No Gambo- 5th @ APAC 2023

Arissana is my ideal runner. I love playing decks that run often and whose engines are strong enough that they don't need to gamble to make money. Arissana and her console and her new resource enable that style of deck to a tee.

The day before APAC, I couldn't find a build for her that I thought was competitive and was resigned to registering 419, but a conversation between Unband teammates the King and Kikai about Koga's Arissana deck renewed my faith and convinced me to hurry up and try creating something. This is a bit more of a glass cannon than Koga's deck, lacking the controlling elements and tech in favor of aggression and a more consistent ball of synergy.

How to Play

This deck aims to eventually win with Deep Dive and an extra click from Pichação, ideally after already having stolen 4-5 points. Keeping this in mind throughout the game is important.

Early, the priorities are getting engine pieces like LilyPAD and Urban Art Vernissage online and establishing a credible threat on the remote. Overclocking the remote and, when the corp rezzes, installing SMC with Arissana to fetch whatever program you need to break the ice is a great play if you have access to it.

Once you have LilyPAD and/or UAV installed, poke HQ and R&D regularly for single accesses, or any lightly protected server. Install a trojan with Arissana, ideally Kyuban, before the ice is rezzed if you're running that server. This "strafing" of HQ and R&D with a Kyuban gains 2 credits after breaking the ice, as well as a draw from LilyPAD, maybe a draw with DreamNet and 3 credits if it's a Dirty Laundry run, and then 2 credits from UAV at the start of your next turn as you bounce Kyuban back to hand, ready to go again. It's a lot of yummy value. Side effects may include stealing agendas.

If the corp defends the remote so much that you can no longer challenge it but leaves R&D lightly defended, use Conduit. Be very cautious about pivoting to a Conduit plan, this deck is generally better at going for single accesses once per turn than running R&D a bunch of times in one turn.

Card choices

• 3x Gachapon: Is this worth 6 influence? To annoy your opponent by installing things for free on their turn? And maybe get a card draw with LilyPAD? Hell yeah!!! The deck filtering is also nice. In all seriousness, this feels really good to fire when you have LilyPAD installed, I would at least try some out.
• 2x Dreamnet: To have more hits for Gachapon. The clickless card draw is great, especially if you're me and always struggle to find LilyPAD.
• Cyberdelia: You don't need 7 mem, but I am incapable of drawing a copy of LilyPAD in the top 20 cards of my deck and unlike DZMZ this doesn't have any awkward overlap in its econ ability with UAV.
• Hush: An idea stolen from Koga. The Loki Ag player in me hates slotting this, but the runner player in me loves it. This card is so good right now, with Border Control, Ablative Barrier, and Funhouse all getting disrupted by it to name only a few of its use cases.
• Ika + Echelon: Ika is a very efficient killer, as well as a trojan you can install with Arissana. It also is the only trojan in the deck you can install when there is no ice. These reasons warranted its slot for me, but I also put Echelon in to hedge against the corp overwriting their ice and trashing Ika.
• No turbine: Too slow in a meta with not much glacier.

Tournament Recap

Overall, I went 5-2 with this deck, beating Epiphany Analytica, Asa, Reality Plus, and Outfit in swiss and Asa in the cut. My swiss losses were to Koga's Ants and Big Deal Outfit. Big Deal--> SDS Drone Deployment.... yup, that'll do it.

For future tournaments, I'd change a few things about the deck. First, independent of matchups, Mayfly is bad. A Propeller and/or an Euler would better enable early aggression. I prefer Propeller between those because it is a bigger upgrade on Corroder than Euler is on Unity most of the time. Look at whether you expect more code gates or barriers too, yada yada.

Now considering matchups, I was really scared of facing tagging and rigshooter strategies with this build. Thankfully, I got lucky in my two tagging matchups. Didn't get as lucky against rigshooter, both directly - getting my Corroder blasted in swiss - and indirectly - being forced to corp in the cut against Kyra out of fear of her 2x Trojan Horse and Zato City Grid. Propeller over the Mayfly should help with rigshooter a bit, but it would be nice to fit a Simulchip in here. For the asset/tag matchups, more experimentation/testing is needed. I may compromise my fun a little and play with some of the Gachapon influence.

Closing thoughts

Very happy to make top cut in a 94 person tournament. Thanks Null Signal for running it and my opponents for some great games. Shoutout to Unband as a whole for being a great testing group, and to AxWill for helping me figure out my ID/241 strategy. That discord call as the sun was coming up in my time zone was hype. In the nine months I've been in Unband, I think I've become a much stronger player.

Shoutout to Pouchsurfer for being the other East Coast US-er in the cut, and for somehow being conscious and playing netrunner on 0 hours of sleep in 40 hours. I thought I had done rough on sleep by sleeping 3 hours after the swiss all-nighter, jeeeez. Massive respect! Also to Choux, who unfortunately missed out on top cut, but gave me a rousing pep talk saying we needed to overclock and running hot at the same time to stay awake and finish the thing.

And thanks mom for making me a huge bowl of fruit salad that hard-carried me through swiss.

I heavily recommend trying out Arissana and agree with everything Koga said in his write-up about how rewarding she feels to play. Good luck to everyone playing her at Cascadia! I can't wait to see what you brew.