"We're calling it orange criminal" (1st @ SW Regionals)

This deck went undefeated and took 1st place at the southwest regionals, only... I didn't get it there.

Huge credit to Ollie who picked up this deck a few days before the tournament and took it straight to first place, taking down R+, Azmari, Thule and Ob. My own results were 1-2 with a win against PD and losses to Kikai's R+ and Alex White on a variation of EA Sports Azmari.

The journey

Shortly after getting back from EMEA I thought it would be fun to see if I could make my throwback deck function in standard. After some failed experiments with Matryoshka and some conversations with the team I started to think about the Aumakua/Leech package as an alternative.

A few more failed experiments and some late night NRDB searches led me to this list from the one and only jan tuno. I decided to play it as is and figure out if I wanted to try slotting Jeitinho back in. I very quickly discovered that wasn't a good idea, Leech and Turtle say "makes lots of runs" and Jeitinho says "make exactly 9 runs."

However the deck was feeling very good. Having struggled to play control shaper recently it was refreshing to play something disruptive that forces the corp to react to you rather than the other way around.

Cards and changes

-2 Bahia Bands, +1 Miss Bones

Bahia made more sense in a world of yellow asset decks but was ultimately not pulling it's weight. The tag removal can be nice, but we're mostly trying to avoid needing to take the Crew tags. Bones is more universally useful across current matchups.

-1 Hippo, +1 Ice Carver

Hippo was often feeling OK but not great. It could act as Crew number 4 once you had the Turtle rolling but not much else. Ice carver came in as a response to every corp running a 1 strength barrier and the general synergy with Leech, Crew and Turtle. In practice it helped avoid getting locked out but on the day neither me nor Ollie were able to find the window to get it played.

-2 Fermenter, +2 Dirty Laundry

jan tuno calls this out in the comments of it's own deck writeup, but this change felt very good. Being less vulnerable to purges is a win, and when you play it with patchwork you feel great.

+1 Contaminate

This was the last addition and I was still debating it's inclusion the night before but ultimately I stand by it. In a Patchwork deck you can get away with a somewhat situational one of with a high upside. It gets you straight back in after a purge. On the day I used it to power up a Leech before running with Crew to trash an ice. That was enough to make me happy.

Final thoughts

While my teammates in EA Sports were playing an aggressive econ denial deck in the form of Blue Anarch, Ollie and myself ended up here with an aggressive econ denial deck that feels a lot like Orange Criminal.

There are still some question marks over the deck: is DooF really worth the influence? (it sits very nicely with the econ denial plan of trashing ice). Is patchwork the right console? Does Bankhar have a home here?

We'll be taking this one back to the EA labs to see where we take it next.

Shoutouts

Baa Ram Wu, sixtyten and Nicky3.0 did an amazing job. SW Regionals was a huge success, great fun and it's down to their efforts before and during the event.

The QEH crew for being the loveliest people to hang out and chat with at various points throughout.

All my opponents and everyone at the event was friendly and I loved playing netrunner with you all. This community is the best.

My EA Sports crew. Who would think we could fill 2 consecutive 4 and half hour car journeys with constant netrunner chat and laughter. Me I would think that.

My partner for being cool when I stumbled in at 1:30am and completely failed to quietly go to bed.

Final final thought: go to regionals.