Is This Wi-Fi Gluten Free? [5-1, Chicago Regionals 2018]

I’ve been playing this deck with very few changes since it went 5-1 at Worlds (let down by my Runner, but that’s a story for another day) and taught me the true joy of grind-y Palana. After Worlds, this deck has consistently been winning at all manner of casual weekly play and went 5-1 again at Chicago 2018 regionals (versus Val, Val, MaxX, Adam, and Hayley.) The nucleus of this deck is unsurprising to anyone who’s been perusing glacier Jinteki decks, but with enough surprise choices here to keep the Runner on the ropes. I’ll try not to blather on about the obvious choices here (“DNA Tracker? In Jinteki? Groundbreaking.”) but if there’s a slot choice that doesn’t make sense or that you’d like me to elaborate, please leave a comment and let me know.

This deck exists to force the Runner into an un-winnable game state. With enough taxing of cards through ICE and traps, eventually the Runner will reach a point where they simply can’t steal an Obokata Protocol, leaving you to score with impunity. You may even reach a point where the Runner can’t make a successful run without flatlining thanks to Data Loop, Kakugo, and Hokusai Grid. If you happen into a matchup where the Runner can prevent net damage, the ICE in this deck is still brutal enough that paying through all of it feels a worse fate than a flatline.

Tech Slots/Influence

Bryan Stinson doesn’t require explanation – if his ability fires once in a game, he’s provided economic value unlike any other card in the current pool. And if you can fire him three times in a turn? Good luck, Runner. He also looks surprisingly similar to a Hokusai Grid when you plop him on a remote. Reversed Accounts to get them within Bryan range, but also just as a good way to pump the breaks on a runner who’s spamming Liberated Accounts and waiting for the time to strike. I also really love just letting a rezzed Reversed Accounts hang as a Sword of Damocles in my remote, since it cost the Runner way more in cards/credits than it cost me to put it there. Biased Reporting can, at the very least, let you recover from going dangerously low on credits – there are very few situations where you can’t guarantee a profit of four credits, and there are an increasing number of situations where you can guarantee over twenty credits from a well-connected Criminal, Pirate, or Mom. MCA Informant and Voter Intimidation because THOU SHALT NOT SUFFER A FILM CRITIC TO LIVE, but also because their collateral damage is decent enough to make them evergreen: MCA for Beth or maybe a Tech Trader if you’re drowning in money, Voter Intimidation for whatever the hell you want once they’ve found a House of Knives or proc’d a Fan Site. My personal favorite is hitting a Same Old Thing once they’ve thrown their Levy away, to remind them of their own mortality. Cyberdex Virus Suite purely to make them faceplant something nasty once they’ve farmed their weight in Datasucker/Aumaukua tokens, but also to be able to fast advance if they get wise and notice your Shipment from Tennin. I’ve spent a lot of time monkeying with the number of spikes in this deck, and two Breached Dome with two Snare! feels best to me. I would love a third Snare – wouldn’t we all? – but cutting into economy to add it feels like skipping vegetables to get more dessert and wondering why your stomach aches. If you’re more of a traditional Glacierist, you might be tempted to cut these to get more tech slots or more ICE – don’t. Snare wins games. Snare killed at least one person at the Chicago regional, and it kills more Runners than you would ever anticipate looking at this list. Breached Dome further grinds down the Runner’s available HP pool, shores up your Archives or HQ defenses, and just generally helps slow the tempo of the game in your favor. Hokusai Grid isn’t nearly as fashionable in Data Loop/Obokata decks now that Ben Musashi is on the scene, but I vastly prefer Hokusai. One guaranteed damage is infinitely better than the possibility of two damage on a central, and in a remote server Hokusai fires in a much larger variety of situations. Icing on the cake, but Hokusai costs more to trash and provides further protection against Film Critic.

