Isolated Incident (comparison to Better Lucky than Good)

I just played a casual weekend of (no booster) Startup, to which a friend of mine brought SirLoathing's 'Better Lucky than Good' deck.

https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/66518

I had deliberately chosen not to play Steve, because I expected to be one of the stronger players present, and my felt own Steve deck would be unfair and unreasonable to bring. I think Steve is very strong in Startup, and a while ago I tuned up what I thought was a very good version of him.

My friend struggled with the Better Lucky than Good list, which ran out of steam for him against taxing NBN builds. In a bid to test the deck/show how it should be done, I had a go with the list myself. It was OK, but I was not a fan.

This has prompted me to write up my own list in comparison to BLtG. It's very similar, so I think the differences are instructive. I'm absolutely sure that SirLoathing could pilot his version better than I did. Playstyle is a thing and you should build your list around what naturally works for you. That said, I far prefer my version. I hope this analysis is helpful to anyone thinking about playing this sort of thing.

Similarities

I think it's remarkable that through iterative deck building myself and Loathing have both arrived at the conclusion that 1x Mystic Maemi and 1x Prepaid VoicePAD is correct. I can't really say more than that. I played this deck a lot and that's what I ended up with. It's great econ support and the two influence is worth it. More of the same gives diminishing returns.

The breaker choices, single Docklands Pass and good-stuff economy is the same. Good cards are good. Docklands isn't quite good enough to play multiple copies for reliability. These choices are hard to argue with.

Three Emergency Shutdown combos well with Steve's speed and focus on running HQ.

Only one Sneakdoor is tough. There's an argument for going up to two, but deckspace is tight. Sneakdoor is great though, especially if you see it earlyish.

Differences

I'm very happy to be playing Jailbreaks over Legwork and The Maker's Eye. They're more flexible as you get to choose where you're running, they improve your tempo by a card rather than blunting it to the tune of 2, and you save a whopping four influence. The extra accesses the more specialised cards cards net you are a big deal, and not to be underestimated, but they're still not worth the investment in my opinon.

Swift is decent, but I don't think there's any beating a full playset of Pennyshaver. Swift lets you do more during the good times, but Pennyshaver builds up a fat bank of cash you can call on when the going gets tough. Criminal is about speed, but the 'shaver gives you a level of staying power that just can't be ignored.

Harmony AR Therapy may well be wrong. Coming back to this list after some time away, I was surprised to see it, given its prohibitive influence cost. It does offer a few advantages though: It lets you grab back singletons that you don't want to sacrifice on the altar of Steve, and it's significantly cheaper than Buffer Drive while filling the same role of providing emergency recursion. Buffer is a good tech card against Jinteki, but Steve himself is already doing that job. Harmony is usually worth at least something, where as Buffer is often just dead.

Isolation is great in Steve. You can install The Class Act a lot of times. I seem to remember I played a Security Testing for a long while too, and it's great with that. Sometimes you play it on an almost-exhausted Daily Casts, and that's a bit sad, but it still works out as an Easy Mark, which is fine and reduces its variance overall. At the end of the game, it can also target Mystic Maemi.

Only two Boomerangs is questionable, but I find they often end up cluttering up your hand, and we're not quite as reliant on them here because we're running a couple of extra breakers.

I like having multiple copies of breakers. It's good, especially in Steve where you can reliably recur anything that there's two copies of in the bin. As well as having fewer 'rangs, part of the trade off is that there's only one Mutual Favor here, which stings.

The singleton Corroder is therefore a big question mark, especially with that Creative Commission there just asking to be cut for influence. But that brings me to my biggest conclusion...

It's all about the money

The reason Steve is a good ID is that he is absolutely filthy rich. Sure he has cute, flexible options, but that's not as big a deal as the fact that he's swimming in cash. Maybe if you're running into optimised Precision Design lists all the time, Loathing's list is the right answer. It's rich enough for that match-up, and time is of the essence. But if the corp is making you spend any significant amount of money, you want economic muscle. Steve's cashflow is very binary; either you're getting in and making money from doing so, or you're being kept out and your best economy pieces don't work properly. That means you have to be rich to stay rich.

Conclusion

There's two types of reliability: there's seeing enough cards that you're definitely finding all the agendas, and there's making enough money that you'll continue to see cards in future. For my tastes, the BLtG list skews too far towards the former, but your mileage may vary depending on your meta and playstyle.