SYNC or Swim (Top 8 at GLC Store Championship)

This is the latest in a series of SYNC decks I've been piloting since getting into Netrunner over the past four months.

After doing poorly at Worlds with a much jankier build (I'm looking at you Better Citizen Program), I discovered Saan's SYNC deck that placed 35th overall in the tournament. I set out to steal all the good ideas therein, and try to make improvements where possible.

I wound up taking this to the Green Level Clearance Store Championship, with a sizeable 52 players, and making the cut. The only game I lost with this deck was an incredibly tight match against Apex with a Heartbeat in play nearly all game, and required a second BOOM!ing that never occurred on account of my one copy getting shuffled to the very bottom of my deck post-Preemptive Action.

Your gameplan is to ICE centrals with inexpensive but taxing options, and set up your scoring/dummy remote to bait bad runs. Unlike previous iterations of this deck, there is no need to set up an additional server for Daily Quest, opting instead to rely on NGO Front as both trap and credit swing. The ideal and often game-winning play is to bait the Runner into a flubbed NGO access and punish with Economic Warfare and Hard-Hitting News the following turn. As well, removing Quest for the reliable burst econ of NGO allows us to run the more expensive Prisec over Casting Call and not give away our bluff.

Scoring an early Bellona to put pressure on the Runner can often prove beneficial depending on board state, and also encourages them to run when you install and double advance your NGO into the same server. I can think of only a handful of times when I've won by scoring out with this deck, but a couple tempo HHNs and a well-timed Echo Chamber make it entirely possible.

Overall, I'm happy where this deck has landed. Even when I've flubbed piloting it, every Runner I've spoken to post-game has said they were stressed out about getting flatlined the entire time, and really what more can you ask for than that?