Greetings and welcome to the final(?) piece in my series of articles on deck building for newer players! If this is your first time reading one of these, you might be interested in reading the first three articles. It starts with choosing an ID, continues on to the importance of a strong economy, and then moves on to a primer on ICE and Icebreakers. In this article, we’ll be looking at agenda compositions for the corp, and win conditions for either side.
When I talk about “win conditions,” it’s different than talking about the conditions under which you win (ie reaching 7 points, flatlining the runner, or decking the corp). When talking about win conditions as far as card games go, it’s usually a discussion about which cards are the ones actually helping you win the game. “But all my cards are helping me win the game. That’s why I put them in my deck,” you might be saying. Touche, unknown pupil. However, while most of the cards in your deck are hopefully bringing you closer toward winning you the game, there are specific cards that you want in your deck that will actually get you there.
Agenda compositions are, as it probably sounds, the suite of agendas that you pick and put in your corp deck as part of the deck building process. As opposed to every other card you put in your deck, this is the only part of building a deck that is legally mandatory, and has a set number of points that you must include based upon deck size. The most common is 20-21 points for the standard 45-49 card corp deck. There are many ways to reach this required amount, but it’s not just the raw numbers I want to talk about, it’s the specific agenda choices as well. Often times with the corp, your agenda choices tie directly into your win conditions, and not just because these are the literal points you are trying to score. I’ll start by chatting more about this below, and then we’ll talk more generally about win conditions for both sides afterwords.
Agenda Compositions
Both the agendas you choose and the specific point distribution of your agendas should be working toward winning you the game. Despite me just saying up above that it’s not just about the literal point number on the agendas, that’s what I’m going to start with, because it’s a good place to start thinking about them. For the rest of the article, I’m going to be referring to agendas by their advancement requirement (x) and their point value (y) in this form: x/y. In this form an agenda with an advancement requirement of 4 and a point value of 2 would be a 4/2 agenda. This is the standard way of referring to agendas in the Netrunner community.
With scoring agendas, there’s a lot of risk vs reward going on. With scoring a 2/1 agenda, such as Hostile Takeover, the reward is small, and comes with a very bad penalty in the form of Bad Publicity. However, because they can be scored directly from the hand (install, advance, advance -> score), most 2/1 agendas have historically seen play. Most 3/1 agendas, on the other hand, aren’t powerful enough to see play. For Example, The Weyland agenda Chrisis Management does 1 meat damage to the runner at the beginning of the Corp’s turn if the runner is tagged. For an effect that is hard to achieve anyhow (making the runner end their turn tagged), you need to spend way too much money and actions. This mainly boils down to the same economic reasons I have discussed about ICE advancement; advancing a card is a slow, expensive thing to do. If you advance a card 3 times, you’re effectively out 6 credits over clicking for credits, so spending your turn doing this for only 1 point on the board is incredibly slow, especially when that same time could have been spent advancing a 3/2 agenda instead, such as Project Atlas, doubling the points you just got. Even if it’s a 4/2 agenda, it only takes 1 more action to advance out than a 3/1. With any agenda over the advancement cost of 2, you also need to make vulnerable and install it into a server, where the runner might take it on their turn. You can counteract this by trying to Fast Advance (FA) them, like with Biotic Labor, but then that just adds on drastically to the scoring cost, Therefore, the ability of a 3/1 agenda needs to be flat-out amazing to counteract these difficulties, and the sad truth is that almost none of them are.
