Looking for silly things to do with the new cards, I saw Your Digital Life, and wondered how to truly maximize its value. The obvious solution to me was forcing the runner to steal 2 Bacterials and drawing 14 cards. You then can convert that sweet YDL money, because the runner just stole 6 points, into a lethal Punitive Counterstrike.
After I shared this glorious idea with the rest of Unband, Odol drew up a first list that had 6 agendas, snare, and mwanza. When I started playing it on jnet, it dawned on me that the deck may be broken in a closed decklist format: 3 out of 4 games resulted in turn 5 or earlier wins. Something not intuitive about Bacterial is that if is stolen from archives, and you find an agenda in the top 7 cards when resolving the "when stolen" trigger, you can trash that agenda and force the runner to access it on that same run. Hence, any facedown in archives can represent a lethal threat. If the runner doesn't know that, running archives with something like a Dirty Laundry to flip over your card and stop the RH credit gain is tempting.
Several changes were then made to Odol's deck, the most important being the addition of Regenesis to threaten wins faster and cutting Mwanza which was too risky even for my tastes. I hoped for the best, and started practicing runner.
As it turned out, yeah, the deck was pretty damn good when nobody knew what it was trying to do. RH won every single game in swiss. I scored out twice, against Arissana and Esa with the help of Regenesis, and killed four times. The first kill was against a Hoshiko, who ran a Bacterial in archives that trashed a Fuji, the second on an Esa who had taken too much core and checked archives. To finish out, I killed two 419s who tried to deny my credits before stealing my agendas only for YDL to immediately gain enough credits to play winning Punitives.
In the cut, it was a different story. Kyra and Charlie both played excellently, and saw the importance of taking accesses on HQ and R&D to steal agendas that I could not protect as well as on the remote or by the addition of more agendas to archives, and then ran archives when I could no longer threaten punitive. I also was too cautious going for Regenesis against Kyra and way too aggressive with it against Charlie. I think there are play patterns with this deck that can win you games even when the list is known- I was very impressed with how well the 1x Dr. Keeling did at draining the runner's resources and then following up the Keeling trash with a Regenesis play, for example- but it is undoubtedly an uphill battle. To improve the list for open decklists, I'd try to fit in another Keeling and cut Anemone (incidental damage is great, but pitching cards and a "deal 1 net subroutine" is not) and Phoneutria (2 net damage does not force a killer install, and they never take the tag) for better ice, with Ivik, more enigma, Saisentan, and Karuna all being ice I'm considering.
My goal for this tournament was qualifying for Interconts, which I narrowly missed out on, but I created that goal when I saw there were 34 players registered, not 94. I quickly edited my goal to getting that sick Bloop deckbox. Only missing out on my original goal by 1 place is fine in my book, although I definitely need a better corp deck to qualify for interconts at Euros.
Shoutouts to @Odol for being interested in this goofy idea and creating a preliminary list, and to @Jinsei for calling Your Digital Life "Yodel." My runner writeup is here, if Arissana is your jam.
This deck is A LOT of fun. There's plenty of forks and interesting decisions and it does well against a variety of decks. It definitely depends on people not knowing the matchup but it's a a real joy