1st + 2nd at Notts District

7-1-1

Wins against NEH, PE x 2, AgInfusion x 2, EAzmari and Ob

Loss to EAzmari

With thanks and love to harmonbee, Lap, Ish and dreadmaaw for putting on yet another fantastic tournament.

Special thanks to lap and ChonkySeal for showing us around Nottingham, and the usual shout out to 🏅EA sports🏅 for being just a great bunch of people to drink beer and play netrunner with. Although, after staying out until 2am at Billy Bootleggers, I will probably never drink beer again--at least not until Sheffield.

Also thanks to clickonerun, who's delicious home baked almond cookies were the perfect hangover cure.

This is an improved version of the runner list that I stole from TorpedoTyrus and OF15-15. It's been tuned for consistency.

I did think that Mulch was the best runner deck, but, for whatever reason, AniCrew Hosh seems to be getting better results at more tournaments for more players.

So, if you are playing in a districts soon--and you should!--and you don't know what runner to play, then I would recommend sleeving this deck. It's really very good.

Now with added consistency!

Light the fire -> 3rd Maemi

We found that the games we were losing were the games where we didn't draw Maemi early, so we sacrificed some equity in the PD matchup to play a third Maemi.

If we come up against Skunk + Void we can either trash all of the ICE on the remote, or we can use our third maemi to charge the Twinning and win off of centrals.

Hannah -> 3rd Lago

I am reasonably confident that Fast Advance Ob is the "best deck" in the format atm,. 3 x mavirus, 3 x sandstone and 1 x wraparound is our worst nightmare, so we asked ourselves "are there any cards that we can include that help us in that matchup?"

The short answer is "no". There is no silver bullet, but seeing Lago early does make a big difference--not only in the Ob matchup, but also in every other matchup as well. We did consider a 3rd Bankhar instead, but I think that the 3rd Lago makes more sense. It will help us to draw into Bankhar anyway.

n.b. Ollie missed the memo on this change, but is in broad agreement about the swap. Even if cutting the brindelmold alt art Hannah makes him sad.

Tread Lightly vs Pinhole Threading

Previously, I have suggested that these cards are roughly equivalent, and that you should just play whichever one you prefer. However, the more that I play this deck, and the more that I see other people play this deck, the more I am convinced that Tread Lightly is much much better.

At it's worst it plays like a fancy pinhole threading wearing a top hat and a monocle. At it's best it just straight up wins games--stealing agendas, clearing remotes, and giving the Corp player the opportunity to misplay and rez ICE that they can't afford.

Play Patterns

Here are a few notes on how to play it.

The Hoshiko Flip

The most important thing about playing this deck, and maybe any Hoshiko deck, is being disciplined about getting a Hoshiko flip on every turn. Most modern corps, especially Ob, will pressure us into running every turn. This is a trap. We have to flip back and forth every turn, otherwise we will simply run out of money.

Make sure to flip Hoshiko every turn. I really cannot over emphasize how important this is. We need to plan out our turns so that we consolidate our run events into one turn, and our installables on the next. Repeat until either we are completely set up, or our hand is full of garbage that we can't install.

Managing Maemi

The next most important thing is managing Maemi. If we have a Maemi on the board, and we don't have any events in hand that we can play, then we need to draw aggressively for an event. Ideally, we want to sink as many Maemi credits into Sure Gamble as possible, and, as it's not a run event, ideally we would do that on our off-turn.

Taking Maemi damage is not usually the worst, but once our favourite arcane axolotl goes above 3 credits then we only have Sure Gamble or Ashen Epilogue to bring the situation back under control.

Hand Crafting

Lastly, we should craft our hand to be full of junk that we want to get hit by net damage, and then we should find ways to turn that junk into value (by taking net damage). When we Bankhar a server, we want our opponent to think that we have Titanium Ribs.

Net damage is not random if we have influence over what's in our hand, and control over when we take the damage.