Most 3/2 agendas are almost effectively blank if used as a 3/2, but that’s almost fine simply on the virtue that they are 3/2 agendas. There are two nice things about 3/2 agendas; the first is that you can easily Fast Advance them from your hand with a single FA tool, and the second is that you just need to install them on the table for you to be ready to advance them out next turn. You don’t need to advance them the turn you install them, so the runner really isn’t immediately sure if it’s an agenda you installed, an asset, or an upgrade. You can use this to your advantage, throwing things behind an ICE’d server and seeing what the runner runs at, trying to make them lose money with assets and upgrades you install, and scoring agendas once they’re too poor from doing that, which is called a Never-Advance strategy. Most 3/2 agendas in the game right now also have an ability that you might use if you over-advance them (that is, advancing them beyond they’re required amount). In some cases, the benefit of doing this is amazing (Project Atlas) and in some cases the benefit from doing this is practically negligible (Braintrust), so it’s an option you should sometimes consider. 3/2 agendas are amongst the most powerful in the game, almost entirely on the back of their point-to-advancement ratio, and the fact that in a 3 click turn you only need one Fast Advancement tool to score them from hand.
4/2 agendas are also very common, and are one of the other most popular agenda numbers. Any agenda above a 3 advancement one is going to be harder to score, because you must advertise it by advancing it, but many 4/2 agendas have very powerful abilities, such as Nisei MK 2 and Corporate Sales Team. Really, any 4/2 agenda that you plan on playing needs to be fairly powerful, because you have to advertise it by advancing it. Sure, there’s also advanceable traps, and you might be bluffing, but there are very few advanceable traps that do anything at all at a single advancement, so this doesn’t really disincentivise the runner from running.
The largest agenda that most reasonable decks play are 5/3 agendas. These agendas are incredibly expensive and cumbersome to score, usually taking a full 2 turns to push through. Most decks still prefer not to play 5/3 agendas, as getting one stolen by the runner is usually too much of a tempo swing to handle, and the abilities on them haven’t historically been good enough to justify the risk. To sacrifice so much money and time to score a 5/3 means that the ability on it has to be incredible in order to make it worth it; otherwise it’s very possible to lose the game *because* you scored the 5/3. The most notable exception is the agenda Global Food Initiative, which is only worth 2 points while in the runner’s score area. This ability meets that power level because it allows the runner to steal it and still need at least 4 agendas to win the game, while you still only need at least 3. Other 5/3s that usually get played are ones that can protect themselves when the runner accesses them, such as The Future Perfect and Obokata Protocol. More recently, Elective Upgrades has seen play as a real 5/3 agenda that doesn’t protect itself. The reason it sees play is because, once scored, the agenda helps you close out the game very quickly, and is considered worth the risk. Really, before Global Food Initiative was printed, the only deck that ran 5/3 agendas at all were Jinteki decks running The Future Perfect. Every other 5/3 agenda in the game was generally considered unplayable, since the ability they could give you wasn’t offset by the fact that they’re expensive and difficult to score, and if the runner takes one the game is vastly harder to win.
There are also two even larger agendas, and those are Vanity Project and Government Takeover. Vanity Project is a neutral, blank 6/4 agenda, so if you thought people didn’t like playing 5/3 agendas with actual abilities, playing an even larger agenda with no ability at all is a real no-go. The only place I’ve seen this used are in decks that are trying to score out in just 2 agendas, playing this and 5/3 agendas, usually also with Punitive Counterstrike in order to punish agenda steals. Government Takeover is a unique Weyland 9/6 agenda that gets played almost exclusively in Punitive decks. It actually has a great ability (click for 3 credits), but 98% of the time if it’s scored, the game ends on the spot, since it’s so hard to find a time and way to score a 9/6 agenda that another agenda has almost certainly been scored by then. This is also the most insanely risky agenda to run, because if the runner scores it the game still effectively ends on the spot, but in the runner’s favor.
Now that we’ve looked at all the types, let’s talk about agenda compositions. Most reasonable decks with a scoring plan will try and play as many 3/2 agendas as they can, and fill in the rest with 4/2 agendas and usually 2 copies of Global Food Initiative. If you’re playing Haas Bioroid, it might be reasonable to play Elective Upgrades, as noted above, but you generally need a strong scoring plan to make it worth it, and usually only Cerebral Imaging decks can score speedily enough to cope with playing a real 5/3. Really, if you look at the 5/3 agendas deemed “playable,” above, you can probably work out decent agenda compositions based on them, since only certain factions can use certain agendas.
