Aggravated Assault Zahya (1st/undefeated at Denver Megacity)

To be honest, I had no idea what I was looking at the first time I saw znsolomon's self-defense list. It looked like a worse Rongydoge Cured My Depression and a worse Counter Surveillance deck, and I had no interest in playing this weird-looking pile when I could be savoring my last few months with Freedom, even if znsolomon spent 6 influence on the coolest bad champ card. However, the concept of ToWing and accessing 5 intrigued me, so when saff dropped the core of this list in our Canadian Highlander expat group chat I loaded it up and was immediately hooked.

This deck is as fun as running gets. You can constantly present forks, pressure evenly across the board, and get paid out for it. Floating tags is obviously part of the gameplan, but you can dance in and out of a tagged state depending on the threats the Corp is presenting. Cupellation and Steelskins give you a ton of game against kill decks that aren’t on Touch-ups and let you break Semak-Samuns with your face (sometimes). I’d like to say that I played this because it was a good meta call against Au with all the run econ and tech you get to include, but to be honest, I just didn’t want to put it down. I play largely by intuition, which can lead me to make dumb mistakes that could be avoided with a minute amount of forethought, but this deck encourages a wanton and frankly disrespectful tactical playstyle that fits me quite well. This deck feels fairly good against the field in general, with some trickiness against Touch-ups kill and Weyland scoring decks (and the intersection of those? perish the thought), but I very rarely feel lost in a matchup.

And you know what? After 50 something games over a couple weeks, Joy Ride almost makes sense to me.

Selected Card Thoughts

Self-Tagging

With a lot fewer crim self-tagging cards around, this deck has to take a very different approach to tags than previous versions. Eru goes from a cute include in spite of the anti-synergy to necessary, giving you a reliable way to self-tag without making a successful run in the late game. A couple more sources might be helpful, but we run into the issue of all the Seb cards not functioning while tagged - I’d rather have Manuel turned off from time to time than play a Friend of a Friend that is sometimes dead cardboard.

Hermes vs Pennyshaver

Most of my games with this deck were played with Pennyshaver, with an eye towards keeping credit totals high against Nebula and the asset decks. However, focusing on buying tempo and disrupting play patterns seemed way more effective - you already get paid when you get in, and Hermes helps you do so in the first place rather than giving you some delayed cash back.

Maintenance Access vs S-Dobrado

It would be nice if this slot could just be Inside Job, but as is we have to make do with central only pressure. Pre-Hermes, I was on a 1-1 split, but Hermes already punishes the Corp spreading ice thinly across their servers, so I leaned into the tax-nullifying and hail mary potential of S-Dobrado. The Hermes/S-Dobrado set also gives you much better options to avoid getting hit with an SDS out of a difficult remote and gives you finishing options if you get rigshot.

The Floating Inf

Steelskin, Eru, and Manuel are core to the strategy, but what to do with the last 2 pips? The original list from saff had 2x Scrounge, which was a nice safety blanket against Weyland and plays neatly with Physarum. In testing it did too little too often, and Physarum was disappointing with such clunky setup. Simulchip fills a similar role, but I wasn’t impressed enough with it given the variance in being able to trigger it outside of Shaper. The draw, Cezve outlet, and time efficient tag-dancing offered by 2x Bahia Bands just proved too hard to beat.

One card I considered early on was “Pretty” Mary da Silva as a way to enhance Jailbreak runs while untagged and make Manuel and/or Eru runs even scarier. The threat of it just getting instakilled scared me off of spending much time testing it leading up to the event. But after talking with Thomas Haas some after, I do think it’s worth a look - yes, the corp can trash it while you’re floating, but that’s generally going to be a favorable tempo exchange that can only happen after it’s paid for itself and done some damage.

Touch-ups Tech

Obviously, it’s no fun to get two Steelskins pulled out of your hand and then get murdered. You can play around this threat on key turns by installing The Class Act, grabbing combo pieces with Cupellations, and pressuring the Corp in ways that disrupt their combo and keep them poor . If you really wanted to never die, you could play Stoneships and aggressively remove tags or even do something goofy like play a T400 Memory Diamond, but I’m pretty sold on embracing the uncertainty and making them have it.

Tournament Report (together with DeeR's The Red Prince)

Swiss

• W vs the districts bye
• W vs Ryan (Dewi)
• W vs Ryan (Thunderbolt)
• W vs Nick O (Control Maggie)
• W vs Thomas Haas (SHTR Au) - Stream
• W vs RyanB (Control Maggie) - Stream
• ID vs heliopolix

The Au games in Swiss were for the most part pretty straightforward - without a certain baseline of experience against the egg, it’s easy to slip up even if you’ve got the tech.

As far as Zahya went, the Thunderbolt game was a bit of a massacre, with a turn one Hermes SAM rip snowballing. The game vs Thomas Haas was a very spicy one - I was in a very good position, having safely gotten to 5 points and using a couple ToWs to keep him in the dirt. Having stolen a Regenesis, I felt pretty safe going tag-me, but wanted to poke HQ again with Cup, so I used Bahia Bands to run and draw up, clearing one of two tags rather than installing a card to try and keep my grip full.

Actually, nevermind all that. After detagging, I continued trying to control the board, and made a run on a card in the remote, tanking an Anemone and suddenly remembering Byte! exists after boomeranging through Flyswatter and jacking out before what would be the game winning SHTR access. Thankfully, I wasn’t the only one rattled, and my opponent went for the Touch-ups combo kill one advancement short (which I played around but still got jumpscared by). I was then able to find a Flyswatter solution in two clicks to finish the game.

Cut

• W vs Zhae (Touch-ups Au)

Zhae’s egg had a lot more big ice and did actually include Byte!, so I applied cautious pressure and stole 5 points while keeping her poor. I then promptly threw all this tight play out the window on the turn time was called, diving the remote last click just to hit a 5 damage Sting rather than defusing Phat and drawing up. I threw down my hand of four cards and loudly swore, convinced I was dead before zhae reminded me that it was actually 2+3 damage - I hit the Steelskin 50/50 and survived one last Bladderwort ping to win on points.

• W vs FAC3L355 (PD)

Unfortunately, this was another HB massacre, with PD flooding, then activating Humanoid Resources and flooding harder, so I got points 4-7 off of a S-Dobrado for four accesses on HQ no later than turn 5.

• W vs RyanB (Control Maggie)

Ryan learned a lot from our last game, and played a good control shaper game but slowly fell behind on tempo until I was able to drop two mini oppos and finish with EOTL.

• W vs Thomas Haas (Control Maggie) - Stream

This was a very fun game, but an uncontested Cohort and some value scores put me way ahead, giving me an opportunity to push an enormous board. I did find out after the fact that I double paid for a Moon Pool, getting mixed up by the process of trashing and Au countering and shuffling and advancing. I feel bad about this because it was definitely impactful given the on board Bladderwort, but I do feel that it didn’t end up changing the game too much - likely I rez the second Reaper as well to get those fires, forcing interaction and turning on my Oppos instead of scrapping in the econ dirt.

Obligatory Shoutouts

• saff and the rest of the asa grief support group for talking through the tuning of this list
• rongydoge for giving advice and reassurance before cut and also providing the mandatory hater screenshot
• CO Netrunner for being sick as hell and covering such a wide range of what’s cool about this game and community!
• Roux, my digestively challenged dog, for not having a single accident at home alone while I was busy winning at card games all weekend