Hawaii Five-0: the only undefeated Jinteki deck at worlds

I've been a PE player for 12 years, so I knew I had to give it a final send-off at worlds before its inevitable rotation. Most recently, I had taken PE to a top 16 finish at worlds in 2022 as well as a top 8 finish at UK nationals the same year.

This list went 5-0 at the 2024 world championship and was the only undefeated Jinteki deck (and one of only two undefeated corps).

I had heard of a few interesting flavours of PE floating around recently; unfortunately the player base in Honolulu is pretty small, and so with limited testing opportunity I decided to stick to my guns and play a list that I was very comfortable with. I took a break from playing in 2023 for personal reasons and needed to make some updates to my list to accommodate rotation and the new banlist.

The key to this sort of deck is having a good mix of threats that punish the runner for running (Cerebral Overwriter, Snare, etc.) and cards that punish the runner for not running (agendas, Clearinghouse, etc.), which creates a 50/50 for your opponent. This is the magic of yomi: while any other deck can be defeated with sufficient strategy and resources, beating PE often comes down to getting lucky on these 50/50 decisions with no clearly correct move. The hard part is not allowing your opponent to read you and thus infer what you've installed.

Sting is the best threat in the list because it fills both of the aforementioned roles, and so Fujii is likewise a welcome include. Obokata may feel like a huge loss at face value, but I think Fujii is a far stronger 5/3 and I would still play it over Obokata even if the latter were not banned. Defensive agendas are good for obvious reasons, but in a deck that is primarily focused on flatlining the runner instead of scoring out, Obokata has no offensive value and thus doesn't really fit into the game plan. More often than not it felt like dead weight; the only thing you want to do with it when you draw it is get it out of your hand.

I don't feel good about running 3 non-Obokata 5/3s, so I did a little rearranging of the agenda suite and I'm comfortable with where it is now. Although initially skeptical of it, Blood in the Water has turned out to be a fantastic agenda which enables some great Neurospike shenanigans, especially in conjunction with Fujii.

My most memorable game involved a runner with Stoneship and SMC + Lilypad, giving them the ability to draw several cards during my turn. I spent a few minutes in the tank determining how I could flatline them before realizing I had a Fujii and two BITW on board and could just score out 7 points in one turn 😅

I had a terrible day runner side, and my Deep Dive Zahya deck really let me down; in hindsight I should have played Sable. Despite a few close ones, I ended up losing all of my runner games except one and finished with a 6-5 record; my worst performance since before Magnum Opus. I was a little disappointed; however, I was very pleased with my corp performance and all in all worlds 2024 was an incredible experience. I already can't wait for the next one!

Due to the community's overwhelmingly positive response to my previous worlds decklist i need deck slots please like this deck (14th at worlds), I no longer need deck slots, but please feel free to like this one anyways.

Please play this in your local meta and spread a little aloha around the world! 🤙 You will be regarded as popular and good-looking for doing so. New players especially love playing against this type of deck and are guaranteed to have a great time and return for more fun games of Netrunner.