Pālanā - Dead & Hungry

This is my take on 'Punative Pālanā', inspired by @Saan's 'Red Dead Re-Deadcoats' deck that was posted a little while back. I recently took 6th place at the Peterborough (Chatteris) Store Championship (strictly speaking its a 2018 Store Championship, but the option is not yet available in Netrunnerdb) with this deck (and using Sunny as my runner). Now, that sounds pretty cool, but in all honesty, I was helped a touch by a 4th round bye and didn't actually win that many games on the day (despite this being my best performing deck on Jinteki with a 70% win ratio over 44 games). It was my first Store Championship and learnt a lot from the experience (like, that I need to play less online and more in person!).

Lets have a look at the deck...

Agendas... 7 agenda setup with "Clones are not People" - I need to score 2 to win, the runner needs to score 3. Agendas were picked to make it hard to steal, so Obokata Protocol and The Future Perfect are no brainers but with Utopia Fragment as the 7th choice. I spent a long time testing stuff for the 7th pick and Utopia worked best. Generally speaking you want to score it early or leave it alone, but if you can score it early, adding a tax of 4-6 credits on top of the horrid amount of damage (see below) needed to steal an agenda makes it quite tasty.

Ice... The ice set up here is designed to either tax or hurt the runner. Kakugo is just so so good, if you can get one on your scoring server that Obokata now needs 5 cards in hand to steal (and thats before the rest of the upgrades!). Ice Wall for additional ETR and to allow us to us Consulting Visit for 0 influence. DNA Tracker is used because it is so damn good, despite it being expensive. It costs loads to break and does some real damage. There are so many runners using the conspiracy breakers and the cost to get through a DNA tracker each time with BO makes this worthwhile alone. Crick lets us throw the odd trashed upgrade back into the game and Mirāju lets us get agendas we don't want in hand back into R&D. Komainu is painful for runners who load their hands ready to steal on Obokata - I've seen many have to jack out after hitting one because they can't afford to break it. Pup is there for the consistent 2 credit tax. I also ran 1 copy of Macrophage to deal with Turtles.

Upgrades... This is where we make our agendas really hard to steal. Where possible you will be trying to score Obokata Protocol, so 4 net damage is on the cards. We run full play sets of Ben Musashi and Hokusai Grid to drop one of each into the scoring server (and replace them if they get trashed). That brings stealing Obokata to 7 net damage. Typically you'll have at least one Kakugo that was passed along the way... so thats 8 net damage. OUCH. Also slotted 1 Bryan Stinson for good luck as the deck taxes runners pretty hard and you need big money for DNA tacker and Punative (oh yeah... I forgot to mention Punative!).

Operations... Credits... lots of them. Full sets of Hedge Fund, IPO and Celebrity Gift. The latter is particularly useful in slowing the corp down. Show them a hand containing Obokata and a Punative or two and see the cogs start turning. The idea here was to win by scoring 2 agendas or kill the runner for stealing one with a double Punative. Both are viable and if you pull the Punatives early you are better served by giving the runner an agenda. We run a full set of Punitive Counterstrike as well as a Consulting Visit for 4 chances to pull one. If the runner stole your agenda they probably took some damage from Ben and Hokusai even if it wasn't an Obokata so hopefully they have a small hand. Bang!

I'm also running my 'utility toolbox', this is something I've slotted into a few decks and really helps, it's 1 of each of the following: Consulting Visit, Ark Lockdown, MCA Informant and Preemptive Action. Punitive is usually on this list, but in this case we have a full set. The idea here is that we can shutdown a few annoying runner plays with as few cards as possible. Consulting gives us the 2nd chance of pulling each of them, MCA deals with Film Critic, or in many cases Beth (as the 5th click each turn is a killer) and other choice Anarch resources. Ark Lockdown kills Paperclip (which can be a game winner) or sometimes Black Orchestra if you have your DNA trackers up. If you see a pair of conspiracy breakers in the heap, Ark Lockdown is a good call. Preemptive Action is a common use card, but as part of the tool box is focused on getting us back the MCA or Ark if we need them again.

So thats the deck - Make a taxing server that costs the runner lots of credits or a near death experience to run, then kill them with Punative, or, score 2 agendas while they are busy doing the maths.