Thunderkite 419 (21.05; >80% win rate on jinteki.net casual)

This is the deck that I've been working on over the last couple of weeks, in order to try to find a Runner deck that's viable in the current Corp-sided meta (21.05 Standard). One warning is that this probably won't be winning you tournaments, because it has a bad matchup against "score out instantly" combo decks (with two such decks, Red Planet Couriers and Game Changer, being very common in the tournament metagame); but it has a pretty good matchup against just about everything else, winning almost all its games in the casual lobby of jinteki.net.

This is a "synergy" style of deck; it's full of cards which work well in combination with each other, instead of cards which are good in the abstract. The basic idea is to build up a really crushing economy as quickly as possible, then continuously make runs, hoping to eventually win the game off random accesses or The Turning Wheel. To this end, basically the entire deck is economy. It also has an unusually large range of icebreaking techniques, making it easier to tune your rig to what the Corp's deck is like, and helping to add even more variety to the way that Netrunner games play out.

I'd like to thank @Diogene for giving feedback on the deck and helping to tune it. We ended up taking the decks in different directions from each other, but it was interesting to see the various ideas.

Strategy

The economy progression

One of the biggest problems that Runners face in the current game is getting their economy started; especially when it comes to slow, inevitable decks like this one, the hard part is often in avoiding the need to spend the first several turns doing nothing while you try to get set up.

The most important thing you're trying to do with your deck early, therefore, is to get a card draw engine going without running low on credits in the process. An ideal turn 1 involves installing The Class Act or Earthrise Hotel without going too far behind on credits in the process. To this end, you have 5 card draw resources (2×The Class Act, 3×Earthrise), and 9 events that can help you stay credit-neutral as you install them (3 each of Sure Gamble, Bravado, and Career Fair; Falsified Credentials is also sometimes usable turn 1, but isn't reliable). Failing this, you'll have to get as many credits as you quickly can and start clicking to draw cards, installing cheap things like Citadel Sanctuary along the way; this isn't nearly as good a start but is often good enough. Wildcat Strike is a good card to have early, but do not play it on turn 1 (because you won't be able to stand being given the cards); if you have a Wildcat hand, ideally you'll want to gain as many credits as you reasonably can on turn 1 (through economy events, Bravado and the like), then play the Wildcat on the first click of turn 2.

Once you've gotten your economy started off, you'll be looking to install a few other things. One of these is (in most matchups) Aumakua; an early Aumakua discourages the Corp from exposing cards, meaning that they'll be spending 1 most turns, and that helps to slow the Corp down enough to let you get set up. Another thing you're looking for is the Citadel Sanctuary + Rogue Trading combo, which forms the main core of the deck's economy. Note that having an Aumakua in hand isn't a good enough reason to keep it; having Citadel+Rogue probably is, though. Finally, if it's safe to run (i.e. there's an open server and you either aren't facing or are rich enough to avoid Hard-Hitting News), you'll be looking for the DreamNet + Sports Hopper combo; there isn't a need to assemble this, but if you have the opportunity, it'll function as a kind of makeshift Symmetrical Visage, letting you set up just a bit faster.

Thunder Art Gallery is the next piece of the economy. You won't have a good opportunity to install this every game. It has two main uses. One is as a slightly inferior backup Citadel Sanctuary, for if you find Rogue Trading but not Citadel; as long as you have things to install, it lets you use Rogue Trading, clear the tag manually, and still install things (this comes out as 1 less efficient than Rogue+Citadel, which is not ideal but still worthwhile, and has the advantage that it works even against a very rich Corp). However, it really comes into its own once you assemble the 3-card Thunder+Rogue+Citadel combo, which is 1+1 more efficient than Rogue+Citadel on its own (as long as you have things to install, it effectively translates to being able to click for 7 once per turn, which is ridiculous).

The "final form" of your economy consists of being richer than the Corp (or at least rich enough that you don't care if the Corp spends 24 or so on trashing your economy because you'll recover from the economic hit faster than they will), and having a Citadel Sanctuary installed, along with some link and some self-tagging cards. At this point, you're looking to, on most turns, gain a lot of credits at the cost of tagging yourself, and then remove the tag with Citadel; and meanwhile while you're doing that, make use of your event economy and your resource economy to gain extra cards and credits on top of that. Apart from Rogue Trading, you have Hot Pursuit and Credit Kiting as ways to get a lot of benefit from tagging yourself; Credit Kiting should normally be used to install either Security Nexus or Amina.

