Hoshiko on Mars (14 wins 1 loss on jinteki.net)

A couple of weeks ago, as I started to build this deck, the Corp side on jinteki.net was flooded with degenerate flatline combo decks. If you weren't up against Mutually Assured Destruction decks that won on turn 8, you were probably up against Drago Ivanov decks that (if they drew well) won on turn 3. There are basically only three ways to deal with this sort of deck: either you try to outrace them, or you try to break up the combo with cards like Imp, or you try to live through the combo when it happens.

This deck takes the third approach – it shows how a slow runner deck can survive in a very fast metagame, by trying to negate the win conditions that the popular Corps are using. It's somewhat matchup-dependent; there are some nearly unwinnable matchups, especially against rush decks (that's where the 1 loss from this version of the deck comes from). However, the metagame is quite favourable to this deck at the moment, because it beats the Corp decks that beat the top Runner decks, and thus I've been putting up very high win rates with it.

Maybe one third of my wins in testing were against the various degenerate flatline combo decks that this deck is made to counter (with many of them ragequitting once they saw what deck I was on – one player even left the table without conceding, but I counted that as a win). The rest were against more normal decks; unless it's up against a particularly fast Corp deck that wins by scoring 7, this deck has good chances against those too (although many of the games turned into a tense race between the Corp scoring an agenda or finding a critical card, and the Runner getting enough credits to make a critical run, which is the sort of thing I play Netrunner for).

Strategy

The basic purpose of this deck is

1. to be able to survive with very large numbers of tags,
2. to survive pretty much any flatline combo, and
3. to be able to use a resource economy, despite the obvious hazard of mixing resources and tags.

The primary goal here is survival – although the deck benefits to some extent from being tagged, the attitude is not so much "I need to collect tags as quickly as possible" but "I don't care if I get tagged". The basic idea is that many Corp decks are tag-reliant, so we're effectively blanking a major portion of their deck (anything that tries to land tags on the Runner) at the cost of turning on a different portion of their deck (anything that punishes tags). This might sound like it's a wash, but there aren't all that many commonly played tag punishment cards, so we're basically causing the tag combo Corp decks to attack along fairly predictable lines, and most of the deck can be geared to that.

The design is also strong against decks that don't normally use tags at all — their tag punishment will be very predictable (the basic "trash a resource" action, plus possibly Predictive Planogram) so we can weather it easily, whereas the fact that we don't care about tags means that we can use efficient cards like Rogue Trading, which are generally unplayable if you have to clear the tag, but very good if you don't.

The main drawback of playing this deck is that it has a very large number of critical cards in it, as Runner decks go. It is going to take you time to find all the pieces, and it is highly likely that at least one key card has all three copies stuck near the bottom of the deck. As such, the key to playing the deck effectively is to draw as many cards as you reasonably can – in the early game, it's far from unusual to take a turn where one click is a run and the other three are drawing cards (and even then, half the reason for the run is to turn on Hoshiko's ID ability, thus drawing a card). It's important not to waste too much time installing non-critical things, which is one of the easiest play mistakes to make; the deck is designed so that past the first few turns, you usually have some way around hand size pressure.

Unlike some lists that use similar cards, though, this is a fairly interactive deck. It can struggle to get through ICE early, but it doesn't fear most of the consequences of faceplanting into it, so a key to making it work is to start running even on fairly early turns – winning with this deck is very slow, so you have to slow the Corp down, and the way to do that is to force them to rez ICE (or if they refuse to, steal agendas so that they can't score them). Throughout most stages of the game, the deck is able to apply pressure to HQ, R&D, and the remote (and runs Archives often enough to tempt the Corp to ICE that too); in order to slow the Corp down far enough that you can beat them, you need to constantly keep up the pressure everywhere to force them to respond rather than to use their main game plan (whilst still clicking for a lot of cards!). This is normally quite hard to do in Anarch, because it typically fears getting hit with an early Hard-Hitting News and losing outright, but it doesn't take long before this deck can stop worrying about playing around HHN and start concentrating instead on surviving an HHN if it happens.

Card choices

After explaining the core strategy, this deck's easiest to understand by looking at which cards are critical. So here's a survey of all the cards, in order from "most important to the deck" to "least important to the deck".

Dummy Box

Dummy Box is the card that makes this style of gameplay possible – due to the basic "trash a resource for , 2" action, there is an obvious problem with mixing tags and resources, and Dummy Box is this deck's solution to the problem.

