Local Frog Eats Coal, Gets Headache (2nd @ Nottingham CO)

So I've been playing Netrunner for over a year now and I figured it was finally time for me to play Shaper. Oh boy.

Honestly, the deck is really fun, and has some real skateboard tricks available, mostly enabled by Coalescence. Despite on the face of it only giving you 2, the ability to discount it or sell it to Aesop is huge, as well as being a tempo-positive contribution to Environmental Testing. It really feels like you'll get as much out of this shell as you put in...at the risk of making your head hurt as you try to think through how to get into R&D this turn.

Despite the deck coming from the prosperAri school of thought (i.e. building towards an endgame rig), I mostly ended up scrabbling around at few to no credits desperately trying to poke enough agendas to not die. This mostly worked (even if perhaps it should not have), losing twice - to Holo Man Ob and to Neurospike Azmari in the cut final. I put this monetary clunkiness down to lack of practice rather than the deck idea being poor.

The deck maybe could have done with another Burner for disruption and a third Trick Shot, the latter of which is quickly proving itself to be a real all-star. I expect to see it much more often going forward!

Muse was another standout - its floor is definitely just getting Coalescence onto itself to break even and sell to Aesop, but the ability to fish Trojans out of the heap is deceptively powerful. Definitely a card that will take a while to unlock the true power of.

Flip Switch was intended to be the solution to the aforementioned Holo Man problem, but in the game in which I found it in time I didn't have enough money to trash a Recoco anyway, so I ended up selling it. Oops.

It was great to see everyone again now that the competitive season is firing back up; I look forward to seeing what the UK scene has in store for us this year!

Big thank yous to frogs and a nameless entity for coming up with the deck!