Fair Enough Hyper Tribrid PE (2nd@GGs only losing to Wilfy)

LSK 4662

This is a tribrid deck: It's glacier, it's fast advance, and of course there's bluffing because it's Jinteki.

And frig this deck's fun. It's not the best corp ever, but it's the best PE has been at just scoring 7 in a long time and it's got so many fun lines of play that just meld the bluffing and the tempo elements of Netrunner together in some really neat ways. It doesn't feel quite like a Jinteki deck so much as it feels like the glacier / fast advance hybrid decks that you could play out of EtF for a while.

After seeing Geist and lots of Val at last week's store champs, I knew I wanted to play a deck that could fast advance a Chronos. When I was looking through NRDB, I saw Fair Enough PE and decided it was the sort of deck I wanted to play.

But the decklist doesn't really get into why it's such a fun list, and so I want to sell you on the way this deck plays and discuss my changes.

The goal of this deck is to score 7 points. You have a couple of ways to do this - there's obviously lots of fast advance, and some games, that's your main plan, but I think the heart and soul of this deck is that, in most games, your goal is to get the runner to run an expensive remote as often as possible. The way you do this is by aggressively bluffing and installing everything.

NGO Front is perfect for this plan because it means anything can be a bluff. An unadvanced card can be a Snare! or a 3-advancement agenda; an advanced card can be an NGO or an Obokata or even just an agenda. I love NGO Front so much. Praise Boggs.

Cyberdex and Hokusai serve double duty: they're good upgrades, and they're useful for their effects alone (Cyberdex is great at turning good Aumakua runs into awful Aumakua runs), but they also let you do more installing. You can install one of them into your Snare! server and give your initial feint another reason for the runner to consider a go.

Ultimately, like with any "score 7 points through moxie and bluffing" deck, you need to score a few early agenda points to make your later feints convincing. I would honestly consider fast-advancing agendas you don't think you need to in the early game, and rushing agendas even if it takes you to a low credit total, because you need to get to the point where the runner has to respect every single install.

The main changes I made to the Fair Enough PE list were adding two NGO Front, which allow for the sort of play I want, and switching out the upgrades from Prisec (which you have to pay for every time) to Hokusai (which you only have to pay for once and it has a higher trash cost) and Cyberdex (see above re: Aumakua)

I also changed the ice up; Enigma is in there for the hard ETR on a Code Gate, and it served me very well for how understated it can be sometimes. Anansi over Komainu is a style choice, but I feel like this deck really wanted just a slightly higher density of "break this or else" ice.

7 comments
24 Mar 2018 PyWiz

It's funny you mention the old hybrid ETF -- I saw the Fair Enough PE list and had the same thought, so I figured why not try it out of red etf (aka Palana)? It's been working out fairly well and this post just reminded me I never actually gave it a shot out of PE. Is the net damage worth it?

24 Mar 2018 LSK

i think the net damage is worthwhile, with the caveat being that the Palana credit might still be worth more to this sort of strategy. I would definitely try both.

25 Mar 2018 paulyg

This looks solid with some interesting changes. I do find this style very fun to play. What’s your reasoning for the CSTs? More money is nice but do you find it hampers your ability to go fast at the start?

25 Mar 2018 LSK

I didn't start with the CSTs, but I found I really wanted some money in the agenda suite, and CSTs are the best neutral money agenda. You have a lot of scenarios where you can rush an agenda, but you'll end up poor for it, and I put in the CSTs to alleviate that. I think they're a good card for the deck.

30 Mar 2018 michaeln

What about dropping a CST and a Chronos, putting in an SSL Endorsement, and then having another slot for something else (another CG say)?

30 Mar 2018 LSK

Chronos is so good I wouldn't want to cut any of them, and especially not for another 3-point agenda, which is hard to score and easy to lose points to.

30 Mar 2018 michaeln

Fair enough. It’s certainly a fun deck to play!