Prāna PE

As a lot of people know, I love Prāna Condenser. I've been playing this deck all 2021 even after the Engram Flush ban, which hit it a lot, until NISEI decided to ban PE for good.

With Midnight Sun, Prāna is back to reclaim its throne. Not having Engram is still a bummer, but the new set introduces a couple of cards that make you feel okay about losing Jeeves Model Bioroids.

In this version of the deck, I usually score out and sometimes win by total mill. Prāna is an exceptional econ card but it rarely leads to a complete lock-out and win, because runners can just get through your servers anyway. Usually you will get your Prāna to 4-5 counters, then if you're sharp enough you pop it before it gets trashed. Or if you have a couple of Warroid Tracker in the remote, you just wait for them to ruin themselves.

Moon Pool is an incredible card, that allows you to FA any 3/1 from your hand even when you already have a Prāna ticking - scoring a House of Knives to eventually get 12 credits is huge. This means we want to play as many agendas as possible to always have Pool fodder. At this point, Giordano Memorial Field is an obvious include, that can easily allow you to push stuff while taxing for 12 or more credits if you play your cards right.

The ice suite is extremely light, because the deck has simply very little money. I could see trying different things but I don't think stuff like Anansi is going to get in here. Data Loop, however, is so helpful in so many situations, protecting centrals while making your opponent worried about Prāna kills - and potentially enabling an Obokata Protocol score after you Thimblerig-swap it on the remote.

I'm still a little unsure about the agenda suite - the Superconducting Hubs could be False Leads, which would sometimes open some kill windows. But I like the extra hand size to get Moon Pool scores more easily, and to hide Obokatas among Snare!s. It's also very possible that a single Project Yagi-Uda is correct, since FA'ing a 3/2 gets you a long way towards scoring out a game, if the runner is shy enough. Hopefully Parhelion gives us our long-awaited Jinteki 2/1 so that the choice becomes obvious.

Remember that most of your losses come from a runner stealing an Obokata early, effectively deactivating your Giordano Memorial Fields. This means that if you draw an early Obo, you should probably try to score it, which is actually easier than it feels and sets you up for a win if you can get a couple of Moon Pools off while drowning the runner in negative tempo.

Also, while Warroid Tracker looks like it has a single, obvious use case - punishing the runner when they inevitably go and trash your Condenser - it actually has many uses, and it's quite tricky to decide what to do with it. It punishes Stargate and ice trashing, and if you keep it on HQ you may have the luxury of keeping a Snare! after firing it. It also synergizes very well with other copies of itself, and with Hokusai Grid, which is your best ice.

This archetype is some of the most fun I've had playing Netrunner. While this is never going to be a tier 1 deck, I think its power level is on par with the other PE archetypes (shell and grinder), and really hope that someone brings it to Continentals and makes a killing with it. Enjoy :)