Competitively Holo - 6-0, 1st @ Scottish Regionals

To paraphrase a certain Netrunner antihero:

No, Azmari is not a fake deck that can't beat prepared players. You're probably just bad at playing combo.

My overall tournament record with Reeducation Azmari this summer is 14-2. It has won three events in the highly-competitive UK circuit, plus the only North American Nationals that counts (Nats attended by Sokka, who literally cannot fail to win a National title, are outliers and should not be counted). Across the season since the May ban list, Azmari's overall winrate has been over 60% across over 250 tournament games, and the vast majority of that winrate comes from Reeducation builds.

Yes, this deck fizzles and does nothing if the runner can successfully break up the combo without getting Punitive’d. That doesn't matter. Any combo deck in any game will lose when an opponent is able to assemble the right forms of interaction at the right time, because you’re not playing the game the normal way. But when they can't do that, you just win.

Good players play combo decks when they are consistent enough and have enough counterplay to interaction that they keep winning even against prepared opponents. I believe this is one such deck. Could it win Worlds? Hard to say. But its chances go up if players keep underestimating it.

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See also my runner writeup, in which I break kayfabe.

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Having gone undefeated at Scottish Regionals with this deck, I'm going to stay up on my high horse about it for a bit. Let's correct some misconceptions.

This deck was not built to beat World Tree Ari. I'm not sure where this idea came from, but I've heard it repeated in a few places. This deck was built to beat Ashnikko, early in Conts season when that still looked like the best runner deck. World Tree was in fact our worst matchup, so while this deck has lost some potency over time as runners become more familiar with it, the new ban list also gives it a boost.

Putting a Caldera or Respirocytes in your deck does basically nothing. I played multiple games this weekend in which my opponent only had time to draw about 10 total cards (including their opening hand) before dying. Without Tree to find it, your one-of tech card is not going to make the difference in any significant proportion of games. Also Respirocytes does literally nothing against Neurospike, which this deck can switch over to very easily.

The deck is actually quite flexible. Despite it being an extremely linear and focused deck, you can and should look to mix things up when refining it for any given tournament.

Since EMEA, I've seen runners learning how to cheat through Piranhas, how to not die to accessing agendas on centrals, and how to draw enough cards to stop Reeducation being lethal. So I changed my ice and agendas, slotted Neurospike & RLC, and kept killing them ☠️

The new ice suite was designed to achieve three aims. First, with many players having learned how to cheat through [Tsarevna](Unsmiling Tsarevna) and Piranhas by overdrawing, we wanted a new set of Code Gates and Sentries that would actually gearcheck runners. Second, with players having noticed that the deck's econ can be tight when going for the quick kill and that forcing rezzes can be a good strategy, we wanted some more punishing facechecks. Third, and arguably most important, we wanted to confound our opponents' expectations. When the runner has only around 12 clicks to play with before their life is on the line, one misstep can be hugely costly, and having ice that operates differently from what they're expecting is a good way to induce those missteps.

The thing I liked the most about this ice suite is that, if needed, we can build a triple-gearcheck server of Ping > F2P > Mest. That doesn't come up too often though, and overall I don't think this suite is definitively better than the suite from EMEA. The old suite requires more raw cards and creds from the runner; this one requires that they find specific tools more quickly. Both have their advantages.

Degree Mill is an option I've gone back and forth on, and decided to play at the tournament for science without being sure if it was correct. I'm pretty convinced now that it's better than [Send A Message](Send A Message). A lot of runners were choosing to take accesses on turn one to find points when I was still too poor to convincingly threaten Punitive. If they found an agenda this way, they could then threaten to defuse the Punitive backup for the remote entirely by finding another on the turn I was pushing the combo. I lost a few games in testing that way.

Mill makes it much harder to lose points on turn one specifically, closing off some losing lines. It's also great against Esa in particular, shoring up a previously tricky matchup into one that feels favoured. Be observant though - you need to be aware of when the cost to steal becomes irrelevant for the runner.

Playing Mill means we're less likely to be able to kill off of an unwise central access, but that's not really what the Punitive is for now that people know about it. Let them decline their steals on centrals and hold Punitive to kill them if they overcommit to cracking the Reeducation remote. In this event I actually didn't get any Punitive kills at all - there may be scope for cutting them entirely, but I'm not sold on that just yet.

If I did cut it, my first port of call for spending that inf would be on more copies of Red Level. The card does a lot of small things for us that add up into a potent little package. Most obviously it's more grease for our wheels, letting us draw more for no clicks, or install pieces that we would otherwise have to discard on a big YDL turn. It also makes the combo lines less predictable by allowing us to gain a click on the kill turn, either by clicklessly installing Djupstad or by combining with Sudden at threat 3. People know by now that three facedown cards in the remote with 12 creds threatens death; with RLC you can surprise kill them from two facedowns. It's a small edge but a real one.

Lastly, Neurospike is mostly here because people are narrowly teching for Djupstad specifically. Spike is better than Djup against [Pinhole](Pinhole Threading) and Caldera, and dying to it after smugly installing Respirocytes is literally the most embarassing thing that could ever happen to any runner. In practice, the main advantage of Spike is that it gives you more 'reach' with the combo kill - you don't have to match cards with e.g. a Marrow-ed up Esa or a Lat with [Stoneship](Stoneship Chart Room) when you're doing three damage rather than one. If you're desperate you can also score Reeducation without a kill condition ready and use the score effect to mulligan for it.

To wrap, let's address the elephant in the room: is this deck totally awful? Should it have been banned out? Did I just ruin a bunch of lovely people's days in Scotland? I can give a pretty confident 'no' to that last question - the event was much too fun and warm-spirited for people to let my deck choice get to them - but I'm a bit too Spike Biased to answer the others. It's a legal way to win a bunch of games, and it's a Netrunner deck, so I like it.

Also it's a pretty potent metaphor for the absolute trash fire that is modern higher education. I burned out pretty hard on trying to improve things at my own HE institution over the past year, but this deck lets me live out a new attitude to that painful issue: if you can't beat 'em, beat people at cards instead.

Peace, love and fuck the Office for Students,
Cobra x