White Girl Blackmail v1.1 (Top 3 at 2 SCs)

"I know when that Blackmail bling/I know ice don't mean a thing..."

You know what's better than a hard R&D lock? A hard R&D lock that your opponent can't protect with ice. Or their scoring server. Or their hand. Or the clothes on their back. Or their self-esteem. It's all yours now. Why? Because you got the Blackmail, girl.

The previous version of this deck took me to 3rd place at the Fun 4 All Store Championship in Ypsilanti, MI, on 2/6. I then reworked it into this version and took that to 2nd place at the GYGO Store Championship in Ann Arbor on 2/20.

For those of you unfamiliar, the game plan is simple:

1) Give your opponent a bad publicity by installing Activist Support at the end of the corp's turn via DaVinci, then selling it to Aesop before you take the tag. (Sometimes Artist Colony can sub in for DaVinci.)
2) Stack up money and slap down three R&D Interfaces.
3) Blackmail your opponent's deck and scoring servers until they cry uncle.

This deck is abusive because it plays Netrunner in a way few decks do. It doesn't care how much money the corp makes; it doesn't care how many pieces of ice they stack up. All it cares about is upgrades and the few cards that directly interfere with its plans (e.g. Executive Boot Camp, Accelerated Beta Testing, or anything else that can rez ice unilaterally, plus Caprice Nisei). If your opponent isn't playing any of those cards, or you can keep them off the table consistently, they have few ways to directly win the game barring a play mistake by you.

Everything in the deck is either a combo piece, fuel for the combo, or a tech card - the latter being Plascrete, Artist Colony, Film Critic, Utopia Shard, Deus X, Clot, Femme Fatale, and, surprisingly, Faust. You mix and match the latter category to keep yourself from getting cheesed out, control any cards that might disrupt your combo, and then apply the sleeper hold. While that might seem like a lot of tech cards, remember that they often won't cost you a click thanks to Hayley and several can be sold off to Aesop for a small profit.

Now, there wasn't anything wrong with the original version of White Girl Blackmail, per se, but one thing I found in the course of playing lots of games with it (and making lots of opponents miserable) was that Professional Contacts often felt like a speedbump more than a valuable asset. It costs 5 credits to improve your regular card draws, but I often found that trying to get my money's worth from ProCon meant I would often find myself declining to use Quality Times because otherwise I'd either have too many cards in my hand to effectively play even with Hayley, or I'd just not have enough money and still have to throw stuff away. And so I'd plod ahead with my ProCon clicking, often having to throw cards away anyway, and while it was more profitable, it felt like the training wheels were still safely secured.

So I threw them in the dumpster and replaced them with the missing Daily Casts, which give you most of the money you would have gotten from ProCon without all the speed bumps, redundant cards, or general feeling of sluggishness, along with the second DaVinci for some redundancy (which also translates into speed, as well as unlocking techy plays like installing Clot out of your hand). No longer do you have to choose between Quality Time or saving your money to afford ProCon on turn 1, which means the deck is much faster and even a bit more consistent.

Two other tech cards are worth particular mention:

Deus X: While Deus X has the same problem as Faust and Plascrete Carapace of being a tech card that costs actual money which means you can't think of it like an "Easy Mark" as you could with Inti, it is important for filling a big hole in the deck's strategy, namely that you don't want to be just dead to two Ronins. Deus X turns the matchups against most of the non-RP blends of Jinteki from "favorable but variable" to just favorable.

Femme Fatale: I was worried going into the GYGO tournament about the viability of Femme Fatale, but it proved to be essential in one game in particular for unlocking both R&D (covered by an Assassin he got off a triple-hit ABT - with no protection! - he Biotic Labored on turn 2) and a Turing on his scoring server, which coupled with Blackmail abuse and Clot eventually locked him out of the game.

It would be nice to get the two influence back from Femme and Utopia Shard, because the one game I lost at the GYGO event was to a Fastrobiotics deck (I'd previously beaten that day) which got a turn 2 Astro and eventually managed to overcome my recurred Clots because Blackmails turned up nothing, as he was sitting on four agendas in hand for much of the game. A Legwork would make it feels much less painful to check HQ with Faust, and would be much more useful in most matchups than the Utopia Shard. Unfortunately, the Shard plays double duty by snagging Scorched Earths, so I don't know if I can get away from it. But if you're feeling adventurous and can live without Femme or Clone Chip #2, a Legwork would be a big upgrade.

In the meantime, I'm busy waiting for Democracy and Dogma, because Councilman is a stupid powerful card which covers up several of the deck's remaining weaknesses, especially Caprice Nisei (since the only way the corp can protect its Caprices is to rez them the moment they're installed, which makes it almost impossible to lock up the other target server). It will become a question of how many of the tech cards can go because Councilman does their job for us, and what we can do with any influence they free up. Time will tell.

In short: this is a real deck. It's gimmicky, no doubt. But it's also unfair in a fundamental way, because it refuses to play real Netrunner, and as a result it can go toe-to-toe with the best decks in the format.