ICE

Not many surprises here, so let me indulge in a personal love letter to Archer. Archer slightly beats out Snare as my favorite card in all of Netrunner for its elegant design and sheer game-reversing power. Few pieces of ice have the propensity to instantly end the game on faceplant, but Archer consistently wins me games against mildly under-prepared Runners. It’s been out of fashion lately in favor of its flashier, newer sibling Tithonium, but Archer differs from Tithonium in that it’s not just painful to faceplant, it’s painful to break in any meaningful fashion. Most breakers will average an 8 credit tax each time they want to run through Archer, and it all but explicitly demands that Runners using bypass mechanics like Femme or Security Nexus divert resources to it specifically.

No controversial statements here, but if you haven’t seen Anansi in the wild let me be the first to tell you that it’s absolutely bonkers. Make sure you can break it before you start running wild and faceplanting, because letting an Anansi fire can put a runner on the backstep for the rest of the game.

If I have any complaints about this deck, it’s Chiyashi. I loved Chiyashi for a long time, but Laamb rips through it like tissue paper for how expensive it is and not enough Runners are relying on AI breakers to warrant both it and Swordsman. I am going to try cutting Chiyashi for Mlinzi to see if saving a few bucks on yet another 5 strength sentry isn’t the best of both worlds.

Agenda Suite

Obokata Protocol is the best agenda to have ever been printed in the history of Netrunner. I love it not because it singlehandedly propels Jinteki into a viable glacier identity, but because it generates so much interaction and decision on both sides of the table. The Runner stealing an Obokata early on can mean the start of an uphill battle toward seven points for the Corp, or it can mean sacrificing cards that leave the Runner desperately scrambling to catch up in vain. Hitting an Obokata during a Deep Data Mining dig can be an amazing acceleration into match point for the runner, or it can mean praying that the next four accesses don’t flatline you while you keep digging with one card left in hand. Most importantly, Obokata Protocol allows Jinteki to finally tax the runner with a win condition. It means that a Runner who failed to prepare for the late-game appropriately or who had one to many reckless facechecks simply can’t win. It’s the idea of an inevitability that all Corp glacier players dream of – a guaranteed win state. Just hope the Runner doesn’t have a piece of tech up their sleeve for just such an emergency.

Obokata Protocol, Data Loop/Kakugo, and Hokusai Grid make for a near-impenetrable server, but I’m hardly the first person to highlight this complement. Let’s talk instead about the non-Obokata choices. Chronos Project is such an important agenda because it is versatile, fairly easy to score, and has the potential to flat-out win the game upon scoring. The obvious use-case is against Anarchs who have Inject-ed their conspiracy breakers all into the bin and are continuing to money up and wait for you to install-advance-advance an Obokata, but equally valuable are scores against Shapers/Geists who brought Levy AR Lab Access knowing that more cards equals more HP. House of Knives could easily be a third Chronos, but I decided to diversify to build in a little extra end-game inevitability. If you can score it, it puts a clock on the Runner’s ability to run on servers protected by Kakugo and potentially containing Obokatas. These 1-pointers also help to enable a pair of tech cards I’ll dive into later, but suffice it to say that having them stolen isn’t the end of the world. Philotic Entanglement can occasionally land you surprise kills if you’re able to either never-advance it or fast-advance it using Shipment from Tennin, but mostly it’s there to close out games where you’re stuck on five points and the runner can reasonably get into any server.

I have a really rocky relationship with Nisei MK II. Obviously, having a scored Nisei with a counter is incredibly powerful merely by way of being able to deny the Runner a game-winning run event, but it’s also very good in this particular instance because you can force the runner to need twice the normal number of cards to get through a server and still steal an Obokata. That being said, they’re not as back-breakingly important as they were during the days of Siphon spam or Replicating Perfection lockouts, so I could definitely see these swapped to something that is equally as damning. Viral Weaponization, maybe?

Final Thoughts – I think this deck is really powerful. So long as you can get some defenses set up early enough and make sure you don’t go too low economically, I never feel like I have a bad matchup. In the end, all Runners bleed the same >:)