My runner deck was just good about enough to not ruin my day, but it was this one that carried me through. It was undefeated, and was only really in any danger on one occasion.
Since rotation I've mainly been on slightly tweaked versions of Data Loop/Punitive Palana. But unsurprisingly people have become wise to those tricks over time. At the recent Stockport SC I switched to Skorpios and enjoyed surprising people with HHN and Boom, but that deck fell at the final hurdle when I couldn't out-money my opponent. I was looking for a way to include taxing ice and a more 'standard' gameplan with an element of surprise. After some thought I realised with a couple of tweaks I could merge these decks together.
The core game plan is standard Palana; money up and install some big and/or annoying ice that makes it costly for the runner to access anything. DNA Tracker has been good in this role for a while, but now Anansi is even better. There's no cost-effective way to deal with it (that I've seen yet) and taking four net to the face is not an option. Once you have something taxing on the remote just IAA for all you're worth, with agendas, NGOs and Gene Splicer. There's only so many times they can run through it (not many) without putting themselves in HHN range. Or if they guess right and steal an agenda (all of which help you) then double Punitive tends to put them off doing it again.
There aren't many non-obvious selections. Colossus was there as a sixth Weyland card (for free ConVis). I thought the ability to advance it might be useful at some point but in hindsight the ETR on Hortum would have been more useful. Alternatively a Crisium Grid might be a nice include for spoiling various shenanigans (and frees up an influence point). MCAI obviously gets rid of Film Critic but also takes care of Beth and Jarogniew Mercs (a benefit I hadn't thought of before the day). One thing missing is a Best Defense to snipe Misdirection which is possibly more useful than the Marcus.
On the day it went 6-0 with wins against Friday Chip Eddie, Adam, Omar, non-Stealth Smoke (!), and twice against Maxx. The scary moment came against Smoke when a FTE steal put them on match point and I had to grit my teeth against a Hail Mary Maker's Eye that thankfully only found a Snare.
I was over the moon when coming second in my last SC, so to go a step further this time is the cherry on the cake of my best period of netrunning by a country mile. Thanks to all the players, TO Millie, and Dice and Donuts for a fantastic day.
I got to play against (and lose against) this list twice in the cut and it's very, very tough. Even without the surprise factor there is a huge amount to try and play around. Bacterial Programming gives the real threat of double Punitive into hand after a score. Taxing ice + NGOs + HHN threat makes consistently checking the remote basically impossible. Miraju takes care of Indexing. I suspect the main bad match-up would be Critic + DDM.
It was a real pleasure to play against such a well-constructed and challenging deck!