Fear the Walking Dead

Walker: My fight is not with you Madison. Take your family and go.

Madison: We've fought too hard, lost too much. We're not running anymore.

Walker: Then you'll die.

-AMC's Fear the Walking Dead

4-4 at Durham 2017 Regionals

I am an unsual Netrunner player. I got into the game a little late, but had some good friends who were showing me the ropes. During one game, I played #Infiltration, but I used it to expose a card. I'd been bitten by hard ICE before, and I was scared of it happening again. "No one plays expose effects," my friend said.

No one plays expose effects...

Fast forward a month. I was at a GNK playing a Silhouette deck with Lemuria Codebreaker and Blackguard. I figured, if no one plays expose, no one will be teched against it! And I was right. Oh, don't get me wrong: I lost handily, but it did throw a wrench or two into some of the Corps' plans.

Why am I mentioning Runner decks, you might ask. Isn't this a Corp deck you're posting? Well, we're coming full circle now.

I had been looking for that one deck which would simultaneously be fun to pilot and have a good win/loss ratio. But, I couldn't play just any old deck. I had to play something no one expected.

Enter Fear the Walking Dead.

This deck carried me to a 4-4 in the swiss rounds at the Durham 2017 Regionals. I won all but one Corp game, and won them handily. This deck is just... Look, no one expects the jank in this deck. No one. In fact, I later learned that I flatlined a player who made the top four in swiss at Worlds last year. And his response when I flatlined him? "I've never taken 6 brain damage before. I don't even know how to react to that.."

This deck has so many wincons. Let me count the ways: 1. Mushin no Shin Cerebral Overwriter's and drop Enforced Curfew. 2. Mushin a Vanity Project and/or Show of Force and score out in a couple of turns. 3. Did the Runner just steal my pretty agenda? Punitive Counterstrike/Archived Memories/Punitive Counterstrike. 4. Face check into a Brainstorm with 5 or more cards in hand. 5. Drop Enforced Curfew while the Runner has a hand size of zero and watch them struggle to win in that last turn. (This is my personal favorite wincon, BTW!)

So many ways to win. And honestly, it's hard to lose. There are only 6 agendas in the entire deck. 6!! And there's plenty of money. Everything that goes down on the table is either certain death, or swift victory for you! So, if you want to look across the table and see true terror in the Runner's eyes, this might be the deck for you.

In the end, the real strategy is this: if you have something in your hand which can go in a remote server, Mushin it out and advance it once. Don't worry about Agenda/Trap/Agenda stuff. Just throw it out randomly and they'll never know when it's safe to run.

NOTE The Aggressive Secretary was added in last minute because, when two (or maybe all 3) Cerebral Overwriters are in the bin and you Mushin something out, they expect an agenda. That's how you get rid of that Medium with 7 counters on it. That's how you get rid of the MKUltra. Then you use the Ark Lockdown.