Stop Trying To Make Kakurenbo Happen - CBI Top Jinteki

A build of Nani AgInfusion brought to you in collaboration with Enkoder and Baa Ram Wu, with additional contributions by Kikai, that took me to top Jinteki and 9th place overall in the 2023 Circuit Breaker Invitational. 4-1 record on the day.

I've been working on versions of Nani/Keeling Ag for about a month with various folks, and arrived at something much like the Snarebears list from Fite Nite. However, it became clear that people were learning the lines against Nani Grid, and the full prison lock was pretty hard to set up. The deck needed additional win conditions.

Enter The Mammoth! As other folks also deduced, Regenesis is excellent in the deck - so good it more or less became our plan A over Keeling. We were often using the good Doctor as bait to create windows for scoring it, more than as a win con in herself, although she certainly can still kill with the right draw. The deck also has a plan C of running the Runner out of cards, often through repeatedly triggering Anemone via Divert Power, then scoring Obos or locking things up with Nani. I won at least one game with each of these plans during the tournament.

Anyway, enough sensible analysis. Some takes, in order of heat:

Kakurenbo is bad.
Yes, all the things it does are things your Nani deck wants to do, but it's so so rare that you want to do those things in the same turn and have Archives secure so they can't just flip things back over and can afford to spend your whole turn doing it. If you want Keeling recursion, just play Restore or Spin her back in and draw her like the rest of us. Baa played a very similar deck with 1 copy of Kaku and used it zero times all day. Meanwhile my deck with no Kaku was the best performing Ag in the field. #AndrejWasRight

Nani is fine actually.
Yes, it's powerful and can lock up games pretty tight under the right circumstances, but often just running at Archives and making the Corp have the right facedowns is enough to disrupt it. As has been said elsewhere, these Ag lists are quite fragile in a lot of situations. What makes them hard to play against is that it's difficult to spot where the weak points are, so you have to take some uncertain shots as runner. To me, that's good Netrunner. A lot of my play yesterday was forcing the Runner to make hard choices and decide whether to call my bluffs - classic Jinteki gameplay. If Nani gets banned then all the Jinteki players will have to go back to PE again. Is that what you want? We can let red have cool things!

Bacterial Programming > Send A Message
SAM can make you a bunch of money, sure, but it's very inconsistent. As Ag you're incentivised to rez your first big ice ASAP, so you often won't have a good target, and other times you don't want to rez your ice because you need it for booping or Hippo protection. Bacterial meanwhile does the same thing every time the runner touches it: gives you a bucketload of useful information. You get to know how safe R&D is for several turns, set up Archives for Nani and/or Regenesis, and pull whatever you need to hand. Sometimes you just draw 7, which feels pretty sick.

Many thanks to my aforementioned collaborators - especially Enkoder, with whom I had an absolutely sick game in round 3 that I still can't believe I won. Shoutouts also to all the NSG folks who put on a really fun and unique event. This game is so much fun and that is thanks to the work of many talented and super-cool people. You all rock.

Peace, love, and always be booping,
Cobra x