The basic idea is that if the Corp tries to trash a resource, we can use Dummy Box to discard a resource from hand and cancel that. More than half the cards in this deck are resources (26 resources from 45 cards), and it draws a lot of cards, so it's usually possible to keep pace with the Corp if they decide to dedicate most of their turns to resource-trashing clicks. The Corp will eventually be able to muscle through a Dummy Box if all they care about is clicks, so you need to make them care about something else – run aggressively so that that 2 cost ends up mattering!

Dummy Box is also this deck's primary defence against Retribution (which most Corps will aim at Obelus) – although this deck isn't flooded with hardware and programs, it has sufficiently many in it that your Dummy Box can normally keep pace with their Retributions, even if they start recycling them.

Due to the level of resource-dependence of this deck, it normally isn't possible to start accumulating tags until you have a Dummy Box down (and enough spare resources in hand to use it, or the ability to bluff having them – normally the Corp does the bluffing, but with this deck, you get to do it too). As such, you really want to see this early; that means spending influence for the full three copies, and adding three copies of Gachapon to find them (although there are plenty of other good Gachapon targets too).

Dummy Box is the hardest card to do without long-term, but if you need to take tags before setting it up (e.g. you get hit by Hard-Hitting News), the deck can just about function without, but it's going to be an uphill struggle. The idea is to install resources only if they're a) immediately relevant, b) Jarogniew Mercs, or c) needed to protect Jarogniew Mercs, and just try to dig to the Dummy Box as quickly as possible.

Jarogniew Mercs

The most famous form of tag punishment is meat damage. When you have a large number of tags, Jarogniew Mercs makes you basically immune to that. When you have a small number of tags, the Mercs won't give you immunity to damage, but they will normally stop a flatline.

Against most decks, three copies of the Mercs is too many. However, if the opponent is all-in on trying to hit you with BOOM!, you'll want a copy as early in the game as possible, so three copies are required to maximise the chance you draw them in time. Ideally you'd only install the Mercs once it was time to go tag-me, as it's both cheaper and better in that situation, but it's able to protect you even before that (if necessary in the very early game, you can install the Mercs and then clear the tag).

Jarogniew Mercs is nice for tanking random meat damage from cards like Weyland Consortium: Builder of Nations and Prisec, but its primary purpose is that it prevents you losing to BOOM!, a very commonly played card. If you can't find the Mercs, and there's any realistic chance that the opponent could be running BOOM!, your primary counterplay is to install an Obelus and try to hold seven cards in your hand at all times, so that 7 damage is not enough to kill you. Because the primary aim of this deck is to beat flatline combos, the Mercs are a key part of it and have been in every version of the deck (I tried with only two copies, it isn't enough given that there's no way to search for them).

Rogue Trading

Rogue Trading is by far the best economy card available for this style of deck. Once you reach the point at which you don't care about taking tags, it gives you a source of economy that's very hard for other cards to match (being able to double-click for 6 three times is both a better rate of return than most economy cards – it compares favourably even to Sure Gamble, although not by much – and a better longevity, outlasting even Liberated Account). In most decks that use Rogue Trading, the reward from the card is balanced around how cheaply you can remove the tag; in this deck, by ignoring the tag, you're effectively removing it for 0 clicks and 0-1 (the tags do have a cost, as explained in the section on Counter Surveillance below, but not much of one).

If you don't find Rogue Trading, you'll need to make use of your other economy cards (and might want to postpone the point at which you go tag-me). There is enough backup economy that you can survive for a while without it.

Obelus

Obelus is the obvious console for this sort of deck. In addition to the +1, which this deck very much appreciates, it has two main abilities that are both very beneficial in this style of deck.

The increase in hand size with tags is useful because this deck draws a lot of cards, and doesn't necessarily want to discard them (even discarding "useless" duplicates is costly, because those could have been used to power Dummy Box). Having to install things to avoid discarding them really slows a deck down; without some sort of hand size increaser, you can only spend half your clicks on card draw (increasing your hand size) because you need to spend the other half getting your hand size back down below the limit. Obelus is a hand size increaser that naturally scales over the course of the game; in the midgame, you're typically taking 1–2 tags a turn, which is 1–2 cards that you don't have to install to avoid losing, and thus you have 1–2 clicks saved to do more useful things like drawing cards, running, and powering Rogue Trading. If you haven't played this sort of resource-heavy deck before, it can be hard to get used to just how costly install clicks can be, so anything that reduces the extent to which you need to install things "early" is helpful.

