Χάιπερ Λάιτ Σμόουκ (2nd Place Greek National

(Title reads "Hyper Light Smoke", the way it would be written in Greek with the original English sound.)

The story of Hyper Light Smoke continues. After some more tweaking and experimenting, yet another adventure comes to an end for her. I realized that some very certain changes had to be made.

Link to Corp Deck

3rd place @ Regionals 2018 @ Thessaloniki, Greece

2nd place @ Nationals 2018 @ Athens, Greece

Some quick info on the deck:

• I needed an answer to currents. A cheap answer. One that was not as useless as Net Celebrity if possible. So I added Interdiction after giving Freedom Through Equality a few tries (giving me a clutch win in a Regionals in Thessaloniki).
• Paperclip is for the weak, much rather for the net-deckers. I decided to back to Cerberus and Inti for more extreme amounts of thinking and planning required in order to break simple barriers. Or.....you know, I just needed the influence so I had to drop Paperclip. :P
• Paragon is great. Even more so when paired with Cyberdelia and stealth breakers. Break something, gain gazillion credits, see the top card and decide if you wanna draw it in a later run with Net Mercur. It all just works amazingly well together.
• After seeing how Turning Wheel had won some people entire tournaments, I realized how overly overfreakinmegapowered it is and I played it as well. Apparently it does indeed win games with lil' to no effort required in certain games.
• Was thinking of replacing Maker's Eye for an Indexing but I liked the speed that the Eye gave, so I kept it. Paired with TTW, it worked wonders end-game.
• One-off resources and programs is dangerous you say? Who cares. Learn to play hard or go home. It worked with Silhouette, it worked with earlier versions of Smoke, it worked now. Whatevs! ^^
• Obviously x2 Notoriety. I am a braggy mofo and I gotta live up to the rep of the Notoriety I have built for myself. Or you know... more because I just freakin' love the card, the playstyle it promotes and the theme altogether!

Greek Nationals ended up having only 10 people attending, but boy was it competitive. 8 or 9 out of those 10 people are regional winners from some past event and they had all brought their A+ game.

Oldgeorge's Report

Even though my Smoke went undefeated, my Jinteki deck, which used to be what I relied on in the past, lost 3 games. One loss in the swiss and two in the cut.

I have recorded all of my games and will post them in less than a week on YouTube, but till then, here's the written report.

Here are my matchups:

Round 1: Kostas Retalis (Fabregus) - MTI

The bane of my existence. I hate MTI because it made Jinteki uncool once again. Even though I think the ID is overpowered, I know I have a chance against it if I setup fast and have an SMC online as well. This is exactly what happened against Kostas. I know I can let go of a couple agendas before going all in and I was fortunate that Kostas did not draw all the pieces he needed to start scoring fast, so as soon as I setup my entire rig (which is usually around turn 7-8), I was good to go and steal everything to win the game. Great game and very intense because of the speed.

Round 2: Chris Oldgeorge - Sportsmetal

This is not your average classic Sportsmetal bs you see on Jinteki.net. No, no, no. Chris is a master craftsman and he made something that went won all of its games except against me. False Flag, Hard-Hitting News, Boom!, Fast Advance options, SSLs, False Leads and a bunch of other spicy things made up for a corp that was to be feared both for its strength as well as for its speed. I even stole SSL in the early game giving him even more speed but I was lucky enough that he did not draw his combos sooner in order to put the pedal to the metal. So, even though he got to 6 points, I managed to also get to 6 points and then finish off with a classic Notoriety.

Round 3: Fotis Giakoump - Argus Security

I played against Fotis's Argus in the Thessaloniki Regionals and lost really badly because I made a run and then thought to myself "oh wait, doesn't this usually run HHN?!" This time, I was more careful and even with being careful, it was a very intense match-up because Argus is a very strong deck with a lot of ways of ending the game. He managed to get to 4 or 6 points I think and then I just closed out the game since my entire setup was complete. Was just a matter of time before he could advance with Audacity.

Round 4: TheM1ke - Argus Security

Mike's Argus was somewhat the same like Fotis's (if not the exact same, not sure). We had a very tough game, very much like the one I had with Fotis and I eventually found the last 2 points hidden away in the Archives where I did not run because I had to save tempo to keep up with the speed Mike was going with.

Undefeated Smoke in swiss. Woop woop! 7-1 and on top of the swiss leaderboard.

Top Cut Round 3: TheM1ke - Argus Security

This was the toughest game of the tournament for me where I literally spent about 6-7 minutes trying to find a way to survive being 4-tagged after an HHN and having only 1 credit and one bad pub. Legit amazing plays by both Mike and myself in order to keep the game going. I eventually managed to close out the game by buying myself a couple turns with a fully loaded Chakana that didn't let him score Hostile Takeover from hand for his 7th point. Amazing game and I cannot wait to watch it again on video.

Top Cut Round 4 - Finals: Fotis - Argus Security

At this point, I knew I had to win twice in order to get 1st place. Not only that, but I also had to go through ANOTHER game of Argus Security which I knew was tough as heck and Fotis knew how to pilot it really well. Three wins in a row against Argus was already a great achievement so I really wasn't sure if a fourth win could be achieved. Nonetheless, somewhat the same thing happened again. I was very careful, keeping 5 useless cards in hand when I saw a double advanced card behind a server, so that if it's an Armed Intimidation, I can just lose my hand instead of taking tags and losing valuable board setup (like Net Mercur or Film Critic). That is exactly what happened in most of the games against Argus and as soon as I had my setup, I basically went for the win. It was an intricate path to victory through a lot of Hard-Hitting News and other things.

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Overall an amazingly fun and competitive tournament with some very intense games. I cannot wait to post the videos for all my friends to watch. Thank you to all the beautiful people of the Greek Netrunner community and once again Congratulations to the awesome person that is Fotis! Well deserved and well played my friend!

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Very much like the Drifter, everything comes to an end. So much like the game itself, I believe it is time I let this deck die out. All of its tricks have been played out, everyone knows what's going on with it and there is not much left to it. People know me far too well and expect Notoriety. They know I ran one-offs and burn me out easily and generally a lot of my rogue deckbuilding choices are not viable anymore, so I believe this may actually be the final iteration this deck will ever see from my side.

Thank you to everyone who helped me build it, test it out and enhance it in various ways. I am looking at you Cpt_nice.

Feedback always welcome of course! :)