Sports Hopper is not primarily included as an economy card, but remember that it can be used as a very expensive Diesel in an emergency. You may have to do this if you need to dig just a little deeper into your deck to have the tools to contest an agenda.

How to run

The main purpose of your deck's hugely powerful economy is to let you draw into the cards you need to build your rig, and to give you the credits to power it. You have four main ways to get into servers, which can be used individually or in combination.

The first is facetanking. There actually isn't all that much cheap " End the run." ice being played at the moment, and it's often possible to get into the scoring server simply by running without breakers and using your powerful economy to pay through traces. Cards like Slot Machine and Whitespace won't do much to defend servers against a sufficiently strong economy. The deck has the ability to get up to 4 if necessary, which will effectively blank any ICE that entirely relies on traces (most notably Macrophage), and often allowing you to just let the subroutines fire rather than paying to break them.

The second is Aumakua. This lets you get through small ICE easily, and larger ICE later in the game; against some decks, this is enough breaking power for the whole game and you'll never have to rely on anything else. Aumakua is known for being very hard to stop without tech cards until the Corp can properly ICE every server (or ICE all servers but Archives and place Cyberdex Virus Suite into Archives), because if the Corp manually purges virus counters, you can just run for 4 more counters in response and negate their turn. Most Corps will, however, eventually be able to lock the Aumakua out, at which point you'll need to rely on other techniques to get past ICE; but sometimes, this will be sufficiently late in the game that you'll have won by then, and spreading out ICE to stop the Aumakua will stretch the Corp's resources thinner and benefit the rest of your rig as a result. Note that if the Corp is running a lot of AI hate, you can choose to not install (or overinstall) the Aumakua and the deck will still function.

The third is Security Nexus. This deck runs a lot of link, so normally in the lategame Security Nexus is bypassing ICE for 1 (although the Corp can pump the trace, you're normally happy when they do, because both sides symmetrically losing credits is usually good for you lategame and if the Corp pumps too much you can just abort the run). This is a bypass, not a break, so it lets you ignore a lot of otherwise annoying triggers (like on Tollbooth, IP Block and Funhouse), and allows you to avoid the detrimental effects of unbreakable subroutines (like on Akhet and Afshar). It also plays incredibly well with Aumakua; it forces the Corp to double-ICE every server to keep the Aumakua out, it's best against strong ICE (with Aumakua being best against weak ICE), and it lets you bypass AI hate and thus negate some of the downsides of running an AI.

The remaining technique is to use a traditional icebreaking rig, which will get you through anything but trap and mythic ICE (and Loki), things that the rest of your rig handles fairly well. This deck contains the most efficient non-stealth icebreakers available (Paperclip, Amina, Bukhgalter), along with Takobi to keep the break costs versus large ICE down, and you can use them to make fairly cheap runs even if the Corp has managed to deal with the rest of your rig (although this typically only happens against glacier). Because the deck hardly runs any multi-access, you really do need to get into servers very cheaply and over and over again; this deck can easily get to huge credit counts but will nonetheless need to spend most of those credits doing things like running R&D every turn to form an R&D lock, so you shouldn't be wasteful of credits and should stay focused on your economy even when it feels like you should easily have more than enough already. Against some decks, you may want to install the entire rig; against others, you may just want to install parts of it (e.g. using only Amina to drain the corp's credits to make it harder for them to rez ICE or score an agenda, or installing Paperclip to deal with an enemy Wraparound in a deck that Aumakua could otherwise have handled by itself). Note that generally you want to start building up counters on the Takobi early (often I'll use slightly less efficient methods of breaking ice in order to make sure that the Takobi has a good counter hoard), because if the game goes very long, the Takobi will often be the only thing making running viable once your stack has run empty.

