Placing High Stakes, Making Hearts Ache (1st place SC)

This was my Runner counterpart to Pancakes Burning on the Dance Floor, taking me to first-place after Swiss and first-place after double-elimination at the store championship in Chesterfield, UK.

My Corp carried me through the day, going undefeated. Ken, on the other hand, went 2 wins, 2 losses in Swiss and 2 wins, 1 loss in double-elimination. An earlier version of the deck only won 2 games in 8 over two small tournaments the previous weekend.

In short, I don't recommend that you play this deck. It's kind of a mess. I do think it has potential, though: it's good against asset-spam decks, it's pretty good against HB glacier, it's pretty good against RP glacier. It can put up a fight against NBN, both fast-advance and kill, but it's not really very good.

The Deck

The deck began life as "PerfumeShop" by TheBigBoy; it's not on NetrunnerDB so unfortunately I can't mark it as "derived from" (although it very much is!), but you can read much more about it on their blog, here. To explain my changes:

• I switched to Ken. I understand the synergy between Gabe and Pheremones, but ultimately he felt very much "win more": if you're consistently getting into HQ to trigger his ability, you probably have enough money that you don't need the extra two credits. Ken's ability, on the other hand, gives you an economic leg-up across the whole game for something you're going to be doing almost every turn, and (especially in the early game) this gives you an economic boost whilst you're getting set up, which is usually the only time you really need it (and you really need it in the early game).

• The event mix is broadly the same, but I dropped an Emergency Shutdown (3 is overkill), added a Special Order (not seeing Eater early enough is crippling), added two Express Delivery (after testing an earlier build over two tournaments I was desperate for card draw) and added Employee Strike (it helps disrupt a lot of corps and is crippling against others - I won a game against a Haarpsichord that was dumping agendas in Archives by dropping a surprise Employee Strike, running Archives and just winning outright).

• Crash Space is scorch protection and helps make up for the loss of Gabe's credits. Drug Dealer is card draw and it's fantastic - you're usually very rich and you need cards more than you need credits. Film Critic was kinda a dead card and I probably wouldn't include it in future. I dropped to 2x Security Testing because I found I never needed 3, but I can see the argument against doing so.

• I dropped the 2x Faerie and 1x Mongoose, replacing them with a single Alias: there is very little Swordsman in my meta, I generally didn't care about breaking ice on remotes (because I wasn't going to run a remote when my opponent actually had any money with which to rez ice) and being able to run with a full central-only breaker suite seemed sensible. This paid off: in the second game of the final, I abandoned Eater/Pheromones altogether and just Keyholed repeatedly with the three central-only breakers until I won. This feels very much like a meta call, however.

• I dropped one Crescentus and one Sneakdoor. I'm still not sure if this was the right decision, but the previous weekend I just felt that I didnt need either of them and in all honesty I didn't miss either on the day.

Final Thoughts

Don't play this deck - yet. It's not competitive - yet. Every game since I've been testing the "PerfumeShop" archetype has felt like it's on the cusp of greatness, however - there's something there, even if nobody has made it work quite yet. Watch this space.

The Name

Bonus points if you know where the title comes from without Googling it :)