419 Apoc Wine

I took this slight modification to Sweet Berry Wine Me to a GNK this weekend. I'm not here to talk about how amazing it was, because I won one (Spark) and lost three (Blue Sun, The Outfit, and The Foundry--don't ask). I'm here to talk about what little I learned about modified netdecking.

I knew I wanted to play an Apocalypse deck. I had been playing a Mining Accident Liza deck, but I thought there might be some serious tag hate and I didn't feel like playing around tag hate. I considered Los because I love his ability and it seemed to work great with Apocalypse (get credits testing servers, get credits after Apocalypse). But ultimately I went with 419 because I feel like link is a safety net, and the potential for expose + Aumakua seemed like a good Apocalypse game plan.

The first thing to go was Eater. Throwing down an Eater telegraphs that you're planning on doing something sneaky--at least to this newish Netrunner player. It seemed valuable to provide the Corp with as little information as possible and Crowdfunding provides plausible deniability for the Apocalypse turn.

That left me with an incomplete breaker suite. I worried about not having a fracter, but figured if spags can go to Worlds without a fracter, I could go to a GNK without a fracter. This was a mistake, because Blue Sun loves it some barriers, and Hagen is extremely difficult for this deck to deal with. A Corroder would have been a worthwhile addition to this deck.

I swapped in The Class Act for Earthrise Hotel, which felt like a straight upgrade. I never saw the single Earthrise on the day, and didn't miss seeing it, so it could probably go.

Employee Strike had to go, so I took Corporate "Grant" for my counter-current and stuck in some Deuces Wild. I'd like to try another Deuces instead of the Earthrise, both to spend influence and to provide a little extra turtle power.

I took Always Have a Backup Plan over Spear Phishing to play around with a new Downfall card. It managed to facecheck me into a Chiyashi; more testing is needed.

I got to Apocalypse twice on the weekend: once to solid effect against Spark and once against Blue Sun, who found an Archived Memories next turn and was able to throw down ICE quickly. That was satisfying, even if I got Punitive'd on turn two against the Outfit and spent most of my game against The Foundry staring at Hagen on HQ and R&D and a Fairchild 3.0 on Archives. Next time!