After this next section, I’ll post various deck lists and we can examine why they chose the agenda composition they chose, what their win conditions might be, and how those agendas might help advance those win conditions. But first, let’s talk about corp win conditions.
Win Conditions – Corp
Getting to 7 points (or flatlining the runner) are the literal win conditions in Netrunner, but most times when people talk about their win conditions (or wincons), they’re thinking about specific cards or lines of play to enable the scoring of said points, or the murdering of said runner. What these win conditions are is usually dependent on what type of corp you’ve chosen to play.
In a Fast Advance deck, common wincons might be Biotic Labor, Jeeves, and/or Calibration Testing. These cards are wincons in the strictest sense, because they literally help you score agendas. In a horizontal deck, Estelle Moon could be considered an important part of your wincon, because she draws you all the cards you need to install and gives you the money to do so. She helps you out-pace the runner, and is therefore actively helping you win the game. Ash 2X3ZB9CY (or just Ash) is a common wincon for taxing Glacier decks with lots of money, because you can then use that money to trace them out of your server with Ash, making them run through it again if they want what’s inside — which ideally they can’t, leading you to score an agenda. In a standard Jinteki: Potential Unleashed deck, you usually win by discarding your opponent’s deck, and then kill them when they have no cards left to draw, so scoring cards like House of Knives are at least a part of your win condition. That’s really most of what needs be said as a quick overview.
Let’s look at some specific decks from Worlds last year and see what their win conditions are, and why they chose the agendas they did. I do want to stress that your win conditions can change over the course of the game and are also dependent on what runner you are facing at the time, so nothing I’m saying here is 100% set in stone. As an example, a Hayley deck with 3 Sacrificial Constructs and a Clot out is going to make your Fast Advance deck’s won conditions of Biotic Labor and Calibration Testing turn off entirely, and a new wincon must be found.
TBB’s Comrades CtM
NBN: Controlling the Message
Agenda (11)
1x 15 Minutes
1x AR-Enhanced Security
3x Global Food Initiative ●●●
3x Project Beale
3x Quantum Predictive Model
Asset (11)
3x Commercial Bankers Group ●●●●● ●
3x Daily Business Show
1x Marilyn Campaign ●
1x NASX
3x PAD Campaign
Upgrade (3)
3x Mumbad Virtual Tour ○○○○○ ○
Operation (13)
2x Exchange of Information
3x Hard-Hitting News
3x Hedge Fund
2x Preemptive Action
1x Psychographics
2x Targeted Marketing
Barrier (5)
2x IP Block
3x Resistor
Code Gate (3)
1x Enigma
2x Tollbooth
Sentry (3)
1x Architect ●●
2x Data Raven
This is one of my favorite decks just in terms of design for a while now, simply because everything is so streamlined. Abram Jopp (aka TheBigBoy) took this list to 7th place at Worlds last year. The goal of the deck is to force the runner to go tag-me (aka, give up on trying to clear tags) and then punish them heavily for doing so. It’s a tempo deck, which is a deck that tries to gain a lead on the runner, compounding it as the game progresses.
The biggest win condition here is the HHN, which can then lead into Exchange of Information turning a 1-pointer into a 3-pointer. It can also ruin a runner economically, forcing them to have to spend 8c and 4 clicks removing tags, playing into the corp’s tempo game. Most of the rest of the deck is designed around getting the runner into a position to threaten them with HHN.
As for agendas, oddly enough the 3/2 isn’t really the star of the show, despite 3/2s being one of the best agendas in the game. It’s still included because it’s very easy to score, and can look like an asset or an upgrade. However, the best 2 agendas are probably Global Food and QPM. QPM is chosen because the deck revolves around throwing tags at the runner, and oftentimes the runner will be at least temporarily tagged as they access, and if they access QPM, you get it instead. Then, when they score a Global Food Initiative, you can set up a play to tag them and then Exchange your QPM (which they scored for you) with the Global Food Initiative (which they now scored for you). AR-Enhanced Security is there as another 1-pointer to exchange, but also protects your assets and further punishes trashing them. 15 mins is there for similar reasons; that is, it can be fast advanced. It can also be shuffled back into your deck once you exchange it for a Global Food, and is good at baiting runs from the runner to make them spend money.
