Stealthy Baba

This is the runner deck I played at NZ Nationals. It won 1 game out of 5, finishing 20th out of 21. It was also a lot of fun. Corp list is here: https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/49730/argus-smallpoints

I've been iterating on this deck and playing different versions of it for ages now, and the core is still the same: Baba Yaga boosts with Houdini using Smoke's steal credit, adding a credit to Net Mercur, getting 4 strength for the whole run, and can boost again using the credit that was just added to Net Mercur to have 8 strength for the entire run, costing only 2 real credits and requiring no additional sources of stealth credits beyond the ID and a NM. With Inti and Faerie on board, you're paying 1 credit for barrier or code gate subs, and nothing on the sentries beyond the boost (and occasional 9+ strength ice can use the Faerie pump ability if there are no spare stealth creds on NM to use). This lets you use Smoke's credit to power one run per turn which doesn't care too much about seeing lots of high-strength ice.

If that run was on R&D, congrats - Mirror refreshes all of your stealth credits, because you're using the sneaky trick of only having one of them in the first place. Run somewhere else as well, or R&D again if the first run was Indexing or you stole/trashed something the first time.

I took Film Critic as the restricted card because I expected a lot of Obokatas and Degree Mills, and wanted to not take risks on potential Hunter-Seekers if possible. This meant not running Clone Chip so the one time I ran into a swordman and had to break it with Faerie (with my Sacrificial Construct still in the grip), I lost the Faerie and couldn't get it back, so that wasn't ideal. Probably should have run Mimic instead for sentries.

Multithreaders turned out to be a great include in the deck, I barely spend any money to run once set up - the problem being that setting up still takes a little too long most games. Cyberdelia was also to help keep the cost in real money of runs to a minimum, as well as the extra MU, and meant I made money for running in some cases. Corps are shifting a bit more towards Glacier builds, and this deck loves those, but it's not quite there yet.

All-nighter is for playing multiple Notoriety in a turn - at this point it would barely be one of my decks if I wasn't trying to do that. Noteriety, particularly playing multiple in a tern to close out games, has become my runner "thing" as much as Snare! is for my corp decks. If you want more reliable but less cool wins, it's probably correct to drop them and 1-2 Notoriety - I think keeping one or two for once you've stolen two six-pointers is probably still the right call.

I briefly tried brewing a version of thus out of Wu for faster setup, running a single Cloak to replace Smoke's credit, and Rebirth to become Smoke later (or someone else if more appropriate), but it didn't seem to pan out. I preferred always having my stealth credit and the smaller deck size.

I would honestly recommend anyone try out this deck for casual fun, because it's a blast to play with, it's just not good enough to compete at tournaments. I'll keep trying though, and maybe one day Stealthy Baba time will come.