Hayley Kaplan: Art Professor

When I started playing Netrunner (part way through the Spin Cycle) Criminal was the strongest faction. Andromeda was dominating the tournament scene and this remained the case for quite some time.

Fast-forward two and a half cycles and it is instead Anarch and Shaper (Kate mainly) that is now dominating, with Criminal struggling for card support (see recent www.netrunners.co.uk articles by Dave ‘Cerberus’ Hoyland and El-ad David Amir for some takes on this).

The problem is I like the Criminal play style. Don’t get me wrong, I am a Shaper fan boy. My first runner was Kate and I think I have about 20 different Kate lists I switch between at the moment. However, the aggressive run economy of Criminal and the ability to pressure the Corporation in lots of different ways, keeping them on the back foot, makes for exciting Netrunner.

So, what to do?

Well the card I feel drives the Criminal play style is Desperado. It is rare to see a Criminal deck not running it and it is arguably the best console in the game (yes, I know some archetypes won’t get much from it, but on the whole…). If I want to play like a Criminal, using this console is probably a must.

Why not just play Criminal?

Well as the above articles alluded to, Criminal are lacking in a few areas (a decent Barrier breaker, R&D pressure, recursion mainly). What faction has this in droves? My favourite, Shaper.

When DaVinci was first spoiled, it struck me as the card which would allow Shaper, with the right influence splashes, to play the aggro style of Netrunner game made famous by Criminal and so this deck was born.

Looking at some of the card choices:

ID: I went with Hayley instead of Kate firstly because the Kate discount doesn’t work with DaVinci (sad face) and because being able to install two cards mid run is great fun. Hayley also accelerates set up time, which helps against faster decks.

Economy:

Run Economy – Dirty Laundry, Desperado, Datasucker and DaVinci is the Criminal-esk core of my deck. It is fast, forces to corp to spread ice across three centrals (made even harder by parasite destroying ice) and who doesn’t like playing Dirty Laundry for 4 credits, a card, 1-3 Datasucker counters and 1-3 DaVinci counters!

Other Economy – Sure Gamble, Daily Casts, Kati forms my longer term backbone.

Draw: 2 Diesel, 2 John Masanori, 2 Visage – Probably not quite enough. If I get Masanori out early he tends to carry me through. I’d like a third Diesel.

Breaker Suite: The main breakers in this deck are the 2 Atman in combination with the Datasucker and Parasite. The other breakers are important with all the anti AI cards around, or any off the wall strength cards which appear (looking at you Janus). I know I am likely to have lots of comments about the Snowball (why not just play Inti), but I don’t always want to play an Atman at 10 against Blue Sun.

Other cards:

Clone Chips/SMC – Pretty obvious. Parasite recursion is also great.

Multi Access – R&D multi-access is the main win condition. HQ Interface is to help against FA when I am looking for that one agenda in hand.

Plascrete – In my meta, we reaaaallllyyy like to kill each other. Film Critic just does not cut it.

Akamatsu – Datasucker and DaVinci takes up a lot of memory.

I have now gone 16-2 with the deck now. One loss was to an early doors explosion on my property vs. GRNDL, the other due to an NEH Astro-train leaving the station by turn 6.

Possible Changes:

• Swapping the HQI for a Clot would certainly help vs. the Astro-train.
• Dropping a something worth 1 influence for a Yog.O, or potentially a Stimhack, would be interesting to test.

More testing is needed, but I think the deck has a lot of potential.

Comments and criticism welcome!