that's fuckin' Obi-Wan Takobi - 4-1, 1st @ Scottish Regional

Scottish Regionals was the last tournament I am planning to play in this year. I'll be at East Anglian Champs, Worlds and UK Nats of course, but I'll be judging not playing at all those events, so this was to be the cap on my Netrunner year as a player.

It has been an excellent summer for both me personally and EA Sports 🏅 as a team (particular shoutouts are due to newly-ordained French National Champion davz131!), so I wasn't feeling a need to prove anything at this event. I went in playing two decks I knew well, aiming to apply the learnings of a wonderful tournament season, see some old pals and have a grand time.

But sometimes you just get in the groove and win ten games in a row.

I've only done that once before in tournament - at the Worlds team event with two of the most broken decks of any Netrunner format ever - so I'm very pleased with my performance! My Continentals finishes are more prestigious, but this is the largest tournament I've actually won. So yeah, a pretty good way to cap off my season!

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See also my corp writeup, in which I go full heel mode.

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The rest of this writeup tells the tale of how this deck came to be, in frankly excessive detail - but I think it could be a useful deckbuilding case study that folks might get something out of. Look out for more of my thoughts on the tournament itself over on TMKF Netrunner very soon! For now, if you're sitting comfortably, I'll begin...

Coming out of Euros, the runner deck I was most interested in was ryanbantwins' Hermes Lat. As soon as I saw RWR it was clear to me that several of the new Shaper power cards - Trick Shot, Cataloguer, Burner - all played really well with Hermes by helping to set up steals. I wrestled with Hermes Lat lists for a while, but couldn't get all my ideas into one cohesive deck, and then we built a cracked Hosh deck so I put Lat down for a while. Ryan's deck gave me what I'd needed: a functional template for a Hermes Lat that I could get to the table and start working with.

At this point you'll have noticed that this list no longer contains Hermes - we'll get there! But before I cut down on Hermes, I went up on it, playing a tweaked version of ryan's deck with two copies of the Crim console at Midlands Regionals. It performed well, but by then Sokka's Lat list was proving that the clunk factor of getting the [Turbine](K2CP Turbine) rig set up just wasn't necessary in Shaper any more. I set my sights on the ice breaker suite as the next area for innovation.

The main concern I had was finding a workable fracter. PD was still proving to be my most difficult matchup - even though Hermes helped leverage centrals pressure into interacting with the remote, I was still having to play remote lock for some portion of most games. Having to pay 4c for [Bran](Brân 1.0) and Gatekeeper repeatedly on top of the upfront cost of setting up the Turbine rig was proving unviable. I switched to Sokka's rig, but found that it wasn't much better at solving the Bran problem - while Propeller saves a lot on the upfront costs its limited nature meant that I was struggling to get through Bran more than a couple of times in a game, and PD players could easily exploit that. Pelangi can help, but Revolver and Unity aren't much better at breaking 6str ice, and that can leave us vulnerable to Mavirus.

I complained about this one night at pubrunner with EA Sports teammate AAshbo, and he made the suggestion that would lead me to completely overhaul the deck: Takobi. Cleaver + Takobi is pretty much the only way in standard to repeatedly break Bran efficiently. However, Takobi doesn't play well with the rest of the fixed-strength rig, because you want to be running a lot for Takobi to work for you, and that means you're at the mercy of the corp's ice choices. If they're rezzing stuff that's bigger than Buzzsaw and Echelon, you're paying through the nose to get your Takobi counters, which sort of defeats the point.

However, Takobi does play very well with two other breakers that other good Shaper players had been playing to success recently: Revolver and Euler. Credit to our EMEA Champion for inspiring me to return to Euler by including it in its variant of Girls - it's a card I've always loved but never found a good use for outside of Ashes Startup. Both these breakers break for free, so they're great at getting Takobi counters cheaply, and at breaking big ice for next to nothing once you have the counters.

With this new rig, the playstyle of the deck started to come together. Previously, Hermes and the RWR Shaper interaction tools were pulling me towards more aggressive and proactive lines, but that was in tension with the setup time that the Turbine rig required. Now I was free to make probing runs with just an SMC down, able to fetch Euler/Revolver/Propeller to deal with facechecks, then deploy Takobi once ice was rezzed and start collecting counters to fuel my late game while continuing to interact.

The deck was feeling a lot better, but it still had two notable issues with draw consistency. If I didn't draw an SMC in the first few turns, my interactive gameplan became a lot less tenable, and corps could pull ahead. Relatedly, if I drew too many of my conditional interaction cards - Burner, Pinhole, Cataloguer - they would gum up my hand, forcing me to choose between slowing down my draw (and therefore my econ) or discarding them and throwing away my ability to control the game.

While Hermes was doing good work whenever I drew it, the need to smooth out my draw to help solve these two problems brought me reluctantly back to Aniccam. It was sad to cut Hermes, but I was very happy with my innovative new rig and consoled myself with the thought that my deck was still different enough from Sokka's to be worth writing up if it performed well at South-East Regionals.

Unfortunately I came down with a nasty cold in the middle of that tournament which resulted in me being extremely distracted, making a number of huge blunders, and dropping before the final round.

A few days in bed recovering from both the illness and the blow to my pride gave me the distance I needed from the deck, and I returned to it with fresh eyes. Sometimes in deckbuilding you have to kill your darlings; with Hermes' blood on my hands already, it was time to turn to Burner. I'd been insisting to anyone that would listen for months that Sokka was wrong and the card was a powerful and important tool for interactive Shaper play, but I was still having games where I struggled due to drawing too many interactive tools. Whenever I chose to discard Pinhole or Cataloguer I seemed to get punished for it, but I couldn't honestly say the same for Burner. So it got burned, opening up slots for a Muse, to act as a 4th SMC, and more econ.

What that econ would be was the last question to answer. At Aldershot I had played two Revolver and 14 total inf, on the basis that the third Pinhole was better than any 2 inf card. The Pinholes were proving totally clutch, but I was finding that the second Revolver was rarely needed. Against AgInfusion I would be at risk of getting run out of bullets, but in every other matchup it was 3 inf going unused, especially with the Muse now acting as an extra tool to reload the first copy where necessary. Cutting it for an emergency-use Ika left me with 4 inf open. I went looking for event economy and came upon the perfect card: Falsified Credentials.

Falsified is event econ that works with Aniccam, it's a great tool to line up our shots with Pinhole, and it is particularly good for our worst matchup, PD, where knowing which upgrade is Void can be the difference between victory and defeat. The theoretical upside was so appealing that I slotted in two copies almost totally untested and shipped myself up to Scotland.

I'm really happy with the deck I've ended up with. It's helped me learn a lot about playing runner with an awareness of the risks of my decisions, rather than over-focusing on finding lines that eliminate risk altogether. To adapt an EA Sports classification convention, it feels like green Criminal, and that feels pretty fucking great. Also it helped me win ten games in a row at a Regional, which really made up for the embarassment of bringing the wrong box of alt-arts for the prizes!

See TMKF Netrunner for more thorough thanks and praises, but for now, shoutouts to RoRo, Shanodin, Stephen, Nicky and the Makoses for a great weekend!

Peace, love and droid rights,
Cobra x