Noiseman 1.0 (1st place GNK Chez Geek - Montreal May 14th)

With the store championship season behind us and the Montreal regionals coming pretty soon, it is testing season... we had a great night at Chez Geek as a lot of the top players from the area showed up and the competition was fierce. Big thanks to the store and all the players who attended.

I was acting as co-TO for the first time and I almost opted not to play since we were an odd number of players (15) but finally decided to throw in this new deck I had built in the afternoon.

I am used to playing Noise: Hacker Extraordinaire, mostly Cacheshop with Wyldside, but didn't have much success lately so I wanted to try something new.

Browsing on Netrunnerdb, I found Chris_Yang’s Whizzard deck which I thought looked very nice. I first planned on playing it as is but I always felt Whizzard: Master Gamer’s ability is a little too narrow, close to useless against certain corp builds. So I started thinking about a similar build but with a runner I know a lot more, namely Noise. Perhaps there are some very similar decks out there, but I thought this one really deserved publishing… it is my first GNK win after all!

The basic idea is to have the ability to run any server, with Clot as fast advance counter. The classic Mimic, Yog.0, Corroder trio provides just that if they are supported by some other tools for larger ices, especially Lotus Field. I am used to play D4v1d, and found the idea to splash an Atman just perfect. Complemented with Datasucker, it is a real beast. I completed my program toolbox with classic Noise viruses, Medium, Parasite, and a pair of Imp to replace Whizzard’s ability and get rid of potential flatline threats. Of course, Self-modifying Code and Clone Chip are musts in this type of build, not only to fetch the Atman when needed, but also to get Clot, or recur parasites, D4v1d or imps.

The obvious addition of Grimoire, Déjà Vu and I've Had Worse and I was already at 31 cards, and no economy or draw power yet. I didn’t want to run Wyldside in this build as I knew I would need all my clicks to set up and run. Symmetrical Visage seemed just the right tool and a very cheap one to install. Throw in Kati Jones and you already have a strong basis. I’ve always been a fan of Cyberfeeder. For 2 credits, you get a recurring credit that you are almost sure to use every single turn you play. I actually regret I don’t have 3 in the deck as they sometimes were slow to show up. Sure Gamble to complete this and economy looked pretty decent. It proved to be a bit short actually. Most of the games, I struggled and had to click for credits way more often than I wanted to. Perhaps a couple of Armitage Codebusting or even Liberated Account are needed here. So I had a few slots left and I knew I could end up with some MU problems. MemStrips are just great. With Grimoire on the board, you have plenty of MU for the breakers. But you need support for the suckers, parasites and imps. The other option is Djinn. It is a good card since it also add the tutor power. But the big downside is, of course, that you have to have the djinn down first, plus it cannot support the parasites. Therefore, memstrips looked more fit for this deck.

The final 2 spots I decided to go for Hacktivist Meeting. Corps have very strong current which can really hurt Noise. Housekeeping, Enhance Login Protocol and the mighty Cerebral Static are seen these days. Having a current of your own is almost mandatory at this point and Hacktivist Meeting is arguably the best runner current at the moment. We seem to see a lot of asset heavy corp deck at the moment so it is a great complement to noise’s ability I think. So I go to the tournament with this completely untested new deck, not too confident, but the goal is to prepare for the regionals anyway. In 3 rounds (I got a bye in the first), I faced NEH butchershop (win), ETF fast advance (loss) and ETF glacier (win). Overall, I think the deck performed quite well, and only have myself to blame for the loss, having made a few mistakes, like wasting an SMC to trash a Wall of Static rather than keeping it to get Clot at the right moment.

As mentioned earlier, the economy is a bit low. And the draw power of Symmetrical Visage might not be enough. But the various tools worked pretty well together pressuring the corps’ assets and forcing them to rezz a lot of ices. I think most of them were expecting something different when they saw Noise and I might have gotten them off guard at times. I will definitely look into improvements in the next few weeks so if you guys have ideas, please do share!