Fear the Massed Gnats (8th Brighton Regional)

Being very rusty on actual Netrunner experience, I took this silly combo deck to the Brighton regional and there was some interest in it, so here it is. Be warned that if your opponent has any idea what you are doing you will not win. Surprise is key.

It's heavily based on this deck, by ism and they had an excellent writeup explaining the main pieces.

The combo is to fire a Hyperdriver and a DDoS with 6 Fear the Masses in hand then.

• Click 1: Fear the Masses to mill 6
• Click 2+3: Same Old FtM to mill 6
• Click 4: FtM to mill 5
• Click 5: FrM to mill 4
• Click 6: FtM to mill 3
• Click 7: FtM to mill 2

Milling 26 cards, then access Archives with Hades Shard for the win.

The ideal line of play is to install Paige Piper turn one, then one each of Beach Party, Duggar's and Adjusted Chronotype on subsequent turns. If you do have Paige, always install before drawing. If you haven't found her yet try and draw into her before installing the other pieces if possible.

Once set up you can rapidly draw your entire deck with Duggar's. Use the first two Hyperdriver's just to increase setup speed. Even with all the draw cards you'll probably click to draw quite a lot.

My biggest change to the original deck was spotting Gnat's 40 card deck size and using that to increase consistency. In solitaire testing the combo will often go off on turn 8. Gnat's ID ability will occasionally fire on turn two if you install a bunch on turn one, but is otherwise useless.

I stripped down to one Eater, one DDoS and one Hippo as my cards for getting access. Film Critic was a late include to try and give me a chance against Jinteki, even though it's still a poor matchup.

Hippo was an attempt to be clever, but it's actually anti-synergistic with DDoS, since both only affect the outer piece of ice. It's only use is to try and rescue bad situations, but if you're not winning cleanly with this deck you're probably not winning at all and I'd change this slot if I were to play the deck again.

While there's a lot of clicking to draw and economy cards often get discarded later on, I'd be wary of removing more economy as you really need to see some early to get the setup rolling.

Round 1: Beat CtM. My opponent didn't realize what was going on and the combo went off as planned, leading me to access archives with Hades Shard and steal 7. Amani Senai fired a couple of times on his scores, but with no need to use Eater the tax didn't slow me down.

Round 2: Lost to Azmari. Turn one scarcity of resources hurts this deck and was probably the deciding factor. I was all set up and ready to fire the combo the turn after my opponent scored out.

Round 3: Beat Sportsmetal. My opponent built a huge Jinja tower and also somehow ended up with a rezzed ice on HQ (possibly from an illegal remote enforcement usage). But I eater / hippo'd that away, fired off the combo and milled him out.

Round 4: Intentional Draw.

Round 5: Lost to PU. My opponent managed to trash my Film Critic before my combo turn. Even though they were in no danger of scoring out they were starting to ice HQ and I panicked and combo'd one turn too early in an awkward turn where I installed DDoS click one and didn't access archives. Then on their turn they shuffled back some agendas. So I only stole 3 points from archives. I subsequently managed to destroy their HQ ice with Eater / Hippo to steal a Future Perfect the normal way, but then I was out of cards and they scored out 3X Obotaka to win.

Thanks to four wins with my corp I managed to come 8/37 in Swiss and made my first cut

Cut R1: Lost to Mti. Finally someone twigged what I was up to and double iced HQ, with the innermost a DNA tracker. To stop me firing even a single FtM they used code replicator on the DNA tracker to use up my money, then installed a Thimblerig with Mti to end the run. At which point I conceded.