"What if I Chose to Dream?" Streets (4th@Scottish Regionals)

This deck started life as Querica's Mean Streets. I took that deck to the Midlands Regionals and it helped me finish 12th, I liked it but it wasn't quite right for me.

So I came back to Scotland and began testing. I rearranged the ice, took out the Snare! and shored up the economy, whilst trying to reduce the overall bad publicity output. I overcorrected in the wrong direction and went from winning most of my games to narrowly losing all of them. The group I was testing with figured out the deck as well as I had, and they knew how to beat it. In honour of this deck's results, I named it "Meme Streets", and then went into the week of Regionals feeling down about my chances of winning with it.

Then, on Wednesday at around midnight, I had an epiphany, "What if I just add the Snare back? Screw it, what if I add two? And don't tell anyone so it's a surprise?"

""What If I Chose to Dream?" Streets" was born at that moment.

A breakdown of the deck -

This deck is built around hitting 4 Bad Publicity and quickly scoring Hostile Takeovers, and there's several ways to do this throughout the deck. It also has the chaos factor of the runner hitting Snares which has won me several games outright, and has set up paths to victory in numerous others.

Economy wise we've got Too Big to Fail, which is great at the start of the game, and there's lots of satisfying tricks you can do to maximize your economy with it (installing an ice and paying the install tax to drop below 10 credits to immediately Too Big next click, etc) but the deck benefits from getting your credits high and keeping them high, which is why I've added 2 Government Subsidies on top of the 3 Hedge Funds which were already in the original list. (This deck wins 30% more games if your Hedge Funds are “Honk Fund” alt arts by ShipmentofHeadcrabs. I don’t make the rules.)

Ice wise you've got the Border Controls to end runs when required, the Data Loops tax the runner at all stages of the game (especially when they can otherwise break the subroutines for free) and can often enable a kill if they hit a Snare on the same run. The runner encountering a freshly rezzed Data Loop whilst trying to run a tripled advanced City Works Project can often cause them to jack out in fear too. The Valentão and Trebuchets generate bad pub for our win condition, and with careful positioning in the early game, the Valentão can lock out the runner and effectively be free to rez (3 from the bad pub, 2 from the subroutines firing).

I went down to 2 Trebuchets instead of Mean Streets' 3 to reduce bad pub output, dropped 1 Magnet because the Scottish meta doesn't really involve viruses, and added 2 Descents to help empty Archives if I became victim of Esâ shenanigans (which happened a lot in testing).

I swapped the Marivus for Business As Usual. Personal preference, I like the idea of having a 0 cost Advance in tight games, and Mavirus often felt like a dead draw that required setup in order to work, often whilst Aumakua is running roughshod on my centrals and getting out of control. It's nice to have a targeted virus removal.

The kill component of this deck is your opponent unexpectedly hitting a Snare (or hitting both during multi-access, dream big!), it can also kill with Punitive Counterstrike, with a Data Loop protecting a City Works Projects, and often a Punitive Counterstrike after a Data Loop protecting a City Works Project.

I removed the 3 copies of Angelique Garza Correa to make space for my additions discussed above. She's a good card that can surprise runners, but most of the time during testing she was just getting trashed during R&D runs and I wanted the consistency of the cards I replaced her with.

Weaknesses of the deck to be aware of:

It's The Outfit, hopefully you know where it struggles already. Against strong runners like Kit, your window to win is before their icebreaker suite is online because once it is you've basically given them the bad pub to breach any server for free.

This deck is tailored to the Scottish meta, if your meta is infected with Virus players you'll want to swap the Business as Usual back to a Mavirus, and you'll probably want to go back to 3 Magnets, for everyone else, have fun!

Thank you to the Scottish Netrunner scene for your help in creating this deck, especially Zylus, qenya, MShiggy, RowRow, SpaceGhost and the rest of the Dundee crew!