A wild Haarpsichord Appeared! (4-1 at Antwerp SC)

Shell Game

via GIPHY

"The year is 2020" PaulyG

"I haven't seen a Haarpsichord in the wild, in a competitive standard format in a while" - Vesper_DBS

Intro
After taking part in the Net Quarantine event and a couple of beginner tournaments, this was my first Store Championships. I rarely have had time for Netrunner on as regular a basis as I would have liked, but have been playing a tonne over the last couple of months. Haarpsichord has always been a fun go to for me, I enjoy the spammy, risk taking nature of it, as well as when people pause to read cards they forgot existed. I'd been tinkering with Old Hollywood Grid, but just could make it work, the deck is poor and OHG is expensive. I still wanted to play something I was comfortable with and enjoyed playing.

I also realised I would be up against players with a lot more experience than me, so I needed to even the odds a little. With that in mind, I took an Azmari list, fiddled around, and added some tricks. I was of the opinion that people wouldn't know what to expect from the deck, and might play the wrong lines against it. In testing this proved to be true. The scariest part of HHN is the fear of HHN - in reality the only tag punishment this deck had was 1x Exchange. The deck only lost once, to a 419 in a game where I pushed a Beale too early and never recovered econ, a stupid mistake I put down to being out of bed at 9 am for the first time since March!

I faced two 419s, a Jesminder, an Omar and an Eddie Kim.

Some cards people didn't expect/had forgotten

News Team - Arguably the best card in this deck given my plan. News Team is a tempo card. Setting the runner back an agenda point meant the corp had to steal 2 3 pointers and a Beale, gave time for me to click back a 15 Minutes on my terms, and if they took the two tags and trashed it, acted as a great defence for archives, and potentially opened up a EOI window. I think it is a massively underrated card.

Project Junebug - Did a tonne of work. Won a game with a faceplant, but worked well as a threat card. This deck didn't have Ghost Branch or Cerebral Overwriter as I normally would, but discarding them to preemptive them back into R&D gave the remotes a degree of protection.

The ID itself - It protects you against big multi access runs. You can lay out a couple of agendas and they can only take one - clutch I know but it saves the day.

Truth be told this was a more serious deck list than I'd normally play, no Casting Calls, Puppet Masters or Award Baits here.

The deck was well rounded and had a few different Win-Cons, with one punitive, one EOI, one scoring out with a double agenda install and one Junebug.

Changes Daily Business Show didn't work for me on the day. I would have much preferred a second NGO and think it fits with the game plan better. The ice suite could certainly be improved, although I don't know how. Would welcome suggestions.

Unfortunately my Pirate Adam let me down on the day, only winning one game - it was a tweaked list from Cable Carnage and is probably to skill intensive for me, I do think there's a list there, but I needed more practice with it.

Thanks to Thomas for organising the event, everyone I spoke to had a great time, and it was very cool to play 5 people from I believe 5 different countries.

This deck is a tonne of fun, I highly recommend having a play with it, if nothing else you'll enjoy people's surprised reactions

CooK_eD