ShibboLat (3-4, 26th at Worlds)

saff 73

This is the Lat deck I brought to the 2024 World Championship in San Francisco. It went 3-2 day 1, making day 2 buoyed by my much better Corp performance, but ending at 3-4, just short of top cut.

The core of this list is a pretty standard event Lat, so I'll just cover the odd card choices. Despite my runner record, I think this list is very powerful and has the tools to do much better than I did with my piloting. Day 1 I was running on limited sleep, and day 2 I didn't get any sleep due to nerves. Every loss with this deck was against one of the best players in the world and I feel so lucky to have gotten to a point in the tournament to play those games.

Shibboleth

I am convinced that this card is underrated as an influence spend outside of Crim. It is incredibly cheap to install, letting you drop it on tempo and continue getting Lat draws. It lets you challenge gatekeeper remotes in the early game off of Overclock/Trick Shot in a way that more traditional decoder options like Buzzsaw and Unity struggle to, and with some careful card selection, it can stay relevant into the late game.

Imp and Mad Dash

These were chosen specifically to help support the Shibboleth plan. We really do not want to play at threat longer than we have to. Imp is just a versatile card in general, helping to remove End of the Line and Seamless Launch, high-trash-cost assets, and very importantly, agendas. With Mad Dash (and Cataloguer) we can ideally skip from 3 to 7 points and avoid the awkward stage of the game with a de-powered shibboleth and no strength support. Unfortunately, Mad Dash is very difficult to connect with into AgInfusion and other decks with Bio Vault.

Takobi and K2CP Turbine

We want to ratchet up our breaker investment exactly as is necessary with what the corp is representing. Against decks like PD, we typically do not want to install Turbine, but Takobi is a high-value install as Cleaver plus Takobi is the most efficient way to get past Brân.

Into decks like AgInfusion, we value Turbine much higher so that we can get to a 5-strength Echelon. Running both cards was the cleanest option I came up with for putting down the cheapest breaker rig that can fight into the two hell remote decks I expected to be most common, as we have strong draw power but very limited money for the long game.

Shibboleth fares well into most commonly played code gates, with a couple distinct exceptions: particularly Hortum, Mestnichestvo, and M.I.C.. With a Turbine, on-threat Shibboleth is back to "mediocre" from "awful" for dealing with these ice. For a lot of the event, this choice worked out well for me, but there were a couple matchups in which this weakness, combined with my mistakes in not prioritizing installing the correct strength-booster for the matchup, was immediately capitalized on and punished.

Matches

R2 (W): Runaway on Azmari Reeducation combo
Just took this game extremely slowly and as safely as possible. Imp trashed two copies of Djupstad Grid.

R3 (W): Joevovich on Pravdivost shell game
Lat is just so difficult to kill, this felt like a highly favored matchup.

R6 (L): tzeentchling on Jukebox Asa
Completely schooled by an Asa variant I had no experience with or against. Excellent play from my opponent.

R7 (L): RotomAppliance on reg Precision Design
Ran too many times into bait, never stole a single point. Punished for a weak Shibboleth position by Architect Deployment Test putting M.I.C. on the scoring remote.

R10 (W): N00dleSoup on reg Precision Design
Early Ikawah steal into Cataloguer+Mad Dash cleaned up this game before the corp built up too much.

R12 (L): Santa on AgInfusion
I had a weak fracter situation relying on Propeller and Takobi which Santa immediately identified and taxed out. I failed to stick to my plan of Turbine into AgInfusion and was promptly punished for it.

R14 (L): Sokka on Built to Last
Whether it was sleep deprivation or something else entirely, I absolutely blundered this game and was only kept in contention as long as I was by an extremely lucky trick shot that nabbed two SDS Drone Deployment. Stealing the second SDS may have been entirely incorrect, as I had to fight through Mestnichestvo with a weak Shibboleth for most of the game. That being said, I'm very happy to have had the chance to play this matchup and get as far as I did.

The Netrunner Community is Amazing

This was my first time competing at Worlds and also the largest card game tournament I've ever attended. Everyone I met was wonderful and the energy and love in the tournament hall was unparalleled. Big thanks to NSG and the volunteer team for putting on such a great event.

Also huge thanks to the Portland, Oregon Netrunner community for being such an active and welcoming community. I'm really proud of how well we performed as a group at this event and hopefully this is the first step in becoming an active force in the larger competitive scene. Our pre-Worlds jam session was instrumental in fine-tuning this list and showing me that it had real potential.

Biggest thanks to my husband Alex for coming with me on this journey to San Francisco and supporting me along the way! Love you!

1 comments
23 Oct 2024 Silent Arbiter

Me when playing criminal: let's import Unity, Shibboleth is unplayable after threat.

@saff: "hold my Takobi"