Space Tempo (the one with Overseer Matrix)

TugtetguT 2006

This is the tempo deck that almost everyone from the NWE brought to worlds this year. It did ok.

Building the beast

When the newest SBL (f)unbanings released Gagarin from prison we more or less immediately began testing different versions of this deck knowing how strong it had been in the past. Whilst you no longer have access to Zealous Judge and to some extent Contract Killer (the latter makes urbans a must trash thus forcing runs) the combination of Economic Warfare and Hard-Hitting News is still just incredibly strong; especially in combination with Commercial Bankers Group and the rest of your assets, which ensure you have an economic advantedge during the course of the game.

Initially we tried more grindy versions with Bio-Ethics Association and more recursion pieces to simply run the opponent out of cards and eventually kill them that way. Two Punitive Counterstrike were added to this early version of the deck as another way to kill runners and they were in the list until the very final days of testing. Often you'd play a long grindy game and once the runner was out of cards or you had the two punitives in hand plus an economic advantedge you'd just IAA a copy of City Works Project and kill them if they stole it. This version of the deck still played Above the Law to snipe annoying copies of Citadel Sanctuary. Punitive was also your main win condition if the runner would just leave your econ alone trashing only the urbans.

The punitives however were sometimes a little awkward. Your hand would often "flood" with operations when you really needed to put more assets on the board and when we began testing against Keiko versions of Big MaxX lists we would fire Hard-Hitting News, not win, and eventually lose the econ war to the drip econ, and it became clear that this MU was unfavoured and we expected a large amount of Big MaxX at worlds so, not good.

In comes Oliver (@Pinsel) wanting to try out Overseer Matrix in the deck to help stick your early Commercial Bankers Group and add extra tax on Urban Renewal trashing as well. Incidentally this addition is also very good against Apocalypse, once you have two of these in a remote clearing them costs the runner 4 tags, 14 credits and 5 clicks counting both running, trashing and clearing tags. Your ICE also trades very favourably in this MU so it's generally favoured anyway, but still a nice cushion.

Finally we tried yet another win condition: False Lead. These let's you turn pretty much any economic advantedge into an immediate win, thus circumventing any need to fiddle about with face-up 5/3's and punitive. It was also in this iteration of the list that the Bio-Ethics Association was swapped for Marilyn Campaign and Daily Business Show to give the deck an even stronger inevitable late game economic adventedge and smooth out your draws.
This feels like the best general version of the deck though it is weaker to tech cards such as Misdirection and Citadel Sanctuary. You can ofcourse just score both copies of False Lead and kill them through pretty much anything. Losing Bio-Ethics Association does hurt against "normal sized MaxX" lists that rely on holding Labour Rights in hand in the late game - Hivemind MaxX in particular couldn't just sit back and set-up a huge conduit dig.

Anyway I wanted to call the deck 'Space Gun' because of the punitives, but since they were swapped for tempo so was the name.

A bit about tempo...

An often debated subject in netrunner slack and other forums... but fear not, Space Tempo is the deck to explain.

TEMPO IS:

  • Paying 0 when you swing for 8! credits before playing HHN
  • Making the runner pay 1 credit whenever they want to access your remotes
  • Making 3 credits whenever you draw a 5/3 agenda that you were never gonna score
  • Rezzing all your assets for free
  • Paying 1 to give the runner a tag when they trash Commercial Bankers Group
  • Drawing two cards instead of one at the beginning of every turn

and finally....

  • scoring just 1 agenda point instead of 7 to win the game - now that's tempo... in spades.

Gameplay wise this means that whenever you sit down and play this tempo deck you should strive to get ahead on the board and only to get ahead on the board.

Points are useless.

This generally translates into installing a lot of assets that either make money, draw cards or both. Then what you want to do is install more. Critically this means that you should not install and score False Lead before you're ahead on the board - see part about the value of points. Unlike ARES this is not an agenda that pulls you ahead on the board, but one that turns your board advantedge into a win.

Last thing left to talk about are the Urban Renewals. Most of the time as the runner you should just take 4 meat damage. If you're trashing this card you should at the very least end the turn on 12 credits and you should only do this to save very important cards or if you're down to your final 4-5 cards in your deck. Losing all your cards means that the corp player can just score City Works Project off the board naked. Funnily enough as corp against MaxX decks its often also correct to wait with these until the runner is low on cards, but you can also just rez them and hope your opponent runs scared.

Finally a quick shout-out to Yann(@happy) who endured a TON of backseat driving during testing only to injure himself two days before worlds making him unable to attend.

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