Card choices

Economy

The choice of economy cards is primarily focused on making sure we can get past the first couple of turns without losing too much speed in the process. Sure Gamble and Bravado are obvious choices for burst economy events; these are great turn 1 (Sure Gamble gives you 4 straight off; Bravado most commonly either gives you 3 and slows down the Corp by forcing them to rez ICE, or gives you 4 and an access). Note that the best place to run Bravado on turn 1 is normally R&D; against 419, a Corp will generally be scared of Diversion of Funds (even though it isn't in your deck, it's in a more popular 419 deck which also runs Bravado, and the Corp won't immediately know which deck you're on), and so HQ is not only more likely to have the scary ICE, it's also quite likely that the Corp will sacrifice R&D in order to focus on protecting HQ. Later in the game, Sure Gamble still gives you 4, and Bravado can be used on any run into a deep server to give you a huge amount of money (especially if you're planning to get past all the ICE and breach the server).

Career Fair is more situational. The actual economic gain is actually larger than for Sure Gamble, giving you 3+ for your card+click expenditure (which is worth slightly more than 4). However, the cost for this is that you need a resource in hand that costs 3 or more and is worth installing. Ideally this would be The Class Act or Earthrise Hotel, your main card-draw resources, but the deck also contains enough other targets to make playing 3×Career Fair viable. This is the main purpose of the Daily Casts; Daily Casts wouldn't normally be an ideal card for this deck (being better later on rather than earlier, whereas early credits are more important than late), but it's good enough and the extra Career Fair targets are required in order to reduce the risk of a dead Career Fair to acceptable levels. Given that the deck is constructed to make it viable, though, Career Fair gives you a third burst economy card that you can use right from the start of turn 1.

Wildcat Strike is the best use I could find for the 15th influence point; the deck needed more burst economy to get past the early game fast enough, and it's the best economy card I could fit into the influence budget. The key to using Wildcat Strike effectively is to make sure that you would be in a position to make good use of the cards if the Corp happened to choose that option (the way to think about it is that the credit option is always good for you, whereas the card option ranges from very good to very bad for you, so you need to make it at least as good as the credit option to get the optimal value from the card). The ideal time to use this is therefore the first click of turn 2, with at least 7 (but preferably more) in your credit pool; you'll want to be able to play any Sure Gambles you draw into right away, and have enough credits that you aren't bankrupted (or required to discard) if you end up drawing mostly programs and resources. If you draw it later in the game, you'll still want to play it click 1, and will normally have enough credits to make playing it safe.

Credit Kiting and Hot Pursuit are economy cards that give a huge gain (and thus are worth playing), but aren't good in the early game; as a consequence, we run only 1 of each. Credit Kiting is normally activated with an Archives run in order to help install your rig (you often don't have enough of a rig at this point to get into the other centrals), allowing you to install Security Nexus or Amina for free. Ideally this would be used together with either Citadel Sanctuary or Thunder Art Gallery to make clearing the tag cheaper, although you actually get a net gain even if you're spending the full , 2 to clear the tag. Hot Pursuit is only really usable in the late game, and helps to make HQ runs much cheaper (even making a profit); you should think of this like Dirty Laundry, i.e. its purpose is to help offset the cost of a run you would be making anyway, rather than being used purely for the economic benefit. Because Credit Kiting has very few targets and works best with support cards, and Hot Pursuit is only really good in the late game and would get stuck in hand otherwise, the deck runs only 1 of each.

Falsified Credentials is somewhere between an economy card and a tech card. When used as an economy card, it will give you 4 of burst economy if you target a card you already know the card type of. In today's upgrade-heavy metagame, guessing correctly without evidence (from 419's ability or from seeing a face-down card installed in the same server as an agenda or rezzed asset) is much more difficult than it used to be; and even when you're pretty confident of what's in the server, often there will be two cards there and (even when you know what both of them are) you won't know which is which. Additionally, almost every 419 deck runs Falsified, and good Corp players will be able to play around it for much of the game (e.g. by rezzing their NGO Fronts to deprive it of a target). So although it gives you a big burst of economy, Falsified is kind-of situational and running 3 copies is too risky because they can just end up stuck in hand. As a tech card, it can be very useful against ambush decks and never-advance strategies; versus ambush it will defuse enough traps by itself to swing the odds in your favour, and versus never-advance it will indirectly give you a huge economic boost by helping you avoid expensive runs (this is particularly important against rush decks, because running their servers early hurts and you don't want to do it unless you really have to).

