Stimulating Gameplay

Big hand and big plans, the main gimmick of the deck is using Severnius Stim Implant to hammer HQ or R&D for punishing multi-accesses. Get your hand size massive and then go in with a standard array of breakers and World Tree to tutor everything.

The Deck-ception; I was playing hit card game Arkham Horror the Card Game® and my friend was playing one Harvey Walters known for his massive, hand-size. I thought can I turn hand-size into a win condition in Netrunner? The answer is, mostly.

Why Padma?: You might ask, why not Ari? Well dear reader its because I found it worth the sacrifice of speed to charge the Mechanocytes fast to reach the critical breakpoint of 10 hand-size. An option for sure is to go for her or even Anarch but I think the inconsistency you experience not having a tutor would really suffer.

Stim Implants: You might not be familiar with this card but it allows you to gain an additional access per two cards you trash from your hand. You must always trash two as the initial price but you may trash as many as you want. Depending on the situation you will be able to decide how much you really need, if you have seen most of HQ before only chucking 4 cards for 3 accesses is often quite worth it. The haymaker is of course binning all your cards for an R&D run for 8 or 9 accesses. It provides a flexible game plan that lets you poke centrals for big rips while still being World Tree shaper who can lock a remote.

The Gameplan: Mulligan for World Tree or a way to get world tree, you need it to find the pieces that create the win condition. The deck is stuffed with options, throwing away one decent hand should hopefully find another.

Once World Tree is down the work can begin, dig for some way to get the stim implants fast or the Mechanocytes. The airblades are here to die to WT for good cards but if they can save some damage go for it. Rigging Up does wonders with the Mechanocytes since it adds a charge and then running R&D boosts you up yet further. Use World Tree tricks to assemble a breaker set as needed and do not be afraid to play aggressively, what are they going to do kill you?

Aim for 10 hand-size give or take, this allows you to consistently dig HQ or R&D every turn or so. If you can toss Steelskin Scarring to the Stim Implants to protect from incidental damage and to ready yourself for the next assault. Each turn should prep for the next as you unleash a rolling barrage of multi-access.

The Bad: The biggest issue this deck has is speed, it can take several turns to get online and unlike typical world tree decks we often spend two turns not getting breakers or turbine as we need the implants or mechnaocytes. Also if you draw weird you can be short on cash which really hurts as you need to pay for some expensive things like World Tree. In game decision making can be tight as what to World Tree trigger and when can make or break your game.

In conclusion: I doubt this deck will set the meta a blaze but I hope you find it fun and interesting enough to give it a spin in your next game, as a plus it forgoes Lilypad for Aniccam preventing some annoying shuffle patterns IRL.