College is a time to experiment

sruman 126

Having played a lot of Stealth Kate and Stealth Andy a few months back, I'm familiar with the stealth deck disadvantage of extended setup time. Therefore, Hayley's ability to gain clicks along the way seems like a natural fit to mitigate the slower setup time.

New IDs are fun but I don't want to play each game feeling wishing I was playing Kate, so I figured I'd come up with a threshold to determine whether Hayley is an ID to get "serious" about. The Kate ability "value" I've experienced and read is in the realm of 10 - 12 credits per game depending on deck. Since a click is generally considered to be worth more than 1 credit, let's say 1.5 credits-per-click. Therefore, if I can usually get 7 Hayley's ability fires in a game without making too many sub-optimal choices to ensure an ID usage, then seems to me that Hayley is in the same ballpark as Kate. As a further comparison, Andy's 4 extra cards is sorta like 4 clicks as a base but is definitely better since -- all at once and at the start, you get to choose from 9 cards for mulligan, etc. Therefore, pegging her at 7 "free" clicks seems reasonable enough as well. Well, enough of how Hayley will be graded.

Some notes on card choices:

Professional Contacts: I've swapped him out for the baby in almost every other deck, so why keep him and his hefty tempo hit here? Mainly because I think Hayley is the ID most able to consistently use him twice a turn without excessive discard. Therefore, his value will rapidly outpace baby value within a 4+ turns and getting him turn 1 can be bonkers value. Of course when he finally appears in turn 11 after 20 click-draws, you want to smash his hipster face. Should I have other card draw -- probably but card slots and I hate drawing diesels with pro-co on the table.

Personal Workshop + Stimhack: Some of my first runner tournament decks were Chaos Theory stimshop, so I've always been fond of this econ package. PW synergizes well with rapid pro-co drawing since you don't have to actually pay for things to get them out of your hand. Also PW lets you use your ability also on the corps turn which is great. Main problem I have with PW is that usually the 2nd one is dead and the 3rd is most definitely dead. Occasionally I can justify a 2nd one installed and ticking down which is fantastic for setting up your rig for almost nothing but it's rare that makes sense. In first games, sometimes can't even keep the 1 PW produce value because all the h/w and s/w is pretty cheap and I want to install from hand as well.

Box-E: Yup, astroble + akamatsu's are great with Hayley as is all cheap, good h/w but went with box-e because I'll be burning my brain on drugs repeatedly and it saves card slots by providing all the memory I'll need in a single console.

Levy: Yeah, you won't be getting back that much that you want, but I just like to have a levy in case all my dog tokens get consumed and clone chips and ghost runners and, somehow, I haven't lost yet.

Potential Weaknesses

  • No ice destruction. The breaker suite is about as good as it gets for slicing through ice efficiently but there's still several, fairly common ice that'll ruin your day -- NeXT Silver (oh how I hate you without parasite), Ashigaru are too examples.

  • No draw outside Pro-co. This really pushes the variance up. Pro-co in first 12 cards draw is okay after that becomes a real question of whether to even install.

  • undoubtedly plenty of others.

In my first 5 games, I'm averaging about 40% of turns using Hayley's ability. If that continues, she'll be getting a C at best based on 15-ish turn games so hopefully can knuckle down and get that score up.

Any questions or feedback is appreciated, thanks.

2 comments
19 Jul 2015 cassafrass

This looks good! As a die-hard Hayley player I agree 100% with your evaluation methodology for her, with the caveat that Kate's ability is good not just because it saves a credit, but because it helps keep tempo. I briefly tried to get pre-paid Hayley to work, but it made absolutely no sense---installing two PPVPs at once is a horrendous tempo hit that won't even let you play Sure Gamble after, for instance. But that's a minor point, and I like your metrics.

Overall this looks like a cool deck, and I'm a little sad that she's only firing her ability about 40% of the time, though looking at it, you could definitely use more draw, yeah; I run 3x Diesel in addition to 3x ProCo, which I agree is a necessary & vital card. I like stealth Hayley, though, and I'm really glad people are continuing to improve on that basic design!

My take on Hayley is that it's not enough to use her ability by installing things with clicks during your turn; you want to be able to install things mid-run or during your opponent's turn, for cheap, and recycle them with Aesop when you don't need them, to be able to keep up your tempo and score when the corp thought they had a window. Sadly, though my first Hayley deck was a stealth deck, this is somewhat at odds with stealth, so I've taken her in a completely different direction. I have my own Hayley deck at netrunnerdb.com with a pretty detailed writeup (that I was going to put in this comment before I realized that would be super rude and belonged better there anyway), if you care to take a look. I'm curious what you think! I definitely end up triggering her ability a lot of the time in most games, and even in the ones I don't I usually get a Personal Workshop out, which anti-synergizes with Kate anyway.

20 Jul 2015 sruman

Thanks for the link and comments. I have also been playing with several different versions of hayley. One actually fairly similar to yours (although Sahasrara over personal workshop) and another resources based one similar to -- netrunnerdb.com -- but using a different draw package (pro-co based). During play, it seems that both versions play better than the deck stimshop based deck here :) The resource based one seems to be able to setup quicker and more consistently but the program-based one can net obscene amounts of money in a long game ( my record so far is 47 pro-co clicks and 18 things sold to aesops plus all the various other money) while being more finicky on setup. I'm leaning towards the resource based one right now, but happy to play either (or even try out this one again) when getting on octgn.