Comrades’ Potato
Jinteki: Potential Unleashed
Agenda (9)
3x House of Knives
3x Obokata Protocol
1x Philotic Entanglement
2x The Future Perfect
Asset (7)
3x Breached Dome
2x Snare!
2x Whampoa Reclamation ●●●●
Upgrade (3)
3x Hokusai Grid
Operation (19)
2x Archived Memories ●●●●
2x Ark Lockdown ●●●●
3x Hedge Fund
3x IPO
3x Neural EMP
3x Preemptive Action
3x Shipment from Tennin
Barrier (3)
3x Kakugo
Code Gate (5)
3x Aiki
2x Mirāju
Sentry (3)
3x Komainu
This specific list was played by a few people (most notably Dan D’Argenio, two times World Champion), but originally published by Jonas, aka thebigunit3000. It’s game plan is to discard the runner’s entire stack, then kill them when they can no longer draw. To this end, much of the deck is designed around forcing the runner to take random damage, which in turn turns on PU and mills a card from the stack, effectively doubling the damage debt in most cases.
Now it would be easy to look at the deck and say “Well, Saan, it’s pretty clearly the net damage that’s the win condition here.” You would not be wrong. However, I think that aside from all the Breached Domes, and Houses of Knives, and Hokusai Grids, etc, what really keeps the deck flowing is the massive amount of recursion contained within. Three copies of Preemptive Action and two copies of Whampoa Reclamation go a long, long ways towards the success of this deck. Whampoa allows you to keep a relatively safe HQ, which is important in a post-Jackson Howard deck that doesn’t actually want to score its 5/3s in 95% of its games (it doesn’t want to score the 5/3 agendas because this is almost entirely a kill deck). Preemptive allows you to shuffle agendas back in if they get trashed as well, and also allows the recursion of more Neurals and Grids, actually allowing for value neural plays, where you throw one down just to discard a card from the Grip and a card from the Stack — something that has never really been close to a thing until now.
As for the agendas, the Obokatas and The Future Perfects are chosen because they’re very hard to steal for the runner, and situations can be designed where the runner almost certainly won’t have 4 cards to steal an Obokata much of the time. House of Knives is there to be FA’d with Shipment From Tennin, and then acts as 6 effective damage to be tactically dealt, often to keep runners from stealing said Obokatas. The Philotic Entanglement is mostly there just as a 3/2 agenda to fill out the 20 required points, but can also be FA’d with Preemptive, and can also deal additional damage, further playing toward the deck’s goals.
This deck isn’t legal any more, since they added Whampoa to the Most Wanted List, making it clash with Obokata Protocol, but versions of it do still exist.
Stinson Reversed CI [World Champion 2017]
Cerebral Imaging: Infinite Frontiers
Agenda (9)
1x Corporate Sales Team
3x Efficiency Committee
2x Elective Upgrade
3x Project Vitruvius
Asset (9)
3x Jeeves Model Bioroids
3x MCA Austerity Policy
3x Reversed Accounts ●●●
Upgrade (3)
2x Bryan Stinson ●●●●● ●
1x Cyberdex Virus Suite
Operation (17)
3x Biotic Labor
3x Hedge Fund
2x IPO
1x Scarcity of Resources
2x Shipment from Tennin ●●●●● ●
3x Ultraviolet Clearance
3x Violet Level Clearance
Barrier (3)
1x Bastion
2x Vanilla
Code Gate (5)
1x Enigma
1x Fairchild 2.0
3x Fairchild 3.0
Sentry (3)
2x Architect
1x Ichi 1.0
This is the World Champion decklist of last year, played boy Wilfy Horig (aka chaosjuggler), but built by Oliver Siccha (aka pinsel). There were several different CI decks at Worlds last year, and next up I’ll show another one just for comparison. This one is more of a glaciery type, usually creating a rather large taxing remote and forcing the runner to run through it. It also has several FA tools to help score agendas from hand as well, such as MCA Austerity Policy, Biotic Labor, and Shipment from Tennin.
