Defenestration

partialcharge 178

The goal of this deck is to utterly control the pace of the game; watching for scoring windows and then pushing out an agenda is the order of the day. How? I'm so glad you asked.

1) RP's printed ability is where this all starts. You know, without exception, that the runner will only have 2 clicks to prep before running on your agenda remote. This can make mental math easier when you're trying to tally up what the runner has or could have access to for breaking in and stealing your stuff. Also, many won't run against Jinteki on their last click. And for good reason! But against this deck, what they've learned elsewhere is only slowing them down.

2) Next step is the agenda selection. Every single one of these has a cost to steal (excepting installed TFP's and archived FAI's). Again, this helps with mental math. Look like they can break in but be broke? Put down an NAPDC and giggle. Furthermore, you're very (relatively) safe with 1-2 agendas just sitting in HQ, as Shock! and Shi.Kyu make sniffing around there unpleasant and repeatedly running for sucker tokens downright dangerous.

3) Piles of taxing ICE with--just a few strong hard stops--seal the deal. Because the agendas are few and costly, you can afford to allow most central accesses without worry. Eli, Pup, Rainbow, and Datapike (or as I like to call it, Minibooth) just take and take, and they cost you relatively little. Tollbooth fills a middle ground; depending on your opponent and the game state it can serve as a hard stop to score behind, especially early in the game. Careful for Femme and Inside Job though! Even into the late game, very few decks can beat a Tollbooth cheaply, so it's almost never a dead draw.

If the game runs long enough--and it's likely to, given the deliberate pace this deck prefers--you'll probably need something meaty to score behind. Enter Hadrian's and Susan. I find the former to consistently surprise runners out of faction, and even mighty Corroder pays a premium to beat it. People are starting to expect the latter, but it's still often good for 2-3 turns of frenzied drawing/cred clicking, which is exactly what you need. On occasion it can even be used to toss the unwary into a Shi.Kyu-spiced garbage heap.

4) Speaking of Shi.Kyu, it's a small but potent part of the mix here. Given the number and value of agendas, forcing a single one on your opponent changes their required minimum agenda count from 3 to 4 unless they can steal 2 TFP's. Handing them 2 is brutal, and if they take all 3 their fate may be sealed. It's not even that big a deal that it doesn't fire from R&D, because from there it goes to archives, where it lurks... waiting... ;)

This deck is otherwise light on ambushes; Shock! is an annoyance until it hits archives, where it greatly helps to protect your overdrawn agendas. Snare! is the card I most often consider replacing, but once or twice it has really closed out a game for me. I never expect a flatline, but just having those in there helps deter reckless R&D digging.

5) To pay for all this you have the myth, the legend, the monster: Sundew. We all know how good this is in RP, so I won't waste much time. Just remember to put it behind some taxing ICE. Obviously Sundew alone isn't enough, so the MHCs provide even more drip. It's such an uneven value proposition for the runner to trash those that, even when they do, you may get a scoring window out of it despite the income loss. Encryption Protocol makes Sundew, MHC, and Jackson even more costly to deal with; there's no greater feeling than watching a runner carefully gather 3 creds, run a central, then come at a Jackson on their last click, knowing all the while that you have 1 or more unrezzed EP's.

Lastly, CG does so much good work here. In other decks I'm reticent to reveal so much, but in this one you can nearly always afford to say, "Hey, look, some ICE and a Fetal."

I've been playing and iterating on this a lot lately, both in my local meta (Mountain View/Cupertino represent!) and on OCTGN and after many refinements I enjoy good success against a variety of decks. The feeling of being so strongly in control is incredible. I even won the game in which I suffered the worst first runner turn of my time playing Netrunner: Siphoned to 0, Sundew trashed, agendas taken from HQ and R&D (4 points) and a Caprice trashed from hand.

I would love to hear about other similar decks folks are running, and any suggested changes. On that front, I sometimes think about -1Eli -1 Caprice (who surprisingly does not often cinch games for me) +1 Jackson, +1 Katana.

Thanks for reading this far, now tell me how wrong I am!

5/25 Made a few edits to the description for clarity's sake.

4 comments
25 May 2014 StLion

This seems like a good deck to me. Perhaps there is some space for Interns in the mix? Maybe dropping a caprice if you don't need them, even though I find them quite potent. Hedge Fund is always a good card. Perhaps even better than gaining 7 creds in two turns with Celebrity Gift?

25 May 2014 partialcharge

Interns is great, and I've been considering swapping out some number of Caprice for them, given her underpreformance so far in this deck. Hedge is of course also always good, and more creds per click than CG. However, CG provides more creds per card, which I find to be more valuable in a slower-moving deck. Particularly when I can so often afford the reveals.

26 May 2014 steevo15

@partialcharge Definitely agree with you on CG over hedge fund. I replaced hedge funds with CG in my Replicating Perfection deck and I never have regretted it.

a few comments about the ice. I think that you are missing some of jinteki's in faction all stars as far as taxing, painful ice goes. Komainu synergizes wonderfully with MHC, and goes great over centrals. I've had a runner pay as much as 7 creds to get through it, no one wants to run with an empty hand against jinteki, so it's always going to be a relevant piece of ice. Sure, it's parasite food, but RP rakes in money so who cares if it gets trashed a couple turns after you rez it. Tsurugi is always going to be at least 4 creds to get through. As far as cheap ETR code gates go, I think that enigma is better than datapike. It's one cred cheaper (not too significant), but I think that losing a click is worse than losing 2 creds. Thats probably just preference though. Finally, I'm of the opinion that rainbow just doesn't fit well in an RP taxing deck. Given that it's all three types, the runner can just pick the least taxing option to get through it, which goes against whats the ice wants to do. I'd almost say that you could drop the eli's, drop rainbows, and include 3x bastion (in eli's place) and use the three inf and extra deckspace for some painful ice (heimdall comes to mind).

26 May 2014 partialcharge

So I just ran this with -3 Caprice -1 Eli +2 Interns +1 Jackson +1 Bastion. Bastion for Eli to squeeze in the third Jackson (which I've wanted for a while now) was fine; saw the Bastion (it performed admirably) but didn't get any Jacksons all game, heh.

Interns, though? Interns cinched the game for me, I think, by installing from archives the only sundew I saw all game after it got trashed off R&D. So yeah. Bye, Caprice; the interns don't cost as much! ;D

@steevo15 Some good insights there, thanks!

I generally avoid Enigma, as it's easy to circumvent the click loss by simply running on your last click. It never occurred to me until just now, though, that in RP you can't do that if it's guarding a central. Brilliant! And yeah, 1c cheaper than Datapike to boot. Will definitely be trying it out.

I see your points about Komainu and Tsurugi for sure. They're a little pricier to rez, though, and I'm all about keeping the taxing ICE value propositions uneven for the runner. I might drop 1 Pup for a Komainu or Tsurugi just to see how it goes, though. =)

You're right that the runner gets to pick the least taxing option to beat Rainbow, but I feel that the point is still uneven trades; Rainbow costs me only 3 to rez, is out of range of Mimic and Yog, costs 2 every run with Corroder or Gordian, 3 for Zu.1e... you get the idea. It's easily--but never truly cheaply--breakable. Not for what it costs me to bring online.

I sometimes think about including 1-2 chimera, just for that last ditch stop. If I ever did that they'd probably take the place of Rainbow.