The increase in hand size with tags is also a useful backup for if the Corp manages to get around Jarogniew Mercs somehow and hit you with BOOM! anyway. In particular, this is your only defence to Self-Growth Program, a rarely played card that would otherwise hard-counter this deck.

The ability to draw cards via running HQ and R&D is also very helpful, because it ties together two things that this deck really wants to be doing – running servers to slow the Corp down, and drawing cards. This sort of click compression justifies the 4 cost on its own.

Obelus is played as three copies, because its abilities are so helpful that you typically want to see it early. The spare copies of Obelus are the most common discard when going above hand size (although can be worth keeping if you suspect the Corp is on Retribution).

Rezeki, Daily Casts

Rezeki and Daily Casts are economy cards geared towards the late-game; they give very click-efficient economy at the cost of giving you a credit deficit for a few turns.

This deck is very hungry for credits in the late game (most of its breakers are inefficient and Counter Surveillance is one of the most expensive cards to play in Netrunner). However, in the early game, it isn't spending much (it's running a lot, but mostly to force rezzes or on unprotected severs, and typically won't break ICE unless it can do so cheaply or needs to stop a rushed agenda). As such, paying a little money up front to have more in the future is a very good trade in this sort of deck (and because almost every game goes much longer than is usual, Rezeki has a lot more value than usual). That increases the value of this sort of card, and Daily Casts and Rezeki are both good enough to consider even in decks where they don't synergise well; when they fit perfectly, like they do here, the cards have huge value.

Daily Casts also has value due to being a resource, and Rezeki due to being a Gachapon target. The latter is very relevant; the former is more of an "emergency use only strategy" (because Daily Casts is typically too valuable to discard to Dummy Box or use as a meatshield for a Jarogniew Mercs).

Gachapon

A deck that's this slow needs a way to find its critical cards fast, and in this case, that's Gachapon (which is much better at digging for most of them than, e.g., Steelskin Scarring would be). Additionally, this deck has so many moving parts that there's nearly always two or three things missing that would be really nice to have right now. Gachapon is thus very valuable because it is highly likely to find something that you need, or at least something that you will eventually need (so that you can stop worrying about it) – you won't necessarily have control over which hole in your rig it's plugging, but it will usually plug at least one of them. It's also entirely reasonable to use this to find Rezeki in the early game (it even installs it for free!).

Gachapon also helps to give the deck enough of a critical mass of hardware to survive Retribution. It does have a drawback (of removing some of your cards from the game), but this can also sometimes be an advantage, because there are many cards that are matchup-dependent, or for which multiple copies doesn't help, so often you can remove useless cards to get at the useful ones faster. (It's still probably a drawback on average, but very close to being a wash.)

Earthrise Hotel

This deck a) needs to draw a huge number of cards to operate, ideally clicklessly and b) can often generate credits very efficiently. Those are pretty much the perfect circumstances for Earthrise Hotel to shine; this deck loves to have a Hotel installed, especially in the early game. Although there are better turn 1s than "Click for credit, install and click Liberated Account, install Earthrise Hotel", that sort of turn 1 is still pretty good for this deck and generally gets it off to a reasonable start.

Once you get past the midgame, Earthrise Hotel is mostly useless for card drawing (it doesn't save much time over drawing the cards via other means), but a blank resource is still fairly useful in this deck (for powering Dummy Box or tanking net damage, or removing to Gachapon). Seeing it early is good enough that playing three copies is worth it, because the early game is the more important part. (Note that, as always, you don't want to install it until you have some reliable source of credits, otherwise you'll struggle to do things with the cards you draw.)

Sure Gamble, Liberated Account

Sure Gamble and Liberated Account go together because they're basically ways of a) getting the economy off the ground at the start of the game and b) boosting your economy in the late game when you've run out of better options. Sure Gamble is definitely not at its best in this deck, but you need early economy to do more or less anything in Netrunner, and these two cards are the best options for that. (Liberated Account is one of my most common trashes to Dummy Box, incidentally – you don't need to play three of them, but you want three in your deck to increase your chances of seeing your early economy early.) Spending a whole turn to drain a Liberated Account sucks when you'd rather be drawing cards, but if it's early in the game and you don't have much drip going yet, it's still often going to be better than the alternatives.

