Took to a GNK today & placed first amongst strong competition, I felt in complete control in every game. Beat Punitive-Vanity Project Biotech, two NEH (one fastro biotics following NAPD Most Wanted List, one Midseasons-Psycho that was not) & an Argus.

MaxXimum Punk Rock circa '71

I've always felt constrained when deckbuilding with MaxX, even though she's easily my favorite runner. We're locked into so much influence in the "Good Stuff" shell: Levy AR Lab Access, Legwork, probably a Lotus Field answer, 2-3x Clone Chip. We have two free influence (which Dan D'Argenio used for Lucky Find in the canonical list) to play with. Then NAPD came in & busted up seven of the influence pips in most lists & poor, punk MaxX was resigned to Eater, Keyhole, DLR shenanigans ("bad stuff" y'all, & it's not even fun drugs).

Now that we cannot spam Parasites in real-time , what's left to live for? Well, we look to another Anarch card that will eventually end up on the MWL & abuse it as badly as we possibly can: Faust. Faust is a powerful card. In a faction with a card named Inject. Did I mention Inject is a card. Did I. Mention.

So anyways I went to revisit a silly list I made to try out interesting Anarch cards from the past cycle, with pancakes & vampires. Since we burn through our deck like a speed junkie on…well…speed, we need two LARLA but suddenly the rest of our influence is more flexible; Clone Chip isn't as vital because we draw >60% of our cards & Faust does all the heavy lifting. Without much need for economy either, we can afford all the silver bullets of the day but also have some fun. When we're liberated, we can finally fit bad cards in our deck. Trope is a bad card. We did it! We put Trope in a deck, y'all.

Drawing Cards is Good in Card Games Mostly Always

This deck plays fast. Pretty early we can get into whatever server we want thanks to Faust. Letting Wyldside run without Pancakes for a few turns won't even matter due to the insane aggression levels we can put up. Drawing three cards for one to zero each turn is unbelievable & means we typically break into one server each turn just to have something to do (other than party with Kati).

Corps will expect either good stuff or bad stuff shenanigans which aren't in our deck. They might not play optimally initially. I can't say I found a way to take good advantage of that. An early Maker's Eye is probably the best we can do, as most reasonable people don't expect burst RnD multi-access out of Anarch.

Good Cards

Day Job. The deck isn't fueled by credits so isn't crushed by its tendency to run low, but Day Job is a great card for rebounding from 2. Slight anti-synergy with Kati Jones & Wyldside doesn't come into play that often. I'd swap to Queen's Gambit except that's too easy to play around, especially after we've run through our deck once & the corp knows it's there. 1x Gambit keeps the corp on their toes & is easily playable. I strongly believe that runner decks need to consider their cost curves now & have cheap rebound economy (because Spark, because must-trash assets, etc.) & Anarch is fortunate to have the best options here.

Turntable. We figured out this card is golden sometimes, but at its worst it's paying a & 2 for a shot at an extra agenda point. No deck runs all two-point agendas. Even though we often don't need the MU, it's worth a deck slot.

Scavenge has great Anarch targets in Imp & D4v1d, with the extra influence bump I haven't missed Clone Chip much.

Impactful one-offs like Legwork & The Maker's Eye. Because of the incredible card draw, we'll see them quickly & if we cycle our deck it won't take long to see them again.

Trope is not the Anarch Levy replacement I dream of feverishly but that's because we've been using it all wrong. We try to install one when our stack is 2-3 turns away from bottoming out, to put a few high-impact cards back (e.g. Legwork, Maker's, a virus)) & be guaranteed to draw two of them with Wyldside. In fact, Trope is far more powerful than Déjà Vu in this list. Since Wyldside guarantees we draw our top two cards, we can replenish our high-impact cards by going Trope, draw (repeat as needed), wait for Wyldside next turn.

Bad Cards

Here's a list of cards I've never played with this deck: Medium, Knifed/all the cutlery, e3 Feedback Implants, Déjà Vu. Trope is a bad card too right isn't that the current best & brightest thinking? Start your cutting there.

Medium is perhaps the strongest Anarch card, a win condition in most decks, but I didn't love it in here. The deck makes powerful event runs like PPVP Kate almost, it does not RnD lock. My late games looked like 1) draw a ridiculous amount of cards for little to no work, 2) somehow recur Legwork or Maker's, whichever is tastier, 3) click Kati.

I tried all three cutlery events since they look sensible on paper; they're influence-free ICE destruction & with the tremendous draw, I assumed I'd be able to draw into the most useful one for the board state quickly. I haven't played a ton with the deck but they have literally never been relevant, the number of times I found myself discarding Knifed to break a barrier is absurd. Every deck still needs some Eli 1.0 hate but honestly, I struggled to find problematic ICE. The devil does work.

I will probably retain e3 Feedback Implants as it's necessary for some match-ups but a dead card in others. NBN's only multi-sub ICE are the nerfed HB imports, plus we can just use Anarch breakers for most multi-sub ICE & they're easier to tutor for out of the heap. I wish e3 was a cybernetics card with reduced cost & some install damage so badly; it'd fit thematically & make it possible to pivot the deck into a cybernetics one with Chrome Parlor, Brain Cage, & NRE (works well with Faust. combos with I've Had Worse). Damon Stone if you're reading this plz reprint e3 thx.

Déjà Vu only has 2 virus targets. It's there as insurance in case a vital match-up card goes in the bin but is also rarely relevant. I used to have two but cut one for the third SOT, which was correct.

Silver Bullets

Corroder is for Wraparound.

Yog.0 is for Turing on a central. Feelsbad, I'm a lot less happy about this card slot than the above.

Mimic is not a bad include but it wasn't in my list. I've never seen a Swordsman rezzed against me but I would strongly think about it, it's a tech card that will see play. e3 does similar work against the low-strength, multi-sub ICE.

D4v1d breaks stuff that would cost us too many cards. I actually didn't find it super relevant except for Archer, but remote Turing alone makes it a must-have.

Imp for every other corporation card.

I used to have Utopia Shard & Plascrete Carapace but I didn't miss them. If you see meat damage a lot those will be powerful but Imp does similar work.

Inject

Inject is the best card in Netrunner. True fact. Playing it automatically gets us an agenda point, kind of like Notoriety except instead of running it's doing drugs.