Zer0 Regrets

I started experimenting with Quetzal self-damage decks a good while ago. They looked a bit similar to what Inermis then used to great effect in Berlin- https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/48696/they-killed-kenny-you-bastards-1st-berlin. Shortly after that list was published I noticed an influx of jnet copycat decks, so I shelved mine and went on to try other things for a while.

Then Zer0 was spoiled and I knew that when it hit, this deck concept would suddenly get a lot better. And here we are. This is my first take on a self-damage deck in the Zer0 era.

The deck's core combo is using Zer0 to fuel Clan Vengeance, employing Titanium Ribs to filter the cards trashed, so you can use the damage to draw more cards and get your heap breakers into play. With Fisk Investment Seminar, you force the corp to draw more cards that you then send into archives by firing your vengeance.

With the usual anarch econ package and a couple Stimhacks you have money for glory runs with the sometimes fairly inefficient heap breakers. Part of the beauty here is that a lot of ICE is rendered impotent by a combination of net damage being cool to tank and Quetzal's ID ability. For example, with Titanium Ribs + Synthblood installed and an IHW in hand, you can get pass Chiyashi without breakers with as many cards in hand as when you approached it. The CV counters are just icing on the cake.

Brain Cage is a source of self-damage that also gives you the handsize to exploit Zer0 -> IHW play.

Mad Dash and Turntable helps to score the points needed to win games. Fisk -> Vengeance means you have a good chance of snagging those smaller agendas that are often just scored from hand, and turntabling them for something juicy.

There's 3x Trope to recur your important cards (Like Fisk and CV, along with card fodder because you can draw through your deck pretty fast once you start using Zer0 every round). By Any Means is situationally useful to deal with annoying crap like Jinteki shell games, expensive asset spam or just bumping rnd a few times if it's lightly enough defended to be ran repeatedly.

I settled on Film Critic as the unicorn card but I'm not sold on this one. It's useful against a great many agendas, but you have great draw power for Obokata and there's definitely an argument to be made for going -1 FC, -1 Titanium Ribs/Synthetic Blood, -1 Brain Cage (or whatever else really) and swap in +3 EmpStrike to hedge against Skorpios and other problem corp IDs.

On that note, the ID is also flexible. Quetzal got picked because she can provide some early deterrence for corps hoping to rush, while you need time to set up the deck. It's definitely possible to try playing this out of other IDs. Hell, I've even toyed with the notion of building it thicker than usual, like MaxX sometimes does. Let me know what you think!