In terms of card draw, there aren't many good choices in the Criminal card pool. The Class Act and Earthrise Hotel are about the best we can do for pure card draw effects; these are both normally huge hits to install, and much of the deck is dedicated to ensuring that we can install them without getting stuck in credit hell and losing the game as a consequence. There are more card draw effects than the deck will actually want to use over the course of the game, but this is necessary in order to ensure that we get the cards that we need early. (Generally speaking, you'd prefer to see The Class Act first, so it may seem a little weird that Earthrise Hotel has the extra copy. However, Earthrise is better when you draw duplicates, and often your midgame card draw will be a mix of DreamNet and chaining Earthrises.) Bear in mind that you should be doing a lot of clicking to draw cards, too (unless you'd end up risking needing to discard an important card, or are very low on credits, clicking to draw a card is usually the correct "filler" action with spare clicks in a turn); the card draw resources won't help if you don't draw into them.

DreamNet is very good when you start running (and also serves as an extra Career Fair target). Not only does it help provide card flow during something you'd be doing anyway, it combos with Sports Hopper (once you have the combo set up, it becomes worth it to make otherwise pointless runs purely to activate DreamNet, although of course it's better if you're accomplishing something else with the run too).

Mutual Favor is a pseudo-card draw card; although it doesn't technically draw cards, both the card draw and the Favor serve the same purpose (ensuring that you can get your rig set up fast enough). It's a weird card because in over half the games you play, you won't have any use for it and will end up discarding it. However, sometimes you end up really needing a particular piece of your rig right now and if Mutual Favor is in your hand at the time (it often will be, because it tends to get stuck there), it will fix that problem for you. Generally speaking, the strategy here is to avoid calling in your Favor, leaving it stuck in your hand, until it becomes obvious what card you need to call with it; you will draw a lot of cards naturally, and can break ice in many different ways, so you don't want to accidentally waste it on the wrong thing and then end up needing it later (if it turns out that you never needed it, you're probably going to win anyway).

Takobi is economy that builds up throughout the whole game and then powers your rig in the endgame. Your main protection from shenanigans that defend servers is to just power through them with a huge credit total, and Takobi is needed to stop those credits draining too quickly. Bear in mind that although Takobi can't power Aumakua, Aumakua can power Takobi, and so you'll typically be charging it while the Aumakua is still powerful and then discharging it once you need to rely on a more traditional rig. Although Leech is a more popular card with a similar effect, Takobi is better in this deck for two reasons: we normally don't have much trouble with small servers (and Takobi charges faster when running on large servers); and it's immune to purges (we wouldn't want to give the Corp the opportunity to purge a Leech and Aumakua at the same time). Additionally, with virus hate very prevalent in the metagame, it's best not to make a deck too dependent on viruses.

Rogue Trading is economy that scales on how cheaply you can untag yourself; it wouldn't be worth the install click if you had to spend 2, to gain 6, so you don't want to actually use it until you have an untagging card handy (you can install it earlier, though, especially as it costs 0, and will normally do that just to save on space in your hand). However, it gives you (once per turn) an effective 5 for in conjunction with Thunder Art Gallery, 6 for in conjunction with Citadel Sanctuary, and 7 for if you have all three cards out at once. So Rogue Trading is this deck's "bulk" economy; it doesn't really function early on due to needing support cards, but later in the game, it gives economy very efficiently and has a lot of longevity (although it doesn't last forever, it will generally last for all the game against most decks, and most of the game against almost all decks). Thus, Rogue+Citadel+Thunder form the main economic engine that helps make this deck viable.

(One warning: Thunder Art Gallery + Citadel Sanctuary + The Class Act is a nombo, because if you install The Class Act off Thunder Art Gallery triggered by Citadel Sanctuary, you'll have missed the trigger timing for The Class Act. So bear in mind that although most other combinations of tag removals and installs work, this one doesn't.)

Not included is Diversion of Funds. Although this deck can sometimes keep the Corp low on credits (using Amina and/or by forcing ice rezzes), it can't reliably get into HQ until the lategame, and many Corps have a very powerful economy nowadays. It's also not very good at getting your economy started turn 1. So Diversion is too slow and inconsistent to be worth a deck slot. (The lack of Mining Accident, another common 419 card, follows simliar reasoning.)

