Hydra CTM (1st at EMEA Continentals, 7-1)

This beautiful pile of cards, including no less than two Hydras (+ two Tollbooth) helped me to claim 1st place in the EMEA Continentals this weekend.

For those of you who remember the good Cpt America CTM list, this is its evil counterpart. We don´t durdle around around with vegan tag punishment should you decide to float tags, we just launch a rocket straight at your face. While this takes up a lot of our influence, this also means that we just need to devote two slots to tag punishment. With Psychographics / Exchange of Information you can often still lose the game if the runner goes tag me early and trashes you board, while the BOOM! immediately finishes the game and give you great odds in that scenario. Predictive Planogram is a fine card on its own and becomes amazing if the runner is tagged, serving as an additional way to punish tags.

The decklist is strongly inspired by the list Nordrunner published on NRDB. At that time I was playing mostly CTM (the Process-Version) on Jnet and thought I give this list a spin. I just changed two cards to include a little more cheap ice, as seven ice felt a tad too little expecially with 4 of them being on the higher end in terms of rez cost. The deck had an extremely high win rate, so I decided to stick with it for the tournament.

I feel like the deck is fairly well positioned in the meta right now. Bankers and Rashida in combination with the upgrades give you a lot of tempo in the early game and are very difficult to contest, unless the runner has a ton of econ early. Against Apoc decks you want to score an early ARES while they setup, which makes it very difficult to land an apoc without ending the turn with two tags (Prisec, Ping help on those turns). If they take their time to clear out the upgrades, you can punish them with your big ice rez. Although the ice seems vulnerable to cards like Botulus or Apocalypse, even one break costs the runner 14 for mkultra onor 12 for blorch (with the install) and then there is usually the forced trash of the upgrade + tag removal, which even rich runners struggle to do, while still staying out of HHN range.

Some games you don´t have money to rez these bad boys, but that usually means the runner is also poor trying to keep your board under control and then you can often either land a HHN at some point or score an ARES to get the runner of the trashing plan.

SanSan is often not actually needed in the games, but helps a lot if the runner just tries to camp your remotes or to sneak out an ARES and leave them in an akward spot.

Thanks to all of Nisei, the organizers/streamers and my opponents for an amazing two days of netrunner. Got me even hyped enough to publish my first deck on NRDB!