figuring this out a few weeks before worlds.

Rebirth - Turning into Omar in the late game against heavily ice centrals usually seals the deal. This was included because of the close-ish ETF matchup, but it was useful across the board in every matchup.

DDoS - Many players will double ice HQ, but not anymore. This is generally fine, but with DDos in the deck, you are able to punish corps for not respecting your Siphon plan enough.

Gameplan

  • Mulligan for Card draw, Faust, and Siphon. Your best hands include Faust + Siphon, so you should really just mulligan for them. I saw players keeping Faust/Gamble/Inject types of hands, and I think those are great as well.

  • In the early game, you are looking to establish Siphon lock while slowly building your R&D pressure. Cards like DDoS work best in this phase of the game, but have some value elsewhere.

  • In the mid game, you are trying to land a hades + obelus combo, and trash as much ice as possible.

  • Toward the end game, you should easily have Medium online, and be able to continue trashing ice and running R&D with Medium (which will continue to draw you cards.) Turning into Omar to deliver the finishing blow is extremely common.

Closing Thoughts

This deck was particularly strong in the worlds metagame, but with all the new tag punishment and ice that is strong against tags, there's definitely more work to be done with a list like this. I think tag me anarch as a good chance of continuing to perform well, but Yellow is getting some great tools against you, as is Weyland in the form of Best Defense.

If you have any questions leave them in the comments and I'm sure one of us will answer!

-West Coast Testing House

38 comments
7 Nov 2016 Murphy

I had zero business making the cut at Worlds. This deck is broken.

7 Nov 2016 FightingWalloon

Could you please explain the controversial Obelus/Shard interaction?

7 Nov 2016 internet_potato

@FightingWalloon Obelus's card-draw ability does not specify that the cards you access have to be from HQ or R&D. So if you run on HQ and fire Hades Shard mid-run, then you will draw one card for every card in archives (accessed via Hades Shard) and one card for every card accessed from HQ. That can be a lot of cards!

Incidentally, Account Siphon mentions not accessing cards in/from HQ, but doesn't prevent you from accessing cards in other servers via paid-ability effects.

7 Nov 2016 Ra1dy

I never saw retrieval run in the streams...Timmy had one Imp, and I think almost everybody had 3 DDOS or am I wrong?

7 Nov 2016 tmoiynmwg

Timmy here. My list cut Eater and Plascrete Carapace for 1 Imp. Otherwise AFAIK all of our lists were identical to this one.

7 Nov 2016 Murse

@tmoiynmwg You cut eater and plascete for 1 Imp and....? You have me on the edge of me seat.

7 Nov 2016 phette23

He played a 45 card deck. As did I, I simply cut Plascrete. No one was on 3x DDoS and I'm pretty sure everyone kept ret run in, it's handy if you inject a Medium or Faust into the bin because you want to be spending your Deja Vu on Siphon & Cutlery.

7 Nov 2016 teky

@MurseI think the other cut was to play 45 cards (this deck runs on 46) :)

7 Nov 2016 JuneCuervo

Yeah we played 46 since we literally could not figure out what to cut after an hour long discussion in the hotel the night before! In hindsight, I would have cut Eater, but, I could see cutting Plascrete or Rumor Mill as well.

7 Nov 2016 Snake Eyes

Excellent Siphon Whiz deck. Have an upvote!

Spicey tech to Rebirth from Whiz to another anarch pending matchups.

Love the Hades Shard Obelus double Spice.

This deck deserved to have performed as well as it had.

7 Nov 2016 westonodom

Yea, I would have also cut the Eater. We definitely played games in testing where it was useful, but if I had to make a cut that would have been it. Second choice would probably have been Rumor Mill. Cutting either of these weakens you overall a little, but doesn't hurt your yellow matchup as much as it does HB or Palana, and given the the worlds meta that would have been okay.

I think if I cut two cards I'd consider adding Wanton or Demolition Run to deal with Psychographics and Exchange (rather than just hoping to Medium dig your way through it).

7 Nov 2016 westonodom

That plascrete proved quite useful. xD

7 Nov 2016 Ra1dy

Figured out vs RP it's not as easy as suspected it would be

7 Nov 2016 bracketbot

It's 46 cards. He could have cut 2 for 1.

7 Nov 2016 Cerberus

This deck is the bomb. I'm gutted you built a better siphon whizz deck than me. Congrats on an outstanding performance!

7 Nov 2016 JuneCuervo

A high compliment from an amazing player! Thank you @Cerberus, we all worked super hard on it.

8 Nov 2016 d23

I ran this deck at KoS, as Val. Add 3 blackmails and a demo run, and the spice must flow.

9 Nov 2016 Hallenbach

Could someone explain the interaction between Obelus and Hades Shard, please? I don't get it.

9 Nov 2016 Nemamiah

This deck is an absolute work of art, and was comfortably the best runner deck that I saw at World's. I got to run against the two West Coast players that I met in the cut; if I'd had to Corp it would have been a totally different story.

Can't recommend enough.

9 Nov 2016 Murphy

Sure @Hallenbach

You can use Hades Shard at any paid ability window during a run on HQ or R&D. This technically makes you access all of archives during that HQ/R&D run.

Obelus just says "cards accessed during the HQ/R&D run". It doesn't care where or how you accessed those cards so it sees all the cards in Archives and draws you a BUNCH OF CARDS.

