Kitty Purry - Best KoS performance by a Delawarean (4-1)

I had my heart set on judging Worlds 2018 as soon as I heard about the tournament. There's an interesting jumble of feelings to untangle as to why I wanted to judge instead of compete, but it was a combination including 1) sentimentality about the end of FFG producing my favorite card game, 2) love for the community that has grown around Netrunner, and 3) recognition that tournaments are stressful, tense, and uncertain and that I already peaked with my back to back Worlds Top Tennin titles.

Unfortunately, after inquiring about judging, I heard that they were good on judges. So I instead had to resort to my backup plan: playing at Worlds. Which meant I needed to figure out decks.

Jesminder has always been one of my favorite runners and Hot Pursuit (and to a lesser extent DJ Fenris -> Liza) give you a great reason to play her. I played Jesminder in NY Regionals and had some pretty mediocre results. And while I got some acrylic credit tokens out of the event, the real prize came afterward:

My deck was highlighted on Ben Ni (aka Beyoken)'s incredible Youtube series Successful Demo!

I was positively beaming watching this video. It was incredibly heartwarming hearing a deckbuilder, player, and content creator I admire to the moon say positive things about my deckbuilding decisions. Additionally, Ben had made some edits to the shell that looked really promising, and I wanted to try them out.

I tried out some changes Philadelphia regionals and things didn't go very well. The biggest problem I had was people would put giant ice in front of HQ and turn off my run based economy. Even though breakers like Engolo got through ice relatively well, it just wasn't efficient enough to make runs as often as I wanted. DNA Tracker and Anansi were wrecking me. Thankfully, Ben Ni came through again:

Ben Ni's updated icebreaker analysis video

One of the highlights of the video was pointing out how efficient stealth breakers were at the moment, particularly vs. the ice that was vexing me.

Thus, this deck was born and I think it is pretty good!

Here are some things that are very good about the deck:

• Thematically, it feels so much better playing stealth with a runner whose theme is actually being stealthy instead of a runner whose theme is livestreaming all her runs. Energy that would have been spent rationalizing a Smoke deck on thematic grounds can instead go toward piloting.
• While CtM's trace can't be avoided, their game plan involves slowing you down with a lot of tags and taggy ice, and the matchup is pretty decent.
• You have Employee Strike and nice breakers against annoyingly taxing Jinteki ice, which feels great versus Mti Mwekundu.
• You get to play DJ Fenris which is a great way to show off your alt art collection.

Ultimately, there was a last minute judging cancellation, and I got to judge after all. I was very excited to do so, judging was a blast, but I am a little disappointed I didn't get to test this pile against the field at Worlds.

As a consolation prize, my friend and great Netrunner content creator Dan let me play the deck on stream on one of his most recent episodes of Day Job.

All in all Netrunner in 2018 may not have been my best year competitively, but it has been my best year by a lot of other metrics. Thanks for sharing it with me.

See you in #mirrormode.

P.S. The deck is called Kitty Purry because Katy Perry has a song called "Hot and Cold" and the deck has Hot Pursuits and Cold Reads and the other fact I know about Katy Perry is she has a cat named Kitty Purry, which is really solid, I must admit.