Philadelphia Regionals Report

Discuss the latest tournament report up on stimhack.com by Dan Sawade here.

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Nice write-up man!
I’m pleased to see Indexing working nicely. I called that as one of the biggest cards in the set and a few people shot me down.

What were the biggest surprises of the day for you, either from your own deck or other people’s?

Great write up. I run a similar Chaos Theory deck myself with great success. I don’t want to post it here just yet, because I know at least one other member will be at my regional in 10 days :wink: It’s got many key cards in common, but there are some real poignant differences. I’d love to discuss it with you sometime.

I’ll have to take another look at indexing. My initial tests made me feel that it wasn’t as good as R&D interface. I’d have to bust into R&D and if I found something, I’d have to do it again.

I play a lot on OCTGN, and I see many skilled players playing fast/insta advance. They all know that the best way to attack it is to grab agendas through R&D before they can draw them. Consequently, I’ve been finding lots of ice there.

Perhaps landing it early on coupled with a tinkering. It can be powerful, but I felt that it lost steam as ice piled up on R&D.

Would you mind going into a bit more detail on how you managed your success with it in this deck? I really want to love this card.

Arkhon - I think the biggest surprise to me for my deck was correctly reading the reaction people would have to seeing Shaper. I know Anthony/Anthony take a cautious approach, heavily icing R&D, then scoring when it’ll leave them in a good position afterward. From snooping around BGG and talking to other players, it seemed like people thought rushing agendas against Shaper was the correct move (not saying one is right or one is wrong, Shaper with a full rig is a tough cookie to deal with). This is especially true when you’re under the gun to score, and have 65 minutes for a match. I exploited this by making a deck that encouraged rushing by having an incomplete rig, then having surprise access through tools like Tinkering, Inside Job, TR/Femme, Test Run, Stimhack, etc. Also TR/Sneakdoor took everyone off guard, which was great. You could improve this with an HQ Interface I suppose, but I didn’t find it necessary.

My biggest surprise was how little Weyland I saw. It definitely had a presence, but like on OCTGN, what was top dog back in the day is just another identity. HB FA was by far the most common deck played by the more experienced players, and should probably be the archetype you want to build against for your runner deck. Andromeda was the most common and (hard to judge, given their outsized presence) most effective runner, which surprised me a bit – I think I prefer playing Gabe, but someone stole my Underworld Contacts so I haven’t been playing Andromeda much, haha.

Shobalk - I agree that Indexing isn’t better than R&DI for all decks. If you have a solid economy, and R&DI can allow you sustained accesses every few turns you’re probably better off with that since you may get far more accesses. The goal of this deck is to use tools to allow cheap access to areas while looking poor. Tinkering was very helpful for an early Indexing, since it’s usually just an Enigma, Katana, Roto, Wall, etc covering R&D and may set you back 4-6 credits. TR/Femme is also very useful for defense like Tollbooth.

That being said, you expect to see 2 agenda points in 5 cards, so you’re highest likelihood is to flat out score an agenda if you can access twice. The next most likely scenario is to see no agendas, and after that pulling multiple agendas. Paying 5-10 credits to have the expectancy of 2 agenda points seems pretty good to me! Also R&DI has a discount with Kate that I wasn’t getting.

I absolutely agree that Indexing loses steam once R&D gets well defended, but so do all R&D access cards. My thought was that as long as I had access, I better make it pay off, especially since I have cards that can substantially reduce the cost of access, like Tinkering, Inside Job, Stimhack, etc. Also Maker’s Eye pairs very well with it, and I found myself hanging on to them until I could Index. If I played R&DI the corp could prep for it, and the economy in this deck just can’t afford that. If I were running MO it’d be different, but I’m not a fan of it for a variety of reasons.

It’s not that Indexing is a miracle card – it just got lost in the R&DI hype (a powerful card in its own right). There’s a human fallacy where when we see two similar things, we tend to like the “better” one more than we should and dismiss the “worse” option. I think that’s what happened to a lot of people when they saw Indexing and R&DI. Remember the reaction to Marked Accounts vs PAD Campaign?

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I definitely think Indexing is strong, and I’m happy to see it get some good use. Its good at stopping the corp form being able to rush early agendas while you set up, it crushes a weak R&D.

R&D interface is good vs a strongly defended R&D. It makes attacking it every couple turns still provide a good payoff. Indexing is best vs a weak R&D.

R&D interface is the best lategame plan. Indexing is a strong aggro card.

Alex is right on. It’s really a math thing – if you make some assumptions, you can say Indexing costs 0 upfront, but on average will score you an agenda after 2 accesses if it’s in the top 5 cards. It also gives you deeper information sooner than R&DI.