While all these cards are great for FAing out agendas, what makes CI tick is the Violet and Ultraviolet Clearances. They enable CI to draw most of their deck in record time, putting a fairly hard clock on the game in terms of how much time the runner has. This also lets CI protect the agendas in their hand due to the massive size of it, which is usually a HQ’s biggest weakness. With such a massive hand, it becomes easy to find and place ICE where you need it, as well as use the various upgrades and assets when they are most devastating. For this specific deck, I’m also giving a shout out to the Reversed Accounts, which drains the runner’s credits while also being able to look like an agenda and bait a run. This then allows Bryan Stinson to activate, letting you fire off Ultraviolet Clearances for a single click. Once the runner is poor, you can safely advance or fast advance your agendas in peace. As for agendas, Efficiency Committee can be used to gain extra clicks before Shipment from Tennin, and can also get extra clicks to install things, purge virus counters, etc. Elective Upgrade accelerates the clock on the game by giving you the ability to FA out 3/2 agendas, or 4/2 agendas with Jeeves. It can be FA’d itself if the runner lets MCA exist for too long. Vitruvius is merely a 3/2, but the upside of over advancing it to gain a card back from archives should not be overlooked, and is often utilized by more skilled players. Corp Sales Team is just another 4/2, and gives money, which is always nice.
This deck list is also no longer legal, since Violet Level Clearance is now banned.
Another Brain Rewiring CI
Cerebral Imaging: Infinite Frontiers
Agenda (10)
3x Brain Rewiring
2x Efficiency Committee
3x Global Food Initiative ●●●
2x Show of Force
Asset (4)
1x Contract Killer ●●●●
3x Jeeves Model Bioroids
Upgrade (2)
2x Cyberdex Virus Suite
Operation (27)
3x Archived Memories
1x Ark Lockdown
1x Audacity ●●●●
2x Best Defense
3x Biotic Labor
3x Hedge Fund
3x Scarcity of Resources
3x Shipment from Kaguya ●●●
2x Shipment from MirrorMorph
3x Ultraviolet Clearance
3x Violet Level Clearance
Other (6)
1x Excalibur
2x Loki
3x Mother Goddess
This is the list that Péter Dinya (aka percomis) brought to Worlds, getting 4th overall with it. It tries to draw as fast as it can, and then combo out a score of both Brain Rewiring (to force the runner to get rid of their hand) and Show of Force to kill the runner, or Brain Rewiring and Contract Killer for 2 meat damage (killing the runner). This is, generally, a much faster deck than Wilfy’s, since it doesn’t try and glacier up and slow the runner. It just takes off like a bullet and tries to end the game as a bullet would. Heck, the thing only runs 6 ICE total. It’s not in anything for the long haul.
Even though the list is fairly different than the other CI list on deck, there’s a lot of similarity in the cards that let you get to your win. Also like Wilfy’s CI, those cards begin with a color and end with the word Clearance. The 2 Cyberdex Virus Suites can also be considered a win condition vs. people playing Clot, as it may be necessary to purge before combing out.
In this deck, the agendas really enable the kill. This deck doesn’t even exist without Brain Rewiring, so that’s gotta be in there. Efficiency Committee again allows the gain of extra clicks. In this deck Global Food Initiative is run over Elective Upgrades because, unlike the other CI deck, this deck has no plan of ever scoring one, so GFI is chosen because it’s only 2 points for the runner. Show of Force is the other half of the kill, and also needs to be in the deck, since you can’t rely on drawing your one-of Contract Killer every game.
And you guessed it, this deck is also no longer legal, since it uses Violet Level, and uses 2 now-restricted cards, Brain Rewiring and Mother Godess.
There’s really an endless supply of decks we could look at, but then there’d be no room to chat about what the hell a runner does to win a game! Lets go find out below.
