Bear Trap - Top Jinteki Deck - 49th Place

This was the Corp deck I used at this year's World Championship.

I showed up to Minneapolis on Wednesday night not knowing what I should play. I had been practicing mostly with a SYNC list very close to Ben Ni's list but I thought there would be a fair amount of Rabbit Hole Kates, a near auto loss if they can find the pieces fast enough. After dinner with a few friends I went up to the hotel room that Brendan (@Embaci) was nice enough to share with me and asked him what he thought I should do and what he was playing. He showed me this magnificent Pālanā Foods: Sustainable Growth list that he said was basically constructed just to ruin an Anarch's day. Clone Retirement to scrub Valencia's pub, Encrypted Portals to make Lotus Field too big for even for Whizzard's Net-Ready Eyes to see. Ark Lockdown to destroy problematic events or Conspiracy breakers. I told him that the list looked amazing and asked if I could also use it and he said yes, so I did and I had a ton of fun with it despite a couple tough losses.

R1: Win vs. Andromeda. Turn 1 or 2 Ark Lockdown on Paperclip with Himitsu-Bako on HQ and remote and Lotus Field on R&D and eventually Archives. He concedes with his 1-of Paperclip gone and his decoder being Yog.0 without Net-Ready Eyes.

R2: Loss vs. Eric Caoli's FaustCakes Whizzard. He got a blazing fast start and I struggled to set up.

R3: Win vs. Valencia. Guy was on Incubator/Medium/Blackmail combo. Early Fast Track for Clone Retirement, he burns a Blackmail and a Same Old Thing-Blackmail to look for it in HQ but whiffs. I scrub the pub and cruise to a fairly easy victory.

R4: Loss vs, Timmy Wong's Hate Bear. Rebirthed into Omar and Medium'd me to death.

R5. Win vs. Ken Tenma. I got just the right mixture of money and ICE and eventually made every server was too taxing. He ended up conceding so that we would have time for game 2 and he would have time for a smoke break before round 6.

R6: Win vs. Raj's Hate Bear. Early Lockdown on Paperclip which made Faust his only way through Himitsu and extended the game long enough to burn through his entire deck. He had a tough break with 2 or 3 of his siphons being in the bottom 5-10 cards.

R7: Win vs. Benjamin Mason's TemuWhiz. Forced him to break Lotus Fields with Black Orchestra and scored out.

R8: Loss vs. Kenny Deakin's TemuWhiz. An incredibly close game where he won of a single card access on R&D after spending 2 D4V1D tokens on 2 Lotus Fields with I think 4 cards left in his stack. I would be more bitter about it if I hadn't done nearly the same thing to him in our next game :P

R9: Loss to Aaron Andries' AnnoyingAF Kate. We're both on X-5 and know that X-6 won't be good enough. We agree to let 1 match decide both games and flip for side. I have to play Palana. He vamps, I lose. Definitely the most 1 sided match I played with this deck all week.

The deck ended up 5-4 but with my Nexus Kate going a decent 6-3 (1 of the losses being a concession in R9) I finished 49th which made this the top finishing Jinteki deck at the tournament. Hearing this brought me a lot more sadness than joy. Of the top 49 decks of the tournament, 7 of them were HB, 1 was Weyland, 1 was Palana. The other 40 were NBN. The lack of diversity is highly concerning and alienating a lot of players who like the diversity within the game. Hopefully these results will be analyzed and fixed by FFG.

Shout-out to anyone and everyone I talked to at Worlds. My local meta has dissolved over the last year and it was nice to remember that there are still a lot of Netrunner people out there that I can call friends. Hopefully I'll see you all next year!