Seamus' Stealth Kit (1st Place Scottish Regionals)

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Seamus 4812

Anyone who knows me knows that Kit is my favourite runner. Who needs a reasonable influence allowance when everything is a Codegate and Refractor is amazing?

I mean, I'd take an influence boost if it were offered...

Anyway! Here's the list I took to the Scottish Regional at the weekend, dropping one game in the Swiss (five rounds) and one in the elimination.

I've written a fair bit in the past about Stealth Kit which you can read in the "derived from" link and on Netrunners.co.uk where I wrote about my experience of taking the purple-haired transhuman to fourth at the UK Nationals in 2015:

http://netrunners.co.uk/articles/kit%20-%20a%20retrospective.html

There's another full write-up of both the decks I took at the weekend coming so for now I'll just cover the significant changes I've made to the previous build and hopefully find time to add match-ups later today.

Professional Contacts

Oh, how I miss Professional Contacts. I defended its inclusion throughout the last year but with NBN becoming more aggressive with their Breaking News scores, the threat of accessing an Archangel in a remote or even Palana splashing Snatch & Grab makes going low on credits to install it early is even more of a risk than it once was.

There's also the issue that Astrolabe often crowds it out against asset spam decks which are extremely prevalent. This is the deckbuilding choice I'm most likely to revisit in the coming weeks and months.

Clone Chips, Sacrificial Construct and Artist Colony

I wish I could afford the influence for all three Clone Chips. Sacrificial Construct helps to maintain Clot against fast advance. It also does double duty against Marcus Batty which is not uncommon these days and can prevent a kill deck sniping your Plascrete with Shattered remains

Artist Colony is a great emergency "don't lose the game" card, grabbing Plascrete following an SEA Source or 24/7 News (which occurred round 1), or maintaining a Clot lock against Fast Advance.

Political Operative and Film Critic

I was running Hunting Grounds in the Political Operative slot for some time. Unfortunately, that made favourable match-ups better rather than helping in unfavourable ones. Being able to break Caprice remotes easily turns HB and Palana from questionable match-ups to strong ones.

Film Critic helps against Palana and any Midseasons decks kicking around and - along with Astrolabe - is my only real hope against IG.

Stimhack

With the loss of Professional Contacts, the econ in the deck is noticeably weaker. Stimhack allows surprise pressuring of remotes or finding of breakers via SMC.

One of the highlights of the day was in the second round when I faced IG. My deck has almost no game in this match-up and, not expecting many on the day, I had decided to just write this off as a loss. Having kept my cool (and gotten pretty lucky) early on I found myself on six points but 40 minutes into the round and slowly edging towards an inevitable death. Keen to move on to my corp game, I went to zero credits to install an RDI then Stimhacked R&D with Defective Brainchips installed, through three ICE with a Valley Grid at the root. Played for and (luckily!) got.

Thanks to all my opponents on the day, Shaz and Lorna for running a great event and to Andy and Ronan who provided my transport to and from Hamilton.

My corp deck went undefeated on the day and can be found here - https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/35079/seamusmodernism-v3-1st-place-scottish-regional-undefeated-

12 comments
24 May 2016 Sanjay

I don't want to minimize how delightful this deck looks, your excellent performance with it, or your good writeup. But reading through this, what I really want to know is what IG is doing with Defective Brainchips.

That sounds absolutely disgusting.

24 May 2016 Seamus

@Sanjay I'll see if I can get in touch with my opponent and see if he minds me spoiling some of his tech (we're in the middle of regionals season at the moment). Needless to say, it was a bonkers deck that kept me guessing to the last card!

24 May 2016 unitled

I believe he goes by popeye09 on Stimhack and the rest. It's the same guy who hit me with a Wormhole out of RP at Nats, and Mushin'd a Ghost Branch against me at Regionals last year...!

Well done Seamus, I dare say you've had the most success of anyone anywhere with Kit, and I think I'm still yet to beat this deck. How do you play the asset spam matches? I'm sure you faced your fair share of them at the tournament, and it doesn't really look like you've got the econ to be heavily trashing? Do you rely on the Clot lock and focus on the centrals? I imagine most points are taken from RnD?

24 May 2016 Popeye09

Yeah, don't worry about the secrets. Next tournament I'm sure I'll have found a new weird card I'm trying to make work!

This was the deck I played: netrunnerdb.com

For what it's worth I think your stimhack run was my favourite play of the day too. It deserved an agenda!

24 May 2016 Seamus

@unitled I believe Chris Hinkes has won a regional with Kit previously but thanks for the congratulations!

With any opposing strategy as specific as asset spam you basically have two options (if you want to have a chance of winning) - beat them at their game (mostly by playing Whizzard in this case) or don't play their game at all.

This deck does the latter as its econ can barely afford to trash anything.

To be clear, this isn't a magical solution to asset play. While my Argus deck has a nice niche in the current meta, asset spam isn't a great time for Kit. However, you can stomp through just about any server these decks tend to throw up and Clot frequently keeps them slow till you do.

@Popeye09 Pleasure to meet you. I can't believe you missed out the Labyrinthine Servers in your write-up. Your explanation on the day was absolutely magnificent!

26 May 2016 PlunkRock

I'm curious to know how often you played the Levy? Is that mainly to get the Clone Chips and Plascrete Carapace back in the stack for artist colony?

Also, will you be cutting any of the multi-access cards for The Turning Wheel? It's hard to see what could get cut for it!

27 Jun 2016 brezzab

How aggressive are you with your uses of Ghost Runner credits? I feel like I regularly get to the end of the game (Win or Lose) and have a few left over.

What's your strategy over determining the use of stealth creds vs using your cred reserve?

27 Jun 2016 Seamus

@PlunkRock That was the theory and was relevant in a few testing games but never came up on the day and I am now testing without Levy and finding it absolutely fine.

I have tried Turning Wheel and found it pretty weak in this deck. I've seen it be very powerful in criminal where it can trigger off access-effects and security testing but here I didn't find it pulling its weight as much as I'd hoped.

@brezzab This can happen and when I do I do feel like I possibly haven't been making maximum use of my resources. In a lot of games you probably end up with more stealth credits than you need but if you come up against people running very high strength sentries then you will get through the ghost runners and I think this quantity of stealth credit sources is correct in order to minimise the chances of being caught lacking them early/midgame.

Ghost runners certainly can be used if you're aware you're going to need to maintain a certain amount of off-run credits for whatever purpose. The only semi-common ICE that can really tax your stealth supply are Archer, Janus (which is appearing in the Surat City Grid decks but still not very common) and Susanoo No Mikoto (which I haven't seen in some time). Otherwise, you can afford to be quite aggressive with the ghost runners.

6 Jul 2016 Tempus

Have you tried Patron? Do you think it might work as a draw engine? Seeing as it is a run intensive deck.

24 Oct 2016 FightingWalloon

Would you add Net Mercur if using this deck today?

24 Oct 2016 Seamus

Yeah. Absolutely. I've been tinkering but unfortunately I think smoke is going to replace stealth kit to be honest.

24 Oct 2016 Seamus

Re patron - I don't think this deck can handle the tempo hit but it will be featuring in my smoke deck with career fair.