Just Kate (Was At A Regionals)

My record at the Cleveland regionals was unexceptional (3-2 for both decks); regardless, here is a report, because this is the only major tournament I get to go to this year. As always, thanks to all who played and put up with me, was a very fun event.

Here's a super regular Kate deck. The Sac Cons were not for Skorp, but for CI, and they likely should be NACH/FC/SMC. Datasucker was awesome all day for saving money, but Parasite surprisingly underperformed. I was almost never below 5c and saving Chips for Clot was always preferred, so I could afford to interact with ICE. Using it on ICE in Moons seems silly with FIHP. The only other thing that likely needs explanation is the 3 Hyperdrivers; this deck struggles the first few turns, but if you can survive those long enough to set up your econ resources then you're gold. Hyperdriver enables this more effectively than Diesel, giving you those extra draws or credits early game (no one should be ashamed to play green Easy Mark), and has obvious synergy with Proco. Late game it gets fed to Moose.

R1 was Sync Boom, with some really cool innovations that I will not spoil for the sake of the designer, but Indexing means you see it coming and can play around it. I set up before he could score 2 agendas and that was ball game.

R2 was Sol, which dropped a T1 Scarcity, slowing me down. and then rushed a Breaking News before I dropped an SMC...which meant it was another 24/7 Boom deck. She assumed that I couldn't get past an active News Hound Astro server T3, but forgot that Nanotk was now in the card pool, and thankfully she didn't draw another BN or QPM until I had gotten my first SMC.

R3 was Eric C's Aginfusion. I was totally off base as to what this deck was doing and should have been hammering centrals, was too scared of Chiyashi and Excalibur when I had tech for that. His start was awful too, but he eventually drew econ and Caprices. It was actually a much more fair deck with really efficient taxing ICE like News Hound and IP Block. Sadly I overfocused on the remote, lost 4 psi games, and ended up losing a game that Eric played phenomenally and I felt like I played horribly. Nanotk was again great this game.

R4 was Sync Boom, and this game went t1 protect both centrals, t2 Breaking News, T3 Raven in front of QPM. My t1 was draw and Hyperdriver, t2 draw 7 times seeing no smc, parasite, or fc, and t3 Indexing into no agendas but seeing Boom, 24/7, and AM. Somehow from there I got 5 points before I blew up, but I was cursing myself for assuming I wasn't going to have to play this matchup so many times. Having no Aaron/Plascrete/NACH means you really can't have a bad starting hand against SYNC, and I wasn't going to get so lucky three times in a row.

R5 was finally Moons, against Blum who I am unable to ever not get paired against. It was a for fun game since we gambled the match win on my corp game. The deck finally got to show what it could do against the assumed field, drawing a ton off of Proco and Astrolable, competing with assets through Proco and Moose, and ignoring ELP with Beth and the 8 run events. An Astrolabe draw did force me to draw Clot, so a few points got scored, but eventually a dance around Clot+SacCon+Chip (I saw an Ark Lockdown off an Indexing) gave me plenty of time to wipe the board of shuffle/draw effects, Indexing into Mad Dash, and find the remaining points for the win.

Aggressive Kate lists are easily my favorite way to play Netrunner, and even if this tournament result isn't very impressive I think this deck is really solid. Moose gives it so much long game power and Shapers are so good at having early pressure on remotes, so this deck actually can fight against the meta effectively, all without any degenerate lines of play. There's a lot of exciting options for innovation too; Maxwell James, Careful Planning, and Inversificator come to mind as cool cards I wanted to play and just didn't have time to test. With some tweaks and a better understanding of the meta I think this style of play once again holds merit. Would love feedback.