Interacting with the Corp

The first order of business in this deck is to get its economy going, with credit gain and card draw engines being the early focuses. That means that the icebreaking effects that actually let you get into servers can arrive a little later, so they end up forming a relatively small portion of the deck; having redundancy in different ways to get through ICE, we don't need much redundancy on the individual icebreakers. In turn, it means that we can spend a lot of influence on the most efficient icebreaking suites available, because we won't need many copies of each card.

Our "early" icebreaking techniques therefore have just two copies each, in order to increase the chance that we find them early enough to contest agendas in the midgame. One of these is Aumakua, which is an obvious choice for any 419 deck, and helps deal with small ICE.

The other choice made for an early-game-to-mid-game icebreaking (actually bypass) card is Security Nexus, which synergises with this deck perfectly for a number of different reasons. The deck naturally wants to be running link, both because it makes Citadel Sanctuary engines safer and because Sports Hopper's paid ability is the best tech against certain decks that it would otherwise struggle with; so it makes sense to add what is probably the game's best card for high-link runners. Additionally, the main drawback to Security Nexus is its high install cost, but because the deck already contains an untagging engine, we can easily add a Credit Kiting to negate that drawback (and we're running a powerful enough economy to be able to hard-install the Nexus if we need to). Additionally, Security Nexus is good against most ICE that Aumakua is bad against, and vice versa, so they complement each other really well.

Relying on Aumakua+Nexus (+economy and link) isn't enough to beat glacier decks in the long term, though (and the majority of corp decks can attempt to pivot into glacier if they realise the opposing deck is weak against that). So there's also a need for a lategame icebreaking suite (we only need single copies of each card because we don't normally need this early on). In testing, it turned out to be very important for this to be as efficient as possible; running slightly less efficient breakers might seem unimportant when you regularly have more than 30 in your credit pool, but the deck doesn't have the ability to run powerful game-ending effects like Khusyuk or Conduit, so it usually has to win off either remote lock, or repeated single accesses on HQ or R&D. As a consequence, the deck runs the most efficient icebreaker suite influence can buy (which, for a deck with no stealth credits, is Paperclip, Amina, Bukhgalter). Fortunately, two of these cards are Criminal anyway. (An earlier version of this deck ran Corroder instead to save on influence, but had a tendency to run out of money as a consequence.)

The Turning Wheel is our main way to actually close out the game, other than random single accesses. It isn't great at this, because a Corp who is playing around it can often make the Wheel expensive to charge (often you're paying something like , 2 per Turning Wheel counter), but it has the advantage of being cheap in both credits and influence, and naturally charges while we're hammering HQ or R&D (which are the things we want to do anyway). It also gives us something to do in the midgame when the agendas turn out to all be stuck deep in R&D; we can charge the Wheel in preparation for when they show up, or to attempt a game-winning dig into R&D later in the game.

Not included is Boomerang. Although it's great for contesting servers early, that isn't the main focus of this deck; and in the lategame, it can be incredibly hard to find a useful place to put a Boomerang because we run servers so efficiently anyway. I used to have it as a 1-of in this deck, but it tended to get stuck in my hand and I rarely had any actual use for it, so I ended up cutting it. It's a great card, but this is the wrong deck for it.

Docklands Pass might be correct in this deck (and is included in @Diogene's version). Generally speaking we see most of HQ anyway, and R&D is normally a more important server to attack; but a Pass would reduce the number of HQ runs required. I've left it out in this version, but it might be interesting to cut, say, a Hot Pursuit or Daily Casts for it.

Tech cards

This deck spends so many card slots on economy, and so much influence on icebreaking, that it doesn't have much room for tech cards. Nonetheless, a few have proven necessary; I managed to fit more tech into the deck by using cards with multiple purposes, that could double as something else.

Sports Hopper is one of the more versatile cards in the deck. It has two sides, the +1 and a ability to gain 3 cards, and both are useful. The link is naturally useful against trace-dependent decks (which the majority of NBN decks are); it also helps a lot against decks which run a Cyberdex economy (because they are probably running Macrophage, which doesn't do a whole lot against a runner with 4). It also makes Security Nexus's triggered ability cheaper, which is important against corps that run large ICE.

