Consulting the Message: (5th Aus Nats, top of Swiss)

Alternate name: Netrunner Cancer

I know every deck post ever likes to make big claims to start an article, so I'll get my one out of the way. This deck is a brutal, grindy, mess of hardcore filth.

It carried me all the way to the top of the Swiss at the Australian Nations last weekend before meeting its match against the highly tailored Wizzard Anti CTM decks run by the winner and runner up. And, honestly with 1 card swap of Salem's to deal with the Networking they were running and some better play, it could probably make a strong game of it even in the face of all that counter play.

This deck takes advantage of the two most fair and balanced tutor cards from Mumbad: City Hall and Consulting Visit, to deliver a stream of on-demand Tagging and Tag Punishment cards. It allows you to run singletons of all the niche Operations yet have much greater consistency because you have effectively 5 tutor cards. You have easy access to Consulting Visit because, hey, what CTM deck these day isn't running 3 Bankers Groups. You then use your Museum to shuffle the used operations and Consulting Visits back in for some nice repeat business.

Between this and the usual CTM bullshit of vomiting cards onto the table and calling it a day, you have the perfect recipe for making Friends in new and exciting places! They may concede by the end of the game, but that's just their way of showing that they want you to feel more fresh for your next game in face of your inevitable crushing might.

Truth be told, unlike the Ken deck I paired it with, this deck feels much more like a Work In Progress. Refinements continue to be made in Cancer Technology to increase the lethality of the deck and improve upon the depth of its toolbox capabilities. Escalation brings with it Boom! a card that can make the Cancer actually Fatal instead of just Dehibilitating. It also brings Observe and Destroy, a card that can get rid of Magnum Opus and kick the shaper player down into a credit hole if you get the opening. The core base stays roughly the same but all the Tech cards can change around to suite whatever meta you're up against.

How it Plays

Not much different from regular CTM. Do CTM things, win game. The deck realistically has to trade San San and/or Breaking News tricks for Museum bullshit instead. It gains longevity and operations consistency, because you can recur Bankers Unions and the like repeatedly, but tagging becomes a matter of throwing money at the problem which requires some care around Temujin and Magnum builds. You won't be nailing anyone with 24/7 -> Closed Accounts -> Hard Hitting News, but if you get an advantage on the board you can really drag it out by recuring HHN and playing it every few turns.

Also, unlike IG museum decks, this deck can actually Win Fast. My games with this deck rarely went over 20 minutes, except in the finals where I took longer as the games vs Wizzard devolved into what felt like kicking sand in each other's faces. In any case, either they score out or you bullshit something out.

In general, the deck looks for openings to repeatedly land tags and goes about creating them with CTM tricks. The CTM power is still brutal and can catch people out randomly.

Psycho is the usual win condition, backed up by EoI tricks and the like. Scoring behind a Tollbooth(s) is also valid: the deck plays a pretty good game of 'Is...THIS an agenda?!" which serves as a backup if the runner is being careful or has their anti-tagging cards out and ready. Between QPI's and an ample supply of trash cards you can bait out a lot of runs.

Cards like Salsa Slums, Employee Strike, Temujin and Networking are all annoying to fight against, but you can Counter Play a lot of them: you effectively have 5 tutor cards in deck, 3 of which are repeatable. You WILL get steamrolled if you don't effectively counter these cards but the deck has a lot of answers to give you a fighting chance.

Anyway, some ground rules on Minutiae.

Always prioritise doing the plays which can be trashed or are temporary over the ones that you have in hand. For instance, if you've got a consulting visit in hand, don't play it when you can use the other one in the deck through Mumbad City Hall to go find something. Chances are they'll try and take down City Hall at some point and won't you look silly with your wasted consulting visit.

Always trigger Museum before Sensies or anything else. Museum shuffles the deck, which gives there a 4/x shot of drawing the recently museum'd card, plus it means the card that Sensies puts on the bottom of the deck stays there (though it probably won't stay for long given how many shuffles you do. Still, means you can be sure that the next runner turn won't involve the runner top decking your agenda.

Keep track of where your cards are. Specifically your tagging cards, consulting visits and the relevant meta cards of the Matchup. Nothing more embarrassing than going for a big Midseasons or HHN only to trigger the city hall, not find a Consulting Visit and realise that they're in the deck. Or worse, your hand. Maximum embarrassment. And people are pretty disinclined to give you backsies for shit like that.

