Quick 'n' Dirty (2nd/11th/32nd at Euro/Africa Continentals)

paulyg 1318

This list goes quick and plays dirty. This is not beautiful, elegant Netrunner. This is a hammer sellotaped to a rocket and some crossed fingers. Here’s a gif from continental championship runner-up tugtetgut:

memes

Myself, Asger and Peter played this in the tournament and managed a combined record of 12-4 in swiss. Peter and Asger made it to the cut and did pretty well :-)

The scrabble for a playable corp was pretty real for continentals this year. I knew that I didn’t want to play Titan (can’t draw an Atlas to save my life) and when I listed out all the other meta corps I mostly wrote “dies to 419/Leela” or “I can’t play this very well” against most of them. I tried a bunch of different GameNet builds, Earth Station, RP, Blue Sun and Jinja Outfit and wasn’t really happy with how any of them played against criminal.

Out of a mix of desperation and curiosity, I decided to try some games with The King’s recent rude-style Outfit list. I honestly wasn’t sure how it would go against criminal but I won some games and some more games… Asger and I spent an evening playing it a few days before the tournament and most of that time was spent laughing and winning by dropping six points into archives but we did decide that the ice was slightly too light and slightly too expensive and set about making some changes.

A Spiderweb went in for one of the Bulwarks, to provide some Boomerang protection, and we dropped a Reversed Accounts to make room for an Engram Flush. This proved occasionally good against criminals who were determined to get a Bravado off as soon as possible (potentially knocking breakers our of hand) and also is a real ice on the remote when it comes to scoring a City Works Project. Asger was also convinced that Ark Lockdown had the potential to do some good work against criminals running 1 Paperclip as their only barrier breaker, so that went in for one of the Archived Memories.

The deck plays fast and has various routes to victory. Interestingly almost all my wins were from kills whilst almost all of Asger’s were from scoring out. I guess he’s a nicer person than me?

Consulting Visit and Archived Memories give you loads of flexibility to play with your operations, grabbing Dedication Ceremonies, Ark Lockdown etc. from thin air and it’s quite a lot of fun trying to work out what your best chance of victory is whilst keeping your options open. Reg crim (biggest chunk of the field) is what you expect to beat and you can normally rush shaper. Freedom can be a little bit tricky though your high-strength ice can be very helpful if you can draw them and stop all your precious operations from getting trashed. Geist is more or less unwinnable.

Reflecting on this deck, we think that DRM could be good to fit in given the easy access you have to Dedication Ceremonies and how much it hurts criminals to take a City Works Project. As a known quantity this deck will lose a bit of power but it still challenges your opponents to play precisely.

2 comments
27 Jul 2020 percomis

Nice finish Paul, congrats!

I honestly still don't know if this deck is actually good. But apparently if you give runners enough options to die on they eventually will pick one. Sadly I found that if reg Crims get rich fast, that can also be awkward. I do like that the deck pushes you towards risky/rushier lines as it's actually fun.

As a fun sidenote, I tried the "bin 6 points" trick only once, runner didn't run Archives for a long while, so I had to Archive Memories back one of the agendas to actually score it :D

27 Jul 2020 paulyg

@percomis Thanks! Congrats on your cut placing!

I agree. I don't think this deck could be at all described as fundamentally 'good' but what I think we all found was that it was sort of good in this meta, and good against the way people want to play criminal at the moment. Criminals feel almost invulnerable and they want to make their Bravado runs and install Tapwrm and get ahead of the corp straight away.

Against a lot decks they can do all this stuff almost on autopilot, whereas here you almost always have access to a big burst of money and a bunch of nasty tools and if they're too loose in their play (which of course you try to encourage via pressure) then what looks like an easy win for them turns into an immediate defeat.

I was sad I didn't get an opportunity to bin 6 during that day but glad you almost pulled it off!