Paperclip, Black Orchestra, MKUltra

Icebreakers are not the highest priority for this deck – although it runs a lot, it doesn't interact with ICE that much (except for gear-checks on HQ and R&D). As such, icebreaker efficiency usually isn't that important for this deck. However, it does often need to run through ICE late-game, and almost any Netrunner deck needs at least some ability to challenge a remote server in the early game. Given how many cards we're drawing and how many Gachapons we're playing, the 2-2-1 split is generally enough to find our icebreakers in time (fewer killers are needed because it is usually possible to facetank your way through non-" End the run" subroutines, which are rare to see on a sentry).

Paperclip is obvious; the choice of the two "lesser" heap breakers is because a) install clicks really matter and installing from the heap allows you to avoid them, and b) with all the cards we're drawing, it's helpful to be able to discard a card and yet still have access to it.

Hoshiko Shiro: Untold Protagonist

This deck is really slow by Runner deck standards, so it benefits a lot from an ID that can help to speed it up. Hoshiko is a perfect fit, drawing cards clicklessly based on a trigger (accessing a card) that we're naturally going to be doing a lot of. (She also creates some amount of Archives pressure by herself, helping to spread the Corp's ICE more thinly and slowing them down.)

Hoshiko's ability can become a liability on occasion, especially near the end, but it's usually possible to play around this by, e.g., running only on every second turn. (You frequently need to take a break for things like double-Rogue Trading usages.)

Counter Surveillance

One of this deck's main win conditions. Some games, you will need to use all three of them; other games, you will have trouble keeping them from being trashed (typically from the grip), so having three helps ensure that at least one copy survives.

Counter Surveillance is a weird card in that it requires carefully managing your tag count; for an HQ run, the optimum number of tags is usually 5, for an R&D run, it's somewhere around 14 ("18 accesses are normally enough to win a game of Netrunner" and you'll get 4 or so naturally). The ideal, therefore, is to use a Counter Surveillance once your tag count gets to around 5 in order to clear out HQ, and then build tags for a big R&D run later. It's entirely possible to "overshoot" on tag count, though, and every tag you have makes Counter Surveillance cost 1 extra, which means that this deck has an incentive to pick up tags to power it – but not too many of them. (I had a game recently where I commented to my opponent that 18 tags was liveable, but 22 would be too many; it's crazy that that sort of detail can matter sometimes.)

Plan A for the late-game is about building up enough credits that you can make a Counter Surveillance run for the win. (Note that if it gets stopped by Border Control, you lose the Counter Surveillance but not the credits, which is a good reason to have multiples of them.) This is not the deck's only path to victory, but is by far the most common. It will not always work – sometimes the Corp has some way to stop a "one big turn" combo, sometimes you somehow miss all the agendas – so you shouldn't be "all in" on this plan, but it is a first resort rather than a backup plan. If you manage your tag count accurately, you can often afford two Counter Surveillance runs; if you can't (say you're playing against an NBN deck which is actively building up excess tags on you), you can typically only afford one.

DreamNet

Hoshiko's signature resource, so playing at least one makes sense in any Hoshiko deck that likes to have resources. It's clickless card draw, which this deck really likes, and can be found via Gachapon. DreamNet isn't remotely critical to the deck, but it easily has enough value that it's worth playing – the lack of a second copy is partly due to deck space and partly because it's bad in multiples.

Trickster Taka, Paladin Poemu

This deck's two companions aren't strong enough to play in multiples, but if you do happen to get them early, they give comparable drip value to Rezeki. Because they're also virtual resources (and thus combo with basically everything in the deck that cares about card types and subtypes), they're strong enough to run (and are also an essential part of the deck's plan B).

Trickster Taka is definitely better; its credits are more consistently useful in the late game, and its overstock penalty is one that this deck doesn't care about (and can even actively make use of sometimes; if the tag count is too low for Obelus safety or for a Counter Surveillance run, you can intentionally leave the Trickster on 3 in order to take a tag every turn). Paladin Poemu is more situational, but it's nonetheless usually possible to find a use for the credits in time (most commonly to play Daily Casts).

The Twinning

The plan B for this deck, and a sort of "alternative late game"; if Counter Surveillance doesn't work for whatever reason (typically either "too many tags" or "too many non-standard run-enders"), The Twinning usually will. The general idea is to power it with, typically, Trickster Taka, and R&D lock the opponent in order to prevent them drawing critical agendas early enough in the turn to do something with them. This would often be combined with random runs on HQ and the remotes to stop an agenda sneaking through. In many games this will just be Dummy Box fodder, but having an alternative win condition is helpful because the main win condition doesn't always work.

