The News Team Predicts a Doomsday

First off, HUGE respect to Isvan for developing the original Haarpsichord Doomsday deck. It's a revolutionary deck, and you should definitely check out his most recently updated version here: http://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/25391/haarpsichord-doomsday-2-3-public-sympathy-shield-1st-place-

However, the game has changed. With the advent of a couple of new cards from Data and Destiny, a substantial portion of what Haarpsichord Doomsday needed to worry about is now completely irrelevant. Allow me to explain.

The basic plan in Haarpsichord Doomsday is to leverage the powerful Jackson/Power Shutdown/Accelerated Diagnostics combo into a scored Hades Shard through one of a couple of card chains, the simplest of which was Biotic, Shutdown, Jackson into Interns and 2 Shipment from Sansan, then Accelerated Diagnostics into a scored Hades Shard. Assembling those pieces took time, and usually you had to have between 6 & 9 credits to pull it off, so there was a lot of early-game jockeying for position. Even after you scored out, the runner had a very feasible race plan against you if they could manage to snag at least one two-point agenda before you combo'd.

No longer, and this version of Doomsday is perhaps the most extreme logical expression of that philosophy. With the arrival of Quantum Predictive Model and News Team, Haarpsichord is now able to easily leapfrog even a runner who is able to get ahead on agendas before the combo happens. As such, the deck is fully oriented toward assembling the core combo quickly and scoring out with an absolute minimum of downtime.

Once you combo out, the runner must run Archives in order to have a possibility of winning. Once they do, the runner takes a few tags from TGTBT, you gain a bunch of cash from Explode-a-Palooza, and then they must decide to either take -3 agenda points or 6 tags from News Team, either of which is game-ending; if they take the 6 tags from News Team, you just win on a Psychographics'd Beale from 8 total tags on your next turn. If the runner doesn't know their access order rules, you get to score 3 points from Quantum Predictive Model.

Let's assume that they're smart and take the agenda point penalty.

You begin your turn, take either Red Herrings or Closed Accounts, whichever you don't have, and play both. Now the runner has to, realistically, run on archives twice to score once. If this happens, you have a guaranteed Quantum Predictive Model multi-score, in which case you end the game via a number of routes. If the runner hangs back to build up enough money to win in a single run, you fast advance into a conventional win with Astro and a Beale.

If you're looking to play the fastest game of Netrunner you've ever played, this deck might be for you. I've scored out my seventh point on turn three in testing--in, in point of fact, only the second game I tested with the deck.