Demo Deck: Defensive HB 2.0

Nery 25

This is the second version of the Demo Decks I've been working on.

A little background: The Chilean Community for Netrunner has been growing since the game's launch. It has always been a niche game that saw it's peak in popularity somewhere between 2014 and 2016. Recently we have decided to promote the game ourselves, and attract new players.

With that in mind I took the task to prepare a Demo deck as simple as possible to explain the most basic aspects of the game. This deck and it's counterpart are thought as a 1st approach to the game, the first hands on after a scripted explanation of the game.

The deck was built with the following objectives in mind:

-To teach both players about the basic mechanics of the game: turn structure, economy, installation.

-To teach the corp player how to set up ice and defend his servers.

-To teach the corp how to score agendas.

-To teach both players the run mechanics.

Several mechanics have been left out to keep things simple: Double clicks, terminal operations and currents. Recursions and play from the heap has also been left out to reinforce the idea that 1 click = 1 action. The deck also favors asset based economy to incentivate the runner to disrupt the corp game.

While I didn't restrict deckbuilding to the core, I wanted to include the most simple and straightforward cards to show the game.

There have been mayor changes from the previous version:

  • Ice suit has been changed: Priority requisition has been replaced by corporate sales team and bifrost bridge. This is done to make sure there are more agendas in the deck. The more agendas in deck the easier it is for both sides to interact with them. As this is a teaching deck, I think this is important. For the same reason I was considering lowering the card count to 45. I Project Wotan was added to replace the final priority requisition.

  • Aggressive secretary was replaced with launch campaign, but I'm considering if it's worth it. Bluffing and traps are a big part of A:NR, I just think the effect of aggressive secretary is a bit too strong for new players. Junebug or cerebral overwritter may kill the opponent, and explaining snare! Midgame usually gives the surprise away. I will introduce traps in the wetland deck, which is thought of as an advanced introduction.

  • Red herrings is changed by Expo Grid. It's a simple card that compliments the economy of the deck while helping explain how upgrades and regions work.

  • Archived Memories is removed: as explained in the Kate deck, I wanted to limit mechanics that do recursion to simplify the deck.

  • The ice scheme needed a complete rework: tollbooth pretty much paralized the game, cobra was ineffective at doing anything other than consuming money considering the cards the Kate deck has, and so was enigma. Enigma was solved by lowering the str of the codegate breaker, but for cobra I decided to just go with ichi. This is the harder aspect of building these decks. And so far I don't know if I've gotten it down. To find simple ice that can balance themselves with the runner. As a player my mindset is on overpowering my opponent, and being in a mindset where I have to balance both things is weird. I'm also considering if removing icewall was a good idea, as it serves the purpose of showing you can advance other cards besides agendas.

I think fairchild 2.0 is a bit too much, but I don't want to send them into a meta where they think face checking is a sound gameplan.

Deck to be played against: Demo Deck: Fix it Kate 2.0

1 comments
15 Sep 2017 LuteMiope

What if we made a bioroid one for the new core identity?