Win Conditions – Runner
Generally win conditions as a runner are things that enable you to access more cards than one normally would be able to, or to make runs when you know there will be an agenda waiting for you. There’s also the win condition of decking the corp, but there isn’t really a viable mill deck out there at the moment now that DLR is gone, so I’ll ignore that for the moment. This section will be a bit smaller than the corp’s section, since we don’t really need to talk about agendas, so I’ll chat just a bit about some specific cards and ideas, and then we’ll get right into looking at some good decks and identifying the win conditions of them. Cards that let you access more cards are probably the most common win condition, and include things like The Maker’s Eye, Legwork, and HQ Interface. Indexing and Equivocation are in a similar vein, in that they let you see more cards than you would otherwise. Cards like Find The Truth and Spy Camera can let you know when there is going to be an agenda waiting for you on top of R&D so you don’t have to spend time or money running until you know you’ll be successful.
It can also be possible to talk about non-multi-access cards as win conditions. For example, saying that Stimhack can be a win condition is a perfectly reasonable statement, meaning that it can get you into a remote to steal an agenda when otherwise you might not be able to. Aumakua might fall into the same category, since it can get past a very good chunk of ICE with relative ease. Film Critic can certainly be a win condition vs decks like the PU deck we saw earlier, giving the runner a way to score Obokata and The Future Perfect with relative ease, although it might be a completely dead card in other matchups. I’m going to focus on the less esoteric uses of wincons while we look at decks here in a moment, but I’ll occasionally still point some of these out if I think it bears mentioning.
Let’s go check out those decks.
TBB’s Comrades Val
Valencia Estevez: The Angel of Cayambe
Event (27)
2x Career Fair ●●
3x Dirty Laundry
3x Hacktivist Meeting
3x I’ve Had Worse
2x Indexing ●●●●● ●
3x Inject
2x Mad Dash
3x Mining Accident
1x Rebirth ●
2x Stimhack
3x Sure Gamble
Resource (15)
3x Daily Casts
3x Earthrise Hotel
2x Film Critic ●●
2x Jarogniew Mercs
3x Liberated Account
2x The Turning Wheel ●●
Icebreaker (8)
2x Aumakua ●●
2x Black Orchestra
2x MKUltra
2x Paperclip
This is the Val list that several people took slight variations of to Worlds, this one specifically being Abram’s (@TheBigBoy). This deck focuses on a crazy amount of draw to go through it (since Anarch doesn’t have any program tutors, and it’s a 50 card deck), while setting up breakers and cash to make your runs. It has very little tricks other than Mining Accident, which usually just functions as another economy card. As for win conditions, I’d say Indexing paired with Mad Dash is the primary one. Indexing is going to let you see several cards all at once, and then run back for just the agendas, while Mad Dash allows you to circumvent the Corp’s usual Global Food Initiative plan of making it so that they only need to score 3 agendas while you have to steal 4. Indexing isn’t a perfect solution, as sometimes you don’t see any agendas, and this is still a 50 card deck, so The Turning Wheel has been included. This increases the density of Multiaccess solutions in the deck, allowing you to find one earlier, as well as gives another pressure tool for the corp to worry about, threatening to see multiple cards in both R&D as well as HQ. As noted above, Film Critic is included as a wincon vs primarily Potential Unleashed and their hard-to-steal agenda suite. Two were smartly included, most likely both in order to see a copy earlier as well as as a backup in case PU mills one off the top of the Stack.
