Hate Bear Val (6th Place at Yellow King SC)

CrimsonWraith 3643

Same derivative deck from before with a few slight experiments, but I did much better this time around. Amazing what a bit more experience with a brand new playstyle does for piloting ability in Netrunner, eh? My only loss with this deck was to a Blue Sun deck that killed me (stacked ice on HQ to prevent Siphons and the inherent tag-me protection of Obelus).

The Demolition Run and Wanton Destruction slots were 1x-ofs that I experimented with the day prior to the tournament. I wanted Wanton Destruction for more bite against combo and damage decks, but that seems somewhat unnecessary with Obelus, assuming you can get your tags and draw up. Demolition Run is the "win more" button against people who don't purge. But, as better players than me have written, win more isn't necessarily a bad thing in Netrunner. I cut cutlery slots to fit these two in here to give me a bunch of one-ofs... Something I normally do during playtesting before cutting the cards I like less and adding more copies of the cards I like. Just didn't get the playtesting time I wanted in with this build.

I've found that despite nearly identical decks, my playstyle with this build is rather different from Whizz Hate Bear, with a much larger focus on Blackmail and En Passant while I set up Faust with Obelus support and a massive hand size. As a result, I'm not using cutlery until much later in the game and found the additional copies to be superfluous. That said, I'm not sold on Wanton Destruction or Demo Run. One of those should be a third En Passant.

I did very little testing but, on paper, MKUltra over Mimic is the right call in a deck that relies on Faust as the primary breaker. You'll rarely need to actually install it, and I believe the flexibility of installing it from your heap on demand is worth the slight increase in costs to break sentries.

Aside from the tweaks above, the last flex spot is probably the Retrieval Run. Now that you have three primary breakers that can be installed from your heap, Retrieval Run's targets are basically Mediums and Fausts that hit the bin on an Inject. I ended up keeping it, but it's probably the next card to go if I find something I like better in here. Like, a second Plascrete for the meta in Colorful Killorado.

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