R&DI costs 4 credits and an installation action, for which 2 runs will get you 4 random accesses. This seems a little worse than Indexing, but after 3 runs you’ll have seen 6 cards. I think I’d rather have 6 random accesses than 5 and a reorder, so the more your rig can handle R&D runs the more value you’ll get out of R&DI.

My deck isn’t set up economically to do that, by design, so I got more value out of Indexing than R&DI. Your deck may be different, however.

Here is the break down of identities:

41 players total:

Criminal: 19
-Gabe: 10
-Andi: 9

Anarch: 9
-Noise: 7
-Whizzard: 2

Shaper: 13
-Kate: 8
-CT: 5

HB: 20
-ETF: 18
-ST: 2

Jinteki: 5
-PE: 4
-RP: 1

NBN: 9
-MN: 7
-TWY: 2

Weyland: 7
-BBW: 5
-BWBI: 2

*edited because this forum formats things strangely.

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I’ve tried out a deck inspired by this one in a few games now, and it’s worked great! The main change was that I dumped all resources, replaced Corroder with Snowball and added another Stimhack and Inside Job. Modded is the only extra economy card. I’m usually dirt poor, but it wasn’t an issue - until I played against a big server Stronger Together deck.

Now, that’s not a top tier archetype by any means, but my deck fell totally flat. I’d prefer to not rely on Kate or Workshop in the deck (it’s so nice to ignore all tags with Carapace), so I’m thinking of adding a single Magnum Opus. The idea is that if I can’t win quick (which the deck is very good at) I can Test Run for Opus and just be richer than the corp.

Feasible or just wasted deck space?

I played another game with this deck (calling it CTrix for now) against a big ice deck and I made 2 mistakes running, kept a hand that seemed good to me (QT, QT, Armitage, Index, Infiltrate).

I never accessed R&D once, everything was 4 ice thick with ichis tollbooths and a janus. It was really difficult, his deck gave him all 3 eves and 2 pads in the first 6 turns - despite this, one emergency shutdown would have saved my hide.

Ended up losing 7-6

Is this going to be a thing now? Big ice is so bad vs shutdown and crescentus… but this is the second big ice i’ve seen this month.

Really great writeup!

Btw, I was your top-8 elimination opponent, and I was running Andromeda (not Gabe, who I despise).

This is an insignificant point, but I could’ve sworn that you scored two Astroscripts (not Astroscript + Beale) in our match. I remember you moving the counter from the first Astroscript to the second one when you scored it.

I ended up getting a tie in the semifinals match, which per the tournament rules gave the win to the other, higher seeded player. In fact, both semifinals matches ended in an unsatisfying tie. Kind of lame.

If you’re curious, these were my decks:

Haas-Bioroid: Engineering the Future

3 Accelerated Beta Test
3 Project Vitruvius
3 Private Security Force
2 False Lead

3 Melange Mining Corp
3 Adonis Campaign

2 Rototurret
3 Ichi 1.0
3 Shadow •
3 Enigma
3 Chum •
3 Eli 1.0
3 Ice Wall •

1 Corporate Troubleshooter

3 Archived Memories
3 Biotic Labor
3 Hedge Fund
2 Trick of Light •••

Andromeda

3 Inside Job
3 Special Order
3 Account Siphon
3 Emergency Shutdown
3 Sure Gamble
2 Forced Activation Orders
2 Kraken
2 Diesel ••
1 Easy Mark

3 Desperado

3 Sneakdoor Beta
2 Corroder ••
2 Yog.0 •
2 Mimic •
2 Faerie
3 Datasucker •

3 Compromised Employee
3 Armitage Codebusting

I went 1-5, 6-0, 6-0, 1-5, 6-0, 4-2 | 6-0, 3-3

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Oh hey, awesome man. No, I scored an Astroscript, and then you plucked the second one and a Security Force out of my hand. If that didn’t happen maybe I had a shot. I then pushed out the Beale just to get some points on the board, since I knew I was on the ropes!

I think this deck definitely gets crushed by big ice, because the econ just isn’t there. The goal of this deck is to lure your opponent into rushing, giving you opportunities to score. Once I play people a few times (not an issue in tournaments), and they figure out what’s going on, they usually play a little safer and make it pretty difficult. I just wanted a different take on Shaper than the usual rig masturbation that I saw, and tried to make it work… this was the result after a few weeks of testing. I think learning to take cues from the corp about when to build and when to aggro is important. Against a deck with a lot of assets this deck can definitely suffer if you have the wrong read. It’s probably a decent deck, and I got lucky with who I get matched up against.

hey Dan,
Did you attend New Holland? if so, how’d it go?

