my frens and i are here! (top of swiss&5th summer showdown)

full name: my frens and i are here to steal your agendas AND your pronouns!

4-0 Undefeated in swiss, flatlined twice in top cut so ryo's getting new pronouns added: was/were :^(

I'll talk about how the deck works but this deck (and my results in the summer Showdown) is a product of all the help the Netrunner PH community has given me in the ~1 month of playing so it wouldn't feel right to share this deck without talking about my experience with them :3

I learned about Netrunner when Blysfool mentioned it to me while I was teaching at a board game event in January, and I got interested when I found out it was print-to-play which was huge since the price of card games has always stopped me from trying. I only started to actually learn how to play by late March after a runner demo game with profwacko, but with Elevation and the huge rotation coming soon I waited until after to actually start playing because the runner I wanted to try (Freedom) was rotating. I would read the spoielrs channel in our discord every day seeing the MetaManila City Grid people fiending for scoops and I got the idea to play banner Ryo there. From Quarkinator, I learned about Keiko's existence and decided to play around her because the frens are so cute! In games, I like to play like a lil ratgnawing at the ankles of my enemies, so I wanted to be really disruptive, so I built the deck with Stargate and Cacophony as my main wincon tools.

The first version of this deck and my corp deck were what I brought to our GNK, which was the first time I met a bunch of the community! I got to talking about how much I love frogs and Lunari mentioned the acrylic Ari by Cat Shen alt art, which later became my reason for joining the Summer Showdown after they mentioned it in our discord! I lost all but one match but had a really great time.

The night after Meta Manila's Elevation GNK, I got to talking to CyberspacePanda asking me if I remembered how our game ended for the tournament report (I chose to run into archives with 0 cards in hands for the vibes and got Fuji'd.) He helped trim the decksize, sugggested changes and even explained each change, which was really helpful since I didn't really know about any deckbuilding fundamentals for Netrunner. miraclemira helped me test and further improve the decks over our countless matches on jnet where I'd get my ass whooped about 90% of the time. Mira and lunari both gave a lot of advice and pointed out things in my gameplay that I could improve on that I made sure to remember (but i will never stop putting byte in remote servers)

I didn't think I'd go undefeated in swiss, or even 5th overall. In my head, even just 3 wins was enough for the alt art Sable, and it was a pipe dream for me to reach top 20 to get the Ari alt art, but yipee! I love all of my frens in NetrunnerPH, without them, I wouldn't have gotten as far as I did, or maybe I wouldn't have even joined the summer Showdown. I'm excited to keep on playing Netrunner with them!

There are probably better ways to pilot this deck, but here's what I thonk:

The deck revolves around frens and #The Twinning, running two copies of Paladin Poemu and Trickster Taka so that it's not too biad if I lose one whether to trashing or because they ate ate ate too much, and one copy of Mystic Maemi because I'm fine with losing her later on when I'm out of events, and Fencer Fueno because in most cases I can reliably give him money to keep him in. The frens fuel my economy through Keiko, ad also my multiaccesses with The Twinning.

I found that I had a lot of games where my stack would be empty, so I added Buffer Drive and Ashen Epilogue so I can use Tsakhia "Bankhar" Gantulga aggressively even until lategame against ice with multiple subroutines. In case one of my breakers get yeeted, Simulchip can help me recur it, even getting me Carmen for free if i trigger it on a round that I got a successful run in.

GAMEDRAGON™ Pro is here in case i'm facing Bran 1.0, or to power up my other breakers.

Stargate and Cacophony are alternative wincons. Coupled with Ryo's ID triggers, I feel like a lil rat forcing the corp to keep trashing their cards into the archives where I can potentially score enough to win.

It's been really fun to play this deck and I hope y'all enjoy it as much as I do.