10 Nov 2016 Hallenbach

@MurphyAhhh, very nifty. =) Thank you for the explanation!

11 Nov 2016 meta4

Love the deck. The hades shard combo was actually the first thing I thought of when I saw Obelus, but I have no proof other than asking one of my friends if he thought it would work!

Anyways, I'm assuming you guys tested Vamp in this deck at some point, and I'm wondering what your conclusions were.

11 Nov 2016 westonodom

@meta4 - I don't think we spent much time on Vamp (but someone correct me if I'm wrong). Despite having siphon, many of my games with the deck I don't have a credit lead. It often plays like you have just enough credits, but not more.

11 Nov 2016 mohaymen

3 Faust seems one too many. I was thinking -1 Faust +1 employee strike.

Also 3 medium, 3 obelus seems too many.

But its just my opinion, im interested in hearing yours.

11 Nov 2016 teky

@mohaymenObelus seems essential from the get go, it's the draw motor, I think 3 is ok... 3 medium and 3 faust could be too much...

now my question to you, why employee over more copies of Rumor Mill?

11 Nov 2016 Murphy

@mohaymen The deck featured 2 Medium at one point and it felt worse to me. The victory condition here is Medium. Having it early provides a TON of pressure.

3 Obelus is also necessary as it fuels the rest of the deck. It is the same reason Dumblefork would run 3 Wyldside. Without fuel, you get stranded on the side of the road.

Eater was in this build because we were worried about not getting one of the 3 Faust in some cases. Some decided the Eater was not needed but I don't think anyone considered going down to 2 Faust.

@teky I guess you were asking @mohaymen but it is a good question. A few of us came to the conclusion that Rumor Mill was cuttable for this build. You often need it in Temuj Whiz to fight against Scarcity which isn't a factor here. Good players play around Rumor Mill anyway so it didn't do a lot for us during the tournament.

Employee would have been nice but the influence wasn't there. Hades and Rebirth were way more value for that influence in the end.

11 Nov 2016 Saan

3 Faust is needed for early remote pressure; this isn't a deck that you want to sit back on. Even with 3 Faust, sometimes I still can't find one fast enough.

The third Medium was something we added in almost immediately in testing. There was a game between @tmoiynmwg and I where I was able to lock him out of HQ with Blue Sun, but kept R&D very, very sparsely defended. If he'd had access to Medium sooner I wouldn't have been able to both keep him out of HQ and my scoring remote because I would have actually had to do something about R&D. This goes back to the core of the deck's playstyle: the goal is to keep the corp unable to keep enough ICE on the servers that matter, and Medium is the key to threatening R&D.

As I recall, we only added Rumor Mill in the night before the tournament just in case someone brought Palana. We didn't do much testing against Palana because we kinda thought Palana was a bad choice, but you can see literally anything in the lower swiss rounds. We figured a single copy of Rumor Mill makes the matchup almost un-losable, so it became card #46.

11 Nov 2016 tvaduva

After watching the Day 2 videos at World's, it looked like Siphon Anarch struggled against CTM. Especially, since it seemed that the plan was to go tag me turn 1. Very few could land a decent siphon because CTM players heavily iced HQ, and used Archangel/Resistor to defend against Medium. And closed out the win with EoI or Psycho.

Given how Top 16 played out, with 9 CTM with most of them on 2 EoI, no ASI and prepared for Siphon, would there be any changes to the game plan and/or deck?

13 Nov 2016 ANRguybrush

If anyone wants a twist on this deck, try it out of Val with Blackmail and en passant.

15 Nov 2016 NoSoup4you

Very informative writeup. No macho bullshit or memes. Nicely done.

16 Nov 2016 kayakninja

Looking forward to trying this. Looks like a lot of fun and I've been looking for another Wizard deck to play.

Note on the Hades+Obelus+Siphon combo, btw. Make sure you use Hades before you break anything with Eater or I'm pretty sure Eater's effect neutralizes Shard.

17 Nov 2016 Cyberzack

If the Hades Shard comes late do you ever not use it out of fear of decking yourself?

17 Nov 2016 dormio

I don't think anyone has asked, but why is it called "Hate Bear"?

17 Nov 2016 Murphy

@Cyberzack That is a really good question. There is a nice balance to using the Hades trick. Too early and you aren't getting efficient draw. Too late and you may not have enough cards in deck to justify using it.

If the deck is working as intended, you will have plenty of tags so you don't have to ditch too many cards. You shouldn't be worried about decking yourself. You have no late game so hopefully it never gets to that point. In a more diverse meta, this deck will have major late game problems.

@dormio I was told there is a Magic deck that uses a lot of Bears. I don't know more than that.

17 Nov 2016 westonodom

@dormio - It's a dual reference. Partially it's a reference to the MtG slang "hate bears" (reference), and since we're from SF it was also a silly joke about how Whizzard kinda looks like a "bear" in another slightly less PG sense.

17 Nov 2016 dormio

@westonodom This is logical, flavorful, and hilarious (the less PG sense). Thanks for the link, too; I'm one of the few (seems like) Netrunner players who's never played MtG.

17 Nov 2016 westonodom

Sure thing @dormio! I actually hadn't played any card games before Netrunner either, though since starting Netrunner I've begun following MtG a little.

23 Dec 2016 dragonblazer

Any cards you would suggest updating since Worlds? Still recommend the deck?