NEH Is Dead (1st Place Tacoma/Seattle Regionals)

News Hound is a very good piece of ICE.

I'm not entirely sure what to say about this deck. It's solid, but imperfect. I did not spend months honing it into a diamond-hard winning machine. I think I spent about 8 minutes building the deck, and may have changed two or three cards over the course of the week-or-so of play testing on casual Jnet. This is a good deck, but it can be better.

Mostly what this deck attempts to do is to punish predictability. Everyone has seen or played against Dumblefork a million times by now. Everyone knows what it's going to do next. You can tell when Levy's coming, you can tell when Parasite's coming, and you know every card in their deck before they draw five.

And I'm not trying to say that that's a bad thing. I'm not going to go on a tirade about the immorality of net-decking or anything like that. A meta's gonna do what a meta's gonna do, and sometimes that's nothing at all. But it is predictable, and you can exploit that. I think Targeted Marketing is a much more elegant piece of tech than Swordsman or Spiderweb.

All that said. I only played against one Dumblefork this weekend, and the rest were Shapers, which kind of threw a wrench into my plans of omniscience. For many of the early games that I played, I would stare blankly at Targeted Marketing in an opening hand. Pro-Co? SMC? Clone Chip? Scavenge? Aesop's? Cache?

This deck was not designed to play against Shaper and I was ill-prepared for it. I kind of had to re-learn how to pilot the deck as I was playing the tournament.

I learned, after a bit, to call Pro-Co in early game, then transition to Clot in midgame and bait out Clot and Clot recursion by continually install-advancing in my SanSan sever and just allow them to have a Breaking News or a 15 Minutes. In this way, I could simultaneously keep my economy strong enough to sustain a pretty formidable glacier on the central servers and wear down their recursion for when it really was an Astro.

It worked well enough to get me first place, I suppose, but those were still some very tough and mentally involved games.

I think that you should probably play Sol over NEH at this point. Targeted Marketing is the best defense against a stagnant meta. Just takes a bit of Savvy.

Speaking of which, I'm very new to competitive Netrunner, so any comments questions, or suggestions are highly appreciated, will be taken seriously, and probably will help me figure this out as much as you.

Thanks to everyone running and running in the tournament. It was a very good time and I met a lot of great people, many of whom probably deserved the trophy much more than I did.

P.S., I have been informed that it is wrong to run 47 cards. I'll do better next time.