Ice Carver, God of War

Ice Carver and God of War are primarily credit savers against decks for which this deck's primary breakers match up badly. For example, Hydra would typically be a problem for this deck, but Ice Carver makes it 3 cheaper to break; and Thimblerig is expensive to break with Black Orchestra but much cheaper with God of War.

God of War can also be used to speed up the rate at which you get tags, which is sometimes required against Jinteki or HB decks. (It rarely helps against NBN decks; the danger there is nearly always having too many tags rather than too few.) It also serves as an emergency backup breaker in case something happens to your primary breakers (e.g. Ark Lockdown, or they get stuck at the bottom of the deck).

Severnius Stim Implant

I covered plans A and B to victory above. Plan C is to just run a lot – HQ, R&D, remotes – and keep the Corp off balance for long enough that you eventually win through random accesses. (Because you can apply pressure in lots of different places, this works surprisingly well – many Corps will put all their effort into defending R&D and discover that they don't have any actual path to winning, so eventually you snipe the agendas from HQ or the remote.)

Severnius Stim Implant is plan D, the last resort when everything else has gone wrong. You will normally get the opportunity to use this once in the game, to access 4–7 cards from R&D (or HQ, if you think/know the agendas are there), and it has the advantage that (unlike Counter Surveillance) it works even from fairly low credit counts. Think of this as the Runner version of Audacity – it can close out a game, but if you don't win you end up discarding your hand – or as a sort of slightly deeper, but higher-stakes, The Maker's Eye that doesn't cost influence. The chance of missing is concerningly high, but some chance to recover an otherwise lost game is better than no chance (and by the time you're forced into using this, it will generally snipe enough points to win more than half the time).

The inclusion of this card also increases the hardware count to sufficient levels to protect you from Retribution.

How does this deck do against…

BOOM!?

Pretty well – use Jarogniew Mercs as the primary defence, and Obelus as the backup (against some decks, you can also trash it from R&D).

Retribution?

Pretty well – Dummy Box will normally save you, and you need that anyway.

Drago Ivanov?

It stands a better chance than most – this is the reason to play three copies of Jarogniew Mercs, so that you can survive the early combos. There are enough resources in the deck that you can untag yourself and protect it.

(Later in the game, both Drago and Mutually Assured Destruction are non-factors, which is the observation that inspired me to work on this deck style in the first place.)

The All-Seeing I?

Better than you'd expect – it's not too bad playing around it by avoiding installing too many resources at once. If you do get hit by it, let non-critical resources get trashed, and save the Rogue Tradings and Dummy Boxes (Jarogniew Mercs will save itself).

Psychographics?

It's a struggle, but you can still win – Psychographics needs an agenda to target, and you can try to stop the Corp drawing them (also, it can be hard for Corps to find it, as they normally only play one copy).

Jinteki: Personal Evolution?

Better than most – the trick is to build up a very large hand size, because in the latest rotation, Personal Evolution's strategy is based around exploiting dips in your hand size, and you can counter that with Obelus. Cerebral Overwriter doesn't do much against this deck either.

Acme Consulting: The Truth You Need?

Not the best matchup, but not unwinnable – this is the primary reason why Ice Carver is required.

NBN: Reality Plus?

Surprisingly well – you'll give the R+ deck lots of drip economy, but it struggles to do anything with it, and you're much richer than it expects because you aren't clearing its tags.

Market Forces?

It really hurts – but it won't flatline you or anything, so you may have a chance to recover (and I have in practice won games with this deck through Market Forces). Also, it's generally a pretty bad card, so your opponent probably isn't running it.

Lily Lockwell?

It depends on what's supporting her – presumably you're playing against NBN, so regaining the tags shouldn't be too difficult, but if she's in there to search for weird one-of tag punishment operations you may be in trouble. She's definitely in the range of "trash on sight" for this deck.

Self-Growth Program?

Pretty badly – it isn't an auto-loss as long as you're holding seven cards in hand, but it will ruin your gamestate and likely leave you one turn from death. Fortunately, it's rarely played and most decks don't want to dilute themselves to play it.

High-Profile Target?

It's been banned.

This deck contains only one new card from Midnight Sun, but nonetheless, it feels like one of the main choices for the 22.08 meta specifically; sometimes, what's important in building a deck for a format isn't the cards that were added, but the cards that were taken away.