Meanwhile, Sports Hopper's ability to draw cards is useful against rush decks just to provide a little extra setup speed. This deck's playstyle is also naturally weak to combo decks, and Sports Hopper can be used to protect you against the majority of flatline combos simply by giving you extra cards in hand and making the flatline harder. (Note that can take quite some practice to figure out the best timing with which to use your Sports Hopper; earlier versions of this deck frequently lost against combo decks due to piloting errors, because I mistimed the Sports Hopper. So if you're expecting a combo-heavy metagame, it's worth practicing against the decks you expect.)

Against flatline-combo decks, you can also use The Class Act to give yourself more than 5 cards in hand overnight, in cases where you see a combo coming next turn in particular (say you just stole 6 points out of Archives and the Corp is rich enough to land Punitive Counterstrike, you're going to need to draw above 5 before their turn starts). Citadel Sanctuary can also protect you from a meat damage flatline once, at the cost of your grip (bear in mind that this does not work against net damage, so you'll need to pay attention to the exact way the opponents' flatline combo works), and you can use Sports Hopper immediately afterwards to draw back up at paid ability speed.

Buffer Drive is your insurance against grinder and rigshooter decks (which this deck would typically otherwise be weak to due to naturally drawing a lot of cards and running very few icebreakers). Against grinder decks, it helps pad out your stack, delaying the point at which you run out of cards, and also allows you to recycle important cards that might otherwise have been hit with random trashes. Against rigshooter, you can use the paid ability to recover an icebreaker if required. Note that it is normally a mistake to mulligan for this (or to not mulligan due to having this); you won't need your insurance immediately and other cards are more vital in your starting hand.

Buffer Drive can also double as economy if its use as a tech card isn't required; it acts as something to install off Thunder Art Gallery (which can sometimes have a tendency to run out of installables later in the game, especially given the nombo with Career Fair), and subsequently can be used to recycle Rogue Trading, in order to keep your economy going a little longer than it otherwise would. The nice thing about this is that the matchups where you need extra economy are typically the matchups where the Buffer Drive would otherwise be doing nothing, so it rarely ends up getting overloaded.

Political Operative is the remaining tech card. This primarily serves to trash Anoetic Void in order to break up the Anoetic+Manegarm Skunkworks combo; or to trash agenda-advancing upgrades like La Costa Grid and SanSan City Grid in order to give yourself an extra turn to contest an agenda. Because this deck is fairly slow, it would often tend to suffer against rush decks; this is one of the main reasons that 419: Amoral Scammer is used as the identity (as his ability slows the Corp down and thus makes our own slowness less important by comparison). Political Operative will slow them down just that little bit further, and this seems to be just about enough to compete with the rush decks (it doesn't always work but it works often enough to make the matchup feel reasonable). This is run only as a 1× because it can be fairly hard to install (although note that you can install it off Thunder Art Gallery even after you've spent all your clicks for the turn, as long as you ran HQ earlier in the turn and have a way to remove a tag); additionally, it's somewhat inflexible as a tech card, because some Corp decks will have no useful targets. I tend to save my Political Operative for use against gamechangingly powerful cards, but I'm not sure that's correct (it may be that targeting economy cards like Rashida Jaheem or Regolith Mining License is correct in some matchups). Bear in mind that, due to the priority rules, Political Operative won't be able to outrace a paid ability from the Corp unless its cost contains (it will be able to outrace actions and triggered abilities, though); so you can use it against Clearinghouse but not NGO Front.

The deck has some scope to add and remove tech cards to suit a particular metagame. If you need to add a new out-of-faction tech card, Takobi is the easiest card to cut for it (e.g. you could do a straight swap for Artist Colony if you plan to face a lot of Spombo decks), and cutting Wildcat Strike won't hurt too much if you need a fourth influence point. Probably Buffer Drive is the best fifth point to cut if you need five spare points for White Hat, but at that point you may be starting to compromise the other matchups too much (which is why I don't think it's possible to tech this deck to beat all the top Corp decks at once).