Medusa (2nd, 5th, 8th at US Nats, 4th at Canadian Nats)

Hi all!

This is the MAD Asa list that both east coast and west coast Snare Bears brought to US/Canadian nats this month. While there were several points of difference between all 5 decks brought (by me, whiteblade, tbu3k, janktivist, and analyzechris), the key distinction between this deck and others (such as the excellent one Teo piloted at US nats) was the focus on asset based click-cards and hard-hitting news.

Why Mad ASA? Why Asset Spam?

Typically, the strongest starting point when determining what corp to bring to a tournament is to consider what decks runners bring. For this nats season we anticipated:

• Big Hoshiko
• ____
• ____
• ____

Oh…that’s it? Well that makes things easy, but Big Hoshiko is a Big Challenge. It prints money, can get wincons and breakers out pretty fast with gacha/moshing, and with bankhar can reliably get into servers when she wants to. Combo decks (such as Mad Ob) create an interesting quandary for big Hoshiko, as all the value in the world can’t divert a bullet to the face. Typically the way Big Hosh handles combo decks is by getting maw out and trashing wincons repeatedly. This works remarkably well, as if you need a 4 card set up you will never get to see the 4th card before another one goes. What our mad asa does is it hides the combo on the board. A Bass there, and MCA there, and suddenly your HQ is so much cleaner and can survive Maws. With HHN, runners need to slow their game a lot in order to make sure they can successfully contest the board. Biotic helps clean up bad board states, but it isn’t reliable enough to get the combo on its own. Against an experienced runner, Mad Asa probably weaker than both asset spam and combo decks, but MAD Asa creates a unique challenge for the runner that we hoped to take advantage of.

Agenda Suite:

Minimalist.

ICE:

Gear checks mainly. We wanted it to be as annoying as possible for the typical big Hoshiko list, so Magnet, Gatekeeper, and Fairchild 3.0 felt good. Echo is cheap, which is pretty much the only thing it has going for it.

Assets/Operations and Flex Slots:

The flex slots in this deck between snarebears were 1 HHN, 1 Sprint, and 1 Malia. Some folks used the slots to add 2 more Gaslights getting to 3, which evens the matchup up a little. Other versions included Restore, Best Defense, or the third Marilyn Campaign. On sum, I think HHN is better if you think you have a more aggressive meta, Gaslight is better if you think folks play too passive. I love Malia, it stresses runners out and can get you out of really awkward matchups. I also liked Sprint, keeps HQ cleaner and makes it harder to get central’d to death. I don’t think these flex slots are crazy important so tailor to taste, but be careful not to get too operation heavy.

Final Thoughts:

Both East and West coast Nats were absolute gems of tournaments. Thank you so much to Sanjay, internet, DanB, Pouchsurfer, and Solomir for keeping Netrunner alive and organizing a wonderful scene. Congratulations to Abraham and Fa for being phenomenal players and showing the world what Weyland is all about! Thank you to all the snarebears for their work testing and building this deck — you’re my colleagues and my friends.

Finally, I wanted to just say that, to my knowledge, East Coast US Nats is the first major finals in netrunner history to be between two non-cis-men*. It meant a lot to me to be a part of that moment, and while there is plenty more work to do, I look forward to continuing the effort with you all to make netrunner a positive and safe space for everyone.

(*With a loving asterisk to the 2017 worlds finalists, neither of whom currently identify as men).

And finally finally, those who know me know I like making playlists for all my decks before a big tournaments. So without further ado here is Medusa

CheeRs!