Recommendation is to split your discards up somewhat based on category. Also helps with figuring out what to Museum every turn.

Finally, be careful with your money assets if your opponent can deal with you spamming them 3-per-turn. Set up decks with the appropriate meta cards, stuff like a Wizzard with Salsa Slums, or a well set up Crim with Networking or Shaper with the Rabbit Holes + Mopus. They're your main source of income, given you have precisely 1 burst economy card. You can't easily protect the Bankers of course apart from with Virtual Tour. But you can try to force a tag threat then slam them onto the table.

Agenda Suite

Because CTM is too tight on influence to run the Museum garbage and San San's, this deck uses the influence on GFI's instead of Breaking News. More useful here, given you need 3 pointers to keep down the agenda density.

Since you don't have enough influence for Breaking News it's time to run the 2nd and 3rd best 1 pointers in NBN instead. You need 1 pointers for EoI fuel naturally. Quantum Cat also helps with people floating tags and medium digging you. Can play it down prior to landing a HHN so if they decide to keep the tags you get a free agenda if they run. If they don't you can score next turn, which is a bit peasant tier but still worth if it gets something juicy down the line.

Hades Shard exists because it's GFI number 3, serves to free up some influence and gives you a prime EOI target of 1 extra untrashable Museum. Slighty risky though: you have a 3 pointer actually worth 3 points and used for its ability. Very strange.

I was considering Market Research instead of Explodapaloza, but I'm pretty sure the latter is better. It's too strong as Midseasons bait and the uses for the Former feel a bit too niche. Useful if your opponent keeps all 4 tags though, since you can install -> Consulting -> Psycho and Fast Advance a 3 pointer.

Assets:

Apart from the Alliance Cards there's not that much differing this deck from a regular CTM.

As an aside, there's only 1 Mumbad Temple because the deck is pretty light on actual uses for Mumbad temple. You basically only need 1 to get your money assets working immediately. Most of the ice is also fairly cheap to rez. More realistically the influence tax is just not worth it to run more than 1.

Mumbad Virtual Tour: Slotted it on the day in place of one of the Museums. Was finding 3 Museums unnecessary given the nerfs to them. Unsure if I still think so but it did some amusing shit on the day.

Even in CTM, virtual tour probably isn't worth running by itself, but when you can recur and tutor it the card becomes much better. It also serves as a Temujin counter of sorts: unless they Sec Test the server they have to go trash it. Always good too on R&D or HQ where Sec Testing is unlikely to occur and a lot of runs are high impact. Even on a remote or Archives it serves to prevent multiple Temujin runs on a single turn. Good way to force someone to be low on credits too to be introduced to Mideasons or HHN, especially in a scoring server.

Operations:

Consulting Visit: The point of playing the deck this way.

Diversified Portfolio: Bit of Win More but it serves as a good repeatable source of money. Better played from hand obviously than tutor'd for, but it is the only burst the deck has. Good to have when trying to land a key Midseasons.

Targeted Marketing: It's a 0 cost current. You want it to stop the Employee Strikes and Rumour Mills. It's Targetted Marketing, so you can do random shit like installing behind a Tollbooth and naming Inside Job vs Criminal. Or name Paperclip against Faust decks to keep your Wrap Arounds relevant.

Fun fact, most common card I named with TM was Networking. Welcome to our Brave New World of Netrunner :P

ASI/Closed Accounts/Psycho: Obvious good cards are obvious. You can get away with running singletons because now you can recur them. As an aside, DLR folds to this deck pretty hard since you can be very hardcore with your ASI recursion.

Tagging Cards: This deck needs 2-3 tagging operations and ideally if there's only 2 cards then they should be different. I find you need a combo of both HHN and Midseasons to cover the early and late game respectively. They complement eachother well. If a 3rd tag card is to be added, then it should be a HHN because of the much greater value seeing that card early and not having to tutor for it.

Ice

It's ice. Change it as you see fit. The numbers can be fiddled around a bit based on meta. Just remember to bring 2-3 Trollbooths to tell people to stay out of a server. Trollbooth still one of the best pieces of ice in the game after all.

Final Thoughts:

Hope you like shuffling.