Keep calm and put a cred on Net Mercur (2nd at regionals)

Cpt_nice 1933

With this deck I just became the runner-up at the Haarlem Regionals. All in all, I am very happy with my place, as I was the only shaper player at the event (most people played Andy or Whizzard) and I like to rep the faction. I faced 4 Moonnites decks, 1 Spark Agency and 1 NBN Making News.

I made some difficult meta calls for this tournament. Because I expected some asset spam but also Foodcoats, I had to make a choice between ways to combat asset spam while also staying on top of glacier. In the end, I dropped Salsette in favor of Clot and stuck with 3 Temujin. I put in one Scrubber just in case.

MVP of the tournament was Clot. It is the bee's knees against Moonnites. Their only way of consistently scoring out is by (re-)using Biotic Labor, so Clot throw's a wrench in their plan. As a shaper you cannot keep up with trashing all their assets, so you need your own tools. Net Mercur does help as it gives you a free credit each turn to get rid of must-trash assets.

Blackstone managed to hinder me more than I expected this time. Almost every barrier I saw today was either an Eli or IP Block, which Blackstone struggles against. It will get swapped out for a Paperclip or Corroder. Influence is unfortunately very tight in this deck. I also missed an Employee Strike. I had underestimated its importance to deal with Enhanced Login Protocol, which is one of the ways Moonnites is so incredibly oppressive.

The Moonnites match-ups were won with a combination of aggressive running, indexing and keeping Clot alive. Spark managed to squeeze a timed win out against me, but NBN Making News (a match-up I usually fear) was manageable once I survived 5 turns of the corp going Door To Door.

I learned a lot about combatting Moonnites from this tournament and I expect to be better suited to beat this match-up next time around. I hope that even though Asset Spam is oppressing good quality Netrunner nowadays, people won't completely give up on Smoke. She is a great ID and incredibly fun to play.

4 comments
27 May 2017 dawspawn

One Scrubber doesn't seem like enough to keep up with asset spam. How did it do in the day? I would drop PolOp and the Scrubber for Corroder. Then you can add Councilman, and another Indexing or Beth. Grats on the good placement with Smoke!

27 May 2017 Cpt_nice

@dawspawn That was exactly my point though. As shaper, you don't want to keep up with asset spam. You want to trash only the absolute must trash resources such as Bioethics Association in RP or Zealous Judge in Gagarin. But the one of Scrubber is nice to have in such situations. It performed well against Spark.

PolOp is unfortunatley a must against Caprice, since corp's these days have the tendency to rez it immediately, so Councilman ends up useless often. I do however definitely intend to find influence for Corroder. Maybe cutting a Temujin. I ended up not playing 3 in any match during the day.

29 May 2017 TKMaximus

If you're seeing a lot of Eli and IP Block, I'd suggest including a Personal Touch (can't be best defenced, and less versatile vs a Jinteki deck with both Eli and DNA tracker) or Net Ready Eyes as a 1x. Saves you so many credits in the long run.

29 May 2017 dawspawn

That's completely reasonable. I like Scrubber for clearing things you find in R&D to get to the agendas, too. Less important in an Indexing build, but still useful.