The Worlds Grind (1st @ Worlds 2023)

Sokka 5643

Check out my YouTube Channel where I have now posted a Worlds Recap Video. I go over my testing, more specific thoughts/explanations of this deck, my tournament experience, and some match analysis. It's a long one and if you can't watch it all I think the match analysis at the end is the best part (timestamps in description).

Team Unband

Team Unband

234

Team Unband at tables 234 😉

Round 1!?

Bridgeman and I when we found out we were paired round 1.

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Preparing for worlds this year was quite the grind. The meta is extremely diverse and this makes finding a solid corp deck an especially difficult task. Hours of testing, late nights, and my stress levels were through the roof for the entirety of the last month up until Friday night when I locked in this as my corp list.

Check out my Boomerang Hoshiko deck here.

It is my absolute pleasure to pass it on to Peter H (@verumvenari), without whom this deck would not exist, to give an overview of this beautiful deck.

Deck Overview

So, is this an all-in Clearinghouse deck? No. But the late-game power of runners these days is so inherently high, even for those teched against assets and rush, that the deck's scoring aspirations go mostly unrealized. Including cards like Gene Splicer or Echo Chamber doesn't solve this problem; the issue is the first 6 points, not the last 1. Our hope was always for the deck to have a scoring plan, and it still does -- it just turns out that the best thing to score, in a world of Hermes and Arissana, is a 6/7 agenda named "Clearinghouse."

The deck has a straightforward goal: make a board that's hard for the runner to handle, and then force them to handle it. The goal is not, in and of itself, to make the runner run out of money, or cards, or to shoot their rig, or to push the world's most unstoppable Clearinghouse as quickly as it can. This is first and foremost an exercise in building a board. Clearinghouse, Trojan Horse, SDS, and credit taxes are all ways of augmenting, or leveraging, the board, but the core engine of the deck is the ice that it installs. This is why things like Botulus and Arisanna are especially good against it. At heart, it's an extremely honest deck, trying to play honest Netrunner. The nasty tricks -- the meat damage, the program destruction, the Sadaka -- are just there to keep the runners honest, too.

Quick Q&A

I’ll address a couple things about the deck here that I’m sure people will be wondering about. Again, I will go in-depth in a post-tournament video on my YouTube channel.

Why is the deck 49 cards instead of 44?

  • Because Above the Law is a huge threat to someone sitting around charging Twinning.

Why is there a Sadaka?

  • Similar to the reason why there is Above the Law, this type of slow glacier deck can have problems against runners who sit there and charge Twinning. Sadaka is a much-needed answer to Twinning and I am very sad that it comes at the cost of a Mestnichestvo because Mestnichestvo is busted in BTL. Shoutout to @Jinsei on this one

Why is there Secure and Protect?

  • to find the 1x Sadaka. Yes revealing it sucks but you gotta do what you gotta do to not lose to Twinning. Yes this means they can Boomerang it but we’re usually popping Bio-Vault on Boomerang runs anyways to make the runner lose their Boomerangs so eventually they won’t be able to deal with the Sadaka.

Why is there a Rime?

  • Because it is excellent Bankhar and Hippo tech and the extra strength can be quite taxing depending on what breakers the runner is using (example: Buzzsaw vs Hortum)

No Rashida??

  • This deck wants to slowly but surely build a solid board. While a single Rashida trigger early can be great, the long-term sustained value from Wall to Wall is what this deck truly wants. Rashida is only good before the first copy of Wall to Wall is drawn. After that, it is a 1-trash dead card waiting to be trashed out of a central and we want to devalue accesses as much as possible

Doesn’t this just lose to Arissana with Hush?

  • Yes.

Shout-outs

I want to give a special shout-out to everyone in Unband for being by my side during this Worlds Grind, to all the lovely people I got to meet at worlds, to NSG for running a top-notch event, and to my gracious opponents who know exactly how lucky I was in some games.

I know I say this all the time but this community truly is special and it means a lot to me to be a part of it. Thank you 💚🧡

Tournament Link

16 comments
18 Oct 2023 koga

🐐

18 Oct 2023 not_yeti

Greatest Netrunner finals, I literally screamed!

18 Oct 2023 lostgeek

Actually no Punitive in the list, huh? Congrats on the finish and the amazing off-meta pick!

18 Oct 2023 Dave976

Wild run. You love to see an off-meta pick actually be the correct on-meta pick. wp.

18 Oct 2023 rubenpieters

RULES

19 Oct 2023 Sokka

@lostgeek the Punitives are for those who Restore Humanity 😉

19 Oct 2023 Bridgeman

🐐 Bäää

Well played good sir!

19 Oct 2023 Radiant

Congratulations and well-deserved! Stoked to have had a front row seat for the finals :)

P.S. how was that falafel place the next day 👀

20 Oct 2023 Berzelius

Glad to see the Turin champion on top of the World! :P

22 Oct 2023 zmb

I can see how Rime can help against Hippo, but how does it help against Tsakhia "Bankhar" Gantulga?

23 Oct 2023 Sokka

@Radiant I slept in when everyone else went so I didn’t get to go 🫣

@zmb Hippo and Bankhar both attack the outermost ice. Rime in front of Pharos means Rime eats the Bankhar trigger. Any other ice would do the same thing but Rime costs 0 to rez and buffs the rest of the server

24 Oct 2023 Weltgeist

Absolutely incredible grand final. Very well deserved!

28 Oct 2023 meitrix87

Great list! Finally, my patience and faith in Green, Glacier and Adv Ice has been rewarded! :)

27 Nov 2023 Council

Greatest of all Rime

8 Dec 2023 Jeffrey Bosboom

Any thoughts on Scapenet against The Twinning in place of the Sadaka?

9 Dec 2023 Sokka

Scapenet comes with the benefit of being able to hit Twinning without having to predict where the runner is going to run. Unfortunately Scapenet only targets Twinning and against other runners it won’t do anything whereas Sadaka on R&D, especially behind a taxing ice, is extremely strong even if it doesn’t trash anything because it allows R&D to be rearranged or shuffled. Sadaka can be dealt with using Boomerang, Bankhar, AI breakers, or Botulus. Scapenet requires you to win a trace. There are some clear pros and cons to both but for me the one factor that is most important is that Sadaka can be tutored with Secure and Protect whereas Scapenet might just hide at the bottom of the deck with no ways of finding it