Finger Guns (6-1, 26th at Worlds)

This is the Asa deck I brought to the 2024 World Championship in San Francisco. It went 6-1 over the course of the event, losing only to Paillu's tag-me Freedom list where I got absolutely dumpstered. Unfortunately my great corp performance was pulled down by rather middling runner play, ending with me just missing top cut.

This is a Punitive Counterstrike deck but it isn't a kill deck. The Punitives exist primarily to slow the runner down and create forks. The ideal game plan is as follows:

1. Spam the board with annoying-to-trash assets behind ice.
2. Overadvance and score a Vitruvius, ideally with two agenda counters.
3. Deploy a (mostly) unstealable Ikawah, using your Vitruvius counters to represent extra Fully Operationals and/or Punitives.
4. Slip in another 3/2 at some point, or finish with a second Ikawah if the runner didn't force out the Vitruvius counters yet. We don't have good fast advance lines (only an obscure RLC/Wage Workers line that requires a Vitruvius counter or two) and we don't have an unbeatable hell remote. Instead we are relying on forcing runs on unrezzed cards to create windows for forks. Sometimes that means installing multiple agendas in one turn and expecting to lose one. The runner cannot afford to overextend if it won't win them the game.

The plan worked well against the mass of Criminals I was paired into, but was uniquely weak into the set of disruption tools offered by tag-me Freedom. Only a single game was actually won with a Punitive flatline, every other win was some mix of regular tempo Asa play and forks created by the threat of Punitive.

Why Punitive Asa?

I had been practicing a lot with variations on Jai's APAC-winning list but was finding that I was struggling to adapt it to my own playstyle and losing often on central accesses. Not feeling very confident about my options going into Worlds, I figured I'd just try to put in some unexpected kill cheese to maybe skate to top half of swiss for prizing.

This led to me finding syd7's Continentals-winning Asa list from 2020 and trying to adapt it to the current meta -- we have some of the same tools, and some new toys as well. The loss of Project Vacheron meant early versions of the list were a mix of Salvo Testing and Send a Message.

After some dedicated testing with liadahlia and excellent deckbuilding intuition from her, we found that the Ikawahs performed much better, strengthening the forks and making centrals less vulnerable early into the game. As the kill cheese plan was being deemphasized, the Týrs got cut for leaner ice. Nico Campaign was replaced with Marilyn Campaign to make it a little bit harder for runners to disrupt our early economic development.

Flex Slots and Card Choices

The list is pretty tight, but I think the third Spin Doctor and the third Tatu-Bola are the most cuttable influence spends. In the last hours the night before the event, I was considering Extract, Standard Procedure, or Your Digital Life as an additional way to burst up in money when necessary on the fork turns, but decided to just run with a more consistent set of tools and to maintain a slightly higher count of installables.

Malia Z0L0K4 was an all-star in the event, blanking Daily Casts, The Class Act, and Bankhar and just being a general nuisance to runners even when not forcing kills through.

Red Level Clearance was a late addition to help smooth out the early game, give an early card for Drafter to pick up, and enable some kickflip lines with Wage Workers. This slot could possibly just be Hedge Fund but I did appreciate the extra utility that RLC offered. One earlier iteration of the deck included Sudden Commandment to combo with RLC for fast advance and dig for punishment but I found that I so rarely needed it to close a game that I had better ways to spend influence.

Matches

R1 (W): TheRealBeale on Mercury
R4 (W): iherdn3rfz on Ken
R5 (W): ksodiya on 419
R8 (L): Paillu on Freedom
R9 (W): Derek M. on 419
R11 (W): Styx on Esâ
R13 (W): Chem_Collapse on Spark Kit

The Netrunner Community is Amazing

This was my first time competing at Worlds and also the largest card game tournament I've ever attended. Everyone I met was wonderful and the energy and love in the tournament hall was unparalleled. Big thanks to NSG and the volunteer team for putting on such a great event.

Also huge thanks to the Portland, Oregon Netrunner community for being such an active and welcoming community. I'm really proud of how well we performed as a group at this event and hopefully this is the first step in becoming an active force in the larger competitive scene. Our pre-Worlds jam session was instrumental in fine-tuning this list and showing me that it had real potential. And thanks Perihelion for the deck name idea.

Biggest thanks to my husband Alex for coming with me on this journey to San Francisco and supporting me along the way! Love you!