Lat and Eru, Here For The Barbie [3-1 @ New Year Showdown]

Welcome to the Barbie!

I wanted to try something off-beat before finally giving in and playing Mulch/Mawrie/Loup and that's when @Zarbba's genius breaker-less Akiko "Throw Another Deer on the Barbie" hit the Deck of the Week..

@Zarbba said in the description that the deck was cool and maybe good and I just want to say I think it's an absolute banger! Finality at home, pre-paid breaking, charging cards, I giggled in excitement reading the list and thinking about all the possible shenanigans.

Normally I like to play decks that have a few exciting cards that people aren't expecting, so I figured why not make that half the deck! After a bit of iterating, this is my take.

tl;dr:

• Secretly play Criminal-like tricks out of Shaper
• Play cards your opponents need to re-read
• Threaten Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
• Use a mob of virtual deer to play Finality at home multiple times
• Win??

No runner deck did better than 3-1 at the New Year Showdown, so maybe it's even actually kind of OK :D

New and Old Shenanigans

The main thing we have here is a pool of tricks:

• Build-your-own Finality
  • Nyashia is the core here, we always want the full set
  • Jailbreak / Eru also give us +1 access
  • Accessing 4-5s card does a quite reasonable job of finding agendas and giving us info
• Pre-Paid Breakers
  • Kongamato, Gbahali, and Boomerang let us pre-pay for our breaking meaning that when running we don't have to worry about spending too much to steal a Bellona etc
  • Pre-paying also means once they're out we have a perpetual threat no matter our credit total, unlike regular breakers
  • Poison Vial can be vital for bigger pieces of ICE, but for many it's not strictly needed
  • DJ Quetzal, we're not going to run HQ enough for Steve, but repeatedly breaking Barriers is something we often want
• Sneakdoor Eru
  • Eru is our closer, lettings us get into R&D via a (hopefully) less ICEd server and giving us an extra access in the process
  • We want her in virtually every game (hence x2)
• It's Lat
  • Until our opponent see's the menagerie they almost certainly think we're playing "normal" Netrunner
  • Often this is good for an early steal against PD and other rushy decks since we can hot drop a crocodile or boomerang and go
  • If you can guess the ICE (or saw it in R&D) then Kongamato works against common early plays like Magnet, Wraparound, Tatu-Bola etc
  • Clickless card-draw really helps assemble the hodge-podge breaking suite
• Stoneship Chart Room
  • Combined with Lat draws this gives us some real defense against kill decks
  • Sometimes we just use it to dig for pieces
  • Often it charges something important
• Into the Depths
  • First and foremost this pulls Nyashia so you can get 3x ASAP and really threaten R&D
  • Sometimes we also get some money or charge a card as a treat
• Mayfly
  • For when we really need to get somewhere or our opponent thinks the remote is safe, bonus, it's fetchable with Into the Depths
• Reclaim??
  • Get back any breaker piece that's not DJ Quetzal
  • Return a Nyashia that was trashed by an SDS or similar
• Some mediocre HQ pressure
  • It's not great, but Jailbreak can give us a little help in a pinch
  • This is awkward, we don't tell our opponents about this

The Actual Gameplan

The core plan is accessing a bunch of cards in R&D which is pretty generically good when the Corp meta is so diverse. We also trade off longevity and repeated accesses in order to be able to have the option to threaten any server, at a moments notice, right up until the late game. We do need a lot of draw for this to work, so we also need to be getting the Lat draw as often as possible and digging with Diesel, Dr Nuka, and possibly even Stoneship.

In a typical game we can break ~6-8 ICE encounters, but that's any ICE, which rewrites the Corp's ICE placement equations since now ideally every server has 2-3 layers of cheap ICE. Most Corp decks aren't set up for this and even those that are still need to draw that ICE giving us time to execute our plans.

Most important we need to maximise the quality of our runs.

I think the best way to take advantage of our toys is to be coy about our plans in the early game if our opponent doesn't know our deck. Then when there's probably an agenda in the remote, drop the breakers and go. Bonus points if it's only a Boomerang since we can probably still keep up the charade, potentially getting us another surprise steal.

If our opponent knows what's up then things are trickier. The existence of our breakers means we can use the threat of running to slow down the corp while we get 3x Nyashia up and running and it becomes a mind game of when will they attempt to score out of the remote and can we get past any tricks. This is super matchup dependent, but since the penalty for getting it wrong is high, I think the best option is to really push the threat angle so they use up resources protecting the remote then only make good on the threat if you're absolutely sure you'll get a steal out of it.

