[3rd at Italian Megacity] putting the harm in harmonbee

Okay first a quick disclaimer: harmonbee is harmony + bee, not harm + on + bee. I do not wish any harm on bees. Runners on the other hand...

This is the corp I took to Italian Megacity, which went 2-0-1 in swiss (also we played the ID and I won anyway) and 1-1 in the cut. Combined with a Hermes Tao with multiaccess a la girls, I came third in the event overall!

Doing a little murder, as a treat

This deck is the bringing of the conspiracy Nuvem into the Elevation card pool. This deck gained a lot of power with the new cardpool, both because Runner economy is weaker and because we got some extremely hot new cards that may as well say "hey! use this in Nuvem" on them.

Plutus gives the transactions in this deck a second life. It is an incredibly flexible card, letting you play a wealth of transactions for very useful effects. Trashing three cards from HQ is a very affordable cost: trash an agenda to play Armed Asset Protection for roughly ten billion credits, or play Predictive Planogram to draw cards to replace the ones you spent. You can put it in your scoring remote for a few turns then overwrite it, leave it in a second remote if you find the ice for it to put double pressure on the Runner, or just leave it out in the open and Oppo Research the Runner when they go trash it.

Petty Cash is incredibly flexible. It nets us an additional click when played via Plutus, which gives us an easy way to fast advance a 3/2. Real Nuvem players will use it to fast advance a 5/3 with 2x Slash and Burn Agriculture. The realest Nuvem players will do this with a facedown Petty Cash that was milled on the previous turn via Nuvem itself. Feel free to insert a meme about this here.

Measured Response is obviously nice as the fourth kill piece, but the threat clause definitely makes it difficult to play. You can pull off some nice lines with baiting the Runner to spend money on a Public Trail first, or even use it to then make clearing Oppo tags impossible.

Lamplighter is a sleeper hit for this deck: it says tag on it, it's taxing, and is a hard end the run when the runner is drowning in tags. Semak-samun is just a nice card for the spare influence.

Where this deck shines is its ability to punish mistakes. The Nuvem ability means that we can quickly boost up to credits to play kill pieces - a Runner making a run and going to less than 8c and 4 cards in hand is easy for us to punish due to the rate we get through the deck with Nuvem mills and the rate we gain money to make these final big plays. We pressure the Runner to trash Plutus and steal agendas milled by Nuvem, which opens up Oppo plays which they can't recover from.

I still have a lot to learn about how the deck plays. At Italian Nats I found myself using the scoring remote as the Plutus remote and slowly filling HQ with agendas as a result. There's a balance to find of when to rush, when to trash Plutus, when to install it in a separate server and whether to ice that server, and so on. There's also a balance to find on when to mill with Nuvem and when to leave the card there: the benefits of a guaranteed safe R&D access is not to be overstated, and while we have enough ice that you can feel comfortable milling some (except maybe vs Deep Dive Sable) this is less true of the kill pieces. Remember that Basalt can recur your kill pieces if needed, or even a card like Planogram to get you up to credits for Oppo!

How did the event go?

I didn't get much practice before this event, which meant I came into it not expecting to place particularly well. It also meant I was extremely calm - this would be no stakes, just messing about with fun decks - I was mainly there to see my girlfriend krys, so any Netrunner wins would just be a bonus.

Anyway, I won against MuslihaT (Porkobolo, via accidentally rigshooting with the 2x Stavka), Seb (piloted by our EMEA champion, via a 3 damage Bankhar leading to an End of the Line kill), and Deep Dive Sable (piloted by giulianomolletta - we ID'd but played it out, with a forgotten floated tag leading to an End of the Line kill) in swiss. I lost to Seb in the cut (piloted by Baserton - don't draw 9 points in two turns, kids) and beat Deep Dive Sable (giulianomolletta).

The last game in the cut lead to the sickest Plutus line I think I'll ever make, and if anyone is doing an awards show for cool Netrunner lines you might wanna consider this one. Here we go:

Corp turn: play some cards, Oppo down to 4c. See the End of the Line on top and do not mill it.

Runner turn: Giuliano says some panicked Italian, then click 2 runs HQ. HQ has three agendas, a Public Trail and an End of the Line. I rez Stavka, trashing the R&D ice and going to 0c. It fires and trashes the rig. He boomerangs through the Maskirovka, goes to access but first I rez Plutus that has been sat unprotected on the board for the past few turns and trash six points faceup into Archives. Access gives him nothing. He can't find a way to get past the ice on Archives in two clicks, so the agendas stay unstolen.

Corp turn: Plutus plays Planogram for both credits and cards, drawing the End of the Line and taking me to 3c. Nuvem mills a card to go to 5c. Credit, End of the Line, End of the Line.

Not bad huh?

How did the event go? (emotional)

Making top cut at a megacity is something I never expected - I'm delighted with my placement, and not just because I got a Shaper hat for doing so well :P (Okay the one downside was missing koga's cube because I made cut, but I will make sure to play it another time!)

Thank you to my Birmingham locals who supported me from afar, getting excited during their Showdown LAN party - especially AceEmpress (<3) and Ish for liaising between me and them. Thank you to oko and davz for reaching out separately to congratulate me. All of you made me feel so, so proud.

Thank you to Atien and Porkobolo for running the event - as always your events are excellent, only outshone by how lovely you both are. I'm so happy that I was able to make it!

Thank you to my opponents at the event for the games, and to everyone in general for hanging out. Particular thanks goes to Baserton for making me feel so welcome - congrats on doing so well with such a cool Corp! Also congrats to giulianomolletta for making his first top cut, you played so well.

Thank you particularly to innit_bruv wowarlok for reminding me that yes, I am a good Netrunner player, and no, it's not a "miracle" that I made top cut like what I said. Turns out that you going "shut the fuck up" lightheartedly made something click inside me - I've put the reps in over the last few months and my recent results are well-deserved!

Thank you to my complotto group - the circuit baby, krysdreavus, and eden - for a space to test some decks in the lead-up to Italian Nats. I'm sorry that I wasn't really able to contribute much due to being so busy in the weeks leading up to the event, but I hope that my presence was still helpful (and I hopefully showed you the joys of Tao and Nuvem). And thank you to the first two for hosting me!

Finally, thank you to krysdreavus for your endless love in and out of Netrunner. I'm so glad we met at EMEA and are able to support each other so well. Ti amo tanto!

Okay I have about ten words of Italian but let me try my best for the Italian community: grazie a tutti per le partite, ci vediamo presto :)