Laguna Lock Hayley
Hayley Kaplan: Universal Scholar
Event (14)
3x Indexing
1x Information Sifting ●●●
1x Levy AR Lab Access
1x Mad Dash
3x Peace in Our Time ●●●
1x Scavenge
1x Stimhack ●
3x Sure Gamble
Hardware (3)
2x Astrolabe
1x Feedback Filter
Resource (17)
1x Artist Colony
1x Beth Kilrain-Chang
1x Citadel Sanctuary
3x Daily Casts
3x Fan Site
1x Hunting Grounds ●
3x Laguna Velasco District
3x Sacrificial Construct
1x The Shadow Net
Icebreaker (5)
1x Atman
1x Femme Fatale ●
1x Gordian Blade
1x Inti
1x Na’Not’K
Program (6)
1x Clot ●●
1x Misdirection
2x Self-modifying Code
2x Tapwrm ●●●●
Here’s a deck we’ve looked at earlier; Wilfy Horig’s winning deck from Worlds 2017. Whereas last time we looked at his breakers, this time let’s look at how he plans to win. The obvious angle of attack is a familiar card; Indexing is ran at the full 3 copies, there’s a Levy there to shuffle everything back in and go again if needed, as well as The Shadow Net and Fan Sites to create even more copies of Indexing, should it be required. This is basically infinite R&D pressure. As with the Valencia deck, there is a Mad Dash thrown in as well. For HQ pressure, rather than the normal Legwork often seen in Shaper as a single copy, he’s running an Information Sifting. This is because Cerebral Imaging was all over Worlds 2017, and they have a gigantic hand size, so Info Sifting often creates a situation where the corp has so many agendas in hand that they must put all of them in one pile and the rest in another, creating a 50% chance for the runner to win on the spot. In all other matches, it is a strictly worse Legwork, but Wilfy (and many others that weekend) deemed it a necessary inclusion.
The other card which may be considered a win condition is Clot. This keeps corps from using Biotic or MCA Austerity Policy or any other number of Fast Advance tools from working. It might not win the game for you, but it does enough to keep you from losing it that I’d still call it a wincon vs FA decks.
As with most of the Corp decks, this deck is now illegal, seeing as it uses both Levy AR Access as well as Tapwrm.
Stomplants – Worlds 2017 36th
Quetzal: Free Spirit
Event (20)
1x “Freedom Through Equality”
3x Career Fair ●●●
2x Hacktivist Meeting
3x I’ve Had Worse
3x Inject
1x Levy AR Lab Access ●●●
3x Peace in Our Time ●●●
3x Sure Gamble
1x Test Run ●●●
Hardware (6)
3x Obelus
3x Severnius Stim Implant
Resource (12)
2x Biometric Spoofing
3x Daily Casts
2x DDoS
2x Earthrise Hotel
1x Hunting Grounds ●
1x Salsette Slums
1x Same Old Thing
Icebreaker (6)
2x Black Orchestra
2x MKUltra
1x Overmind
1x Paperclip
Program (2)
1x D4v1d
1x Grappling Hook ●●
This is a deck created communally by a bunch of dudes in Seattle, and was piloted up to 36th by Joshua Greggory, aka @netjogging. I wanted to include this deck firstly because Josh is an awesome, really nice guy (as well as the rest of the Seattle dudes), but also because it has a really cool win condition.
This is a very aggressive deck whose aim is to draw like crazy, install both Severnius Stim Implants and Obelus, and then start drawing up and making high-impact Sev Stim Implant runs on HQ and R&D, throwing away your cards in order to access more of the Corp’s. Obelus then draws cards back up after the run based on how many you accessed so you’re ready to do it again. You basically burn your deck down doing this as fast as possible, and then use Levy to start it all again. Rather than using Mad Dash as a free 7th point, which is a run event and therefor can’t be used with SevStim, the deck uses Freedom Through Equality. This can be played before a deep run in order to become a point whenever an agenda is accessed.
Salsette Slums might be considered a wincon versus asset-spam decks, to be used as a tool to remove their win conditions from the game. Similar to Clot, it doesn’t win you the game itself, seeing as it doesn’t literally give you points, but it goes far enough to keep you from losing to that specific matchup that apparently the Seattle crew thought it was worth including.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on deck building for newer players. Despite no new cards being printed after Reign and Reverie, there are a plethora of deck building choices with the card pool we currently have. Once all the cards are released and there is a full playset of cards available, I might do another article examining the card pool as a whole. In the meantime, keep experimenting, keep having fun, and keep on running!