Otherwise I think generally the best plan is to make use of early facechecks (we often have little to lose) to get a few peeks at R&D when possible, this often provides useful intel on what ICE may be where so we know better what and when to contest.

Once the remote is looking too expensive then we gotta work out where the Agendas are.. the answer is normally R&D which is nice since we have little HQ pressure. Though, if we think the corp is flooded then Jailbreaking HQ or even just running for single accesses is probably fine in a pinch.

If the agendas are in R&D then it's time to Do The Thing. Hopefully we've nabbed an Agenda or two already since that's going to help put The Math in our favour, but if not then we need ~17 R&D accesses (see this great Metropole Grid video).

While we've been threatening servers we should hopefully have found x2-3 Nyashia; any time using Into the Depths we almost certainly want to pull it. Combined with our 6 sources of Charge, I find most games I'm using (or have the option to use) ~9-12 Nyashia counters + ~2-4 extra accesses off Eru or Jailbreak spread across 3-4 big runs. This nicely works out as ~14-20 accesses meaning we can get a win ~50% of the time just from hitting R&D.

As our number of accesses goes above 17 our win rate rapidly improves (e.g. it's ~75% around 22 accesses), so every little trick we can pull to see more cards is worth it. Run early when the corp might not rez the ICE, let some sub-routines fire to give us some extra reach later, get an early agenda from somewhere, anywhere! The best improvement to the maths is just to have more Agendas in the score area, who knew?

Most games are closed out by playing Eru and looking at 5 cards.

Pain Points

Cards like Anoetic Void and Border Control really eat into our breaking reserve..

• Sometimes we can just accept that if we know we'll get an agenda out of it, most of the time I think we just need to try and anticipate it so we don't waste resources and start looking elesewhere. We can still threaten these though, keep putting down breakers and often we can convince an opponent to e.g. put a 4th piece of ICE on the remote costing them valuable tempo and resources

R&D triggering traps like Snare!, Nightmare Archive or Behold! are problematic in multiples or with other extra damage effects..

• I think we just have to accept this as a hazard, take standard steps to mitigate like running with 6+ cards against PE and having money to clear tags. Be aggressive if the Corp is low on credits

Asset Spam exists..

• The out is probably just to draw hard for Nyashia and some economy then dive R&D and maybe soul read agendas hiding on the board.. Honestly I think this matchup is incredibly hard, if you have some tips then please share!

Fast Advance exists..

• Invoking the threat helps, similar to asset spam, I think the out is to triple down on the R&D pressure

High Points

• Making ICE quality far less relevant than ICE quantity
• Dodging or mitigating popular combos like Stavka-Hafrún
• Opponents double-taking after seeing DJ Quetzal or a surprise Crocodile
• The mind games of being able to simultaneously get anywhere (sometimes even on T1), but also it being ruinously expensive if you go to the wrong place

Options

• Beatriz Friere Gonzalez I think could be solid, but often I find myself wanting to get into HQ anyway leading to it being ICEd over or prefering to make a normal run
• Mind's Eye felt like too much of a hit to include+play and then also draws too much attention to R&D to make actually making the 3 runs a reasonable proposition
• Captain Padma similarly draws extra attention to R&D from the outset and I often found myself charging Nuka when I could have been getting clickless draws via Lat
• Akiko.. look I also want Akiko to be good, but she has the same issues as Padma, plus people are tipped off to there being shenanigans
• Mad Dash, Finality + an extra point if you hit actually sounds pretty good especially in some matchups, this one is a contender
• Finality // Maker's Eye.. you know maybe there' a version of this deck that plays those over Jailbreak..
• Falsified Credentials, one of the few expose cards, if it could fit then this might actually be good to know when to run the remote
• Chameleon can be a nice way to break through revealed ICE repeatably, but I found it was too expensive to use it often
• Slap Vandal seems like it would be good, but my opponents are clever and just trash the ICE and I look sad

Wrap Up

Deck is fun to play, Netrunner is great, hope you found something enjoyable here^^

Thanks to @maninthemoon for running a very fun tournament and all the other people involved that made it great. Also thanks to @holzpubbnsubbe for bouncing these silly ideas around with me and @mays.leyline for getting me to join the tournament in the first place, plus both for moral support during^^