Yeah, I went but I brought 2 bad decks because I got all the goodies I wanted out of Philly. I was running a Whizzard big-rig and Jinteki RP (that I hadn’t really played before), and did ok I guess, like 10th/22 or something. The Jinteki deck was a liability and constituted most of my losses, because it plays a rush style and if you don’t draw agendas early you’re done for.

The top 8 were 7 Andys and 1 Gabe, I think 4 HB, 3 NBN and 1 Weyland. I really, really wish I brought my good decks, because I think I had a good shot at this tournament :smile: the competition was a notch lower than Philly. Nevertheless one of the friends I drove up with made it to the finals, but basically lost the match with one mistake – he didn’t cover the Ichi that was on top of R&D with an Enigma he had in hand, allowing Gabe to Inside Job R&D with RDI out to win the game and match. My buddy had 2 Biotics in hand and all the money, and scoring a 3/2 would’ve tied the match. Since he would’ve run in the tiebreaker, he probably would have won. Oh well! There were three guys who drove up to New Holland who all made top 8 who were running with decks similar to your criminal.

Oh, and for the record those dudes in the Void Ripper jackets in Philly called themselves the Panther Moderns… I’m rereading Neuromancer, and just realized that’s a Neuromancer reference, haha. Also someone’s trying to get a tournament going in Harrisburg at the moment – he met us in New Holland and posted on our facebook page. Maybe we’ll see you there! Crossing my fingers they go ahead with it, though I think regional registration is closed if I remember correctly.

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That’s awesome, I’ve been meaning to pick up Neuromancer, and have recently been on a streak of cyberpunk films. Kate Mac is totally taken from Kate Libby from the very 90’s film Hackers.

I was wondering about the Panther Moderns, and a quick google search found them: http://statigr.am/p/479146270812112360_24018424

Which Facebook page are you referring to? I couldn’t find the information you refer to. I’d be curious to see if I can make it out to Harrisburg.

Oh man, that is so awesome. I wanna join, haha. Yeah, when those dudes rolled into Redcap I was thinking like, “Holy shit… the nihilists are here!” We have a little facebook group called Philly Netrunners, but you’re not missing much.

Here’s Mac rolling face in high school:

While you’re watching cyberpunk films, make time to watch Brazil. There’s no running or whatever, but it’s… unique.

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Rofl…the nihilists are here…

I didn’t see them come in together so it actually took me a while to understand what was going on. At first I thought it was one guy with constantly changing hair.

Hey, btw, looks like someone just ran your deck in Norway and didn’t do too bad:

Though it was a small venue, he was #2 after swiss but opted out of elimination since he was the TO.

Added: Brazil is an insanely bizarre film in a way that really puts me off. I’m actually lost about what is appealing about that one. I watch a lot of weird and unknown films, but that one was the sort of goofy that kinda irritated me.

I ordered a copy of Neuromancer and am excited to start it.

Been thinking a bit more on this deck…

As far as I can tell Netrunner is commonly divided into early, mid and late game. Early game the corp hasn’t got much defenses up, and the runner can get in several places with no breakers. Criminals live here and often try to extend this phase. Mid game, the corp has some ice on every important server, but the runner hasn’t yet gotten his rig and economy up. This is the time for the corp to dominate. Rush decks try to get here as soon as possible and then close out a win before the game moves into late game. In the late game the runner has his full rig out, this is the traditional domain of Shaper decks.

The point of all that is that I think this deck is at its best in the midgame, a time where the corp traditionally dominates. It excels if you can fool the corp into feeling safe, thinking that you’re not set up yet and he has a window to score. If he’s not fooled you can still win with Indexing and Sneakdoor.

(I’m the norwegian mentioned above, btw.)

Yeah, I totally agree. Games with this deck usually break down like this:

Early game: Try and get every piece of ice rezzed to get a better feel for the board, and what tools you’re gonna need. Hopefully you have a KJ ticking away.

Mid game: You may have one or no breakers out at this point, but you still always seem to find a way into their remote :smile: if they try to delay at this point, TR/Sneakdoor.

Late game: Wonder why you’re not running Magnum Opus, and have Ichi trash your programs on a kamikaze R&D run hoping to suck out one last agenda point.

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Maybe that the deck subverts the normal phases of dominance is part of what makes it so fun.

As for MO, I’m trying out a version that swaps Katie for Opus and Sacrificial Construct. (The constructs are there to enable early aggression even with early Opus, but they’re very handy throughout the game.) I find that MU isn’t such a big problem as I usually delay getting a full rig out (as you point out for mid game), so I usually got the MU to play Sneakdoor or Femme when I want to. A second Femme late game would be tough, but at that point it’s better to have Opus anyway.

Just got my ass handed to me by Jinteki, though. In my defense he did know what I was up to (first game I crushed his NBN), but I’m thinking about adding Net Shield back in, either replacing Deus X or going to 41 cards.