p4wned 1.3 (3rd place Zürich regionals)

I'm incredibly proud of this deck. It started as a fun idea about one year ago (when I was completely new to the game) and performed really well last weekend in my first regionals ever, going 5-1 and getting me 3rd place.

Don't worry, I won't make any absurd claims that this is tier 1 material, but it has a solid game plan and can adapt to a wide variety of threats. Yes it contains the beach party / game day combo, but it's not a combo deck. 47 cards doesn't mean the deck is jank, this is a serious and reasonably well-tuned list. It does ok against glacier, is almost impossible to flatline, has a very fast and tight clot lock, and keeps asset spam in check at least for a while.

I laid out the fundamentals of the deck in the writeup of the 1.0 version (https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/30023/p4wned-1-0-after-napd-most-wanted-). It relies heavily on Faust but also makes lots of money selling random junk to the pawnshop. The other breakers are mainly there to counter AI-hate but occasionally help out when the pressure on your hand gets too great and you really need to get into a server. I will often install Inti or Zu.13, use them a couple of times and then sell them to pay for levy etc. The key to playing the deck well is learning to manage a constantly shifting rig and understanding that even cards like symmetrical visage, beach party and chronotype can be sold when needed and replayed later.

A couple of things have changed since the 1.0 version, mainly cutting 2 street peddlers because the influence was urgently needed, so the deck is slightly slower to set up but much more solid. I replaced 2x cycy with 1x zu.13 as Turing is much less prominent these days. All of this opens a ton of deck slots for silver bullets such as clot, film critic, councilman against caprice, hunting grounds against komainu and data raven, etc. Because the deck cycles so fast I am practically guaranteed to see all of these silver bullets every game, and the ones I don't need net 2, 3 or even 7 credits for half a click.

Here's the tournament report:

Swiss

Round 1 against NEH FA:

I got the clot lock and kept it going. I don't remember anything else about this game.

Round 2 against Blue Sun:

This was some kind of punitive kill deck (power shutdown I think), but 10 cards in hand + 6 on bookmark put an end to the flatline dream. I made several blunders (parasiting his spiderweb was particularly embarassing) but then I focused and played a patient, calculated game, eventually pulling a 3-pointer and takeover out of R&D.

Round 3 against HB FA:

This was a weird homebrew deck, so I needed to find out his game plan asap. When I accessed a biotic I immediately set up the clot lock. I got a couple of points out of R&D, but he never-advanced a chronos project removing clot and about 20 other cards from the game, my worst nightmare. He fast advanced 2 beta tests in a row, triggering both and getting 4 ICE out of them. Being de facto locked out of R&D I thought I had lost for sure but then he forgot to rez his Jackson and I had councilman out, so I went straight for archives and pulled out the win.

Round 4:

Intentional drawing is lame but then those are the rules and I like winning.

Top 8

Game 1 against Palana Glacier:

I had a rough start with only symmetrical visage and a bunch of silver bullets. I still managed to keep something like an R&D lock going for a while. He had an eli stacked with a wall of static, so I would alternate between getting in with Faust and Inti. At some point I ran out of cards and couldn't keep up the lock any longer, so I took a risk: I sold Mimic to be able to pay for Levy next turn. It turns out he did have the swordsman I suspected on R&D, which completely wrecked me. When he IAA'd his last agenda, I went for a Maker's eye, popping SMC after passing swordsman to get Faust back, but he smartly used his Nisei Token and I had no chance of contesting the remote. Down to the loser's bracket I go.

Game 2 against NEH asset spam FA:

I got clot super early, and fought hard for occasional R&D accesses through his Archangel + Little Engine. When I finally stole a global food, he exchanged it for a breaking news that had been sitting on the table forever, a huge tempo hit for me. Somehow I kept up the clot lock and at some point he had to put down an Astro behind Archangel + Tour Guide, which I managed to steal thanks to instant speed parasite. He parked another Food behind the Archangel, which I stole on the final turn for a timed win.

Game 3 (with corp) against Val siphon spam:

My corp was a minimally modified Info refinery. He siphoned me and pretended to have had worse. I called his bluff and it turns out that Scorch, Archived, Scorch was the worst he had had.

Game 4 against Palana Glacier:

Rematch of Game 1. This time I did a lot better, I knew that he ran multiple snares and swordsmen, but probably no Komainu. I installed Mimic before Faust and went for R&D. He didn't rez the swordsman, bleeding free accesses that got me an early Nisei steal. The game stabilized, then he killed my film critic with a surprise snatch and grab, which hurt my R&D prospects a lot. He slowly but surely built up an unassailable remote, but after scoring food his econ was kind of bad. At some point he tried to sneak out a naked philotic, and I went straight for it because I'm not particularly afraid of snare. This tipped me off about him being agenda flooded, which he confirmed a couple of turns later by playing celebrity gift showing me nisei, food and future perfect. Now that he had the economy to protect his remote, he installed the nisei and managed to score it while I was busy levying. I ran HQ a couple of times to no avail. He installed what I assumed was the food into the remote, leaving him with future perfect in hand. I managed to redraw my film critic and ran HQ once, but he used the nisei token. Time was about to be called and I was losing 4-5 at this point. I ran HQ 2 more times, emptying my hand to Eli, hitting the agenda and hosting it on critic with just one click to spare. In a desperation move he used Jackson to shuffle his snatch and grab back, which was the optimal play but still giving him less than 10% chance to win, and he didn't get lucky.

Game 5 (with corp) against Hayley:

We had a really back and forth game, being very even in economy, but then I blundered away my chance to win with midseasons by holding back 2 credits instead of pumping the trace all the way, landing only a single tag which was not enough.

Even though I made a bunch of silly mistakes, I'm still really happy with my 3rd place finish, and the whole day was a blast.