Seattle Regionals 2014 1st Place Report

Originally published at: Seattle Regionals 2014 1st Place Report - StimHack

Discuss the Seattle Tournament Report here.

Related to my own mini report seen here:

Fun fact: I am actually just naked.

Grats on the win Joe!

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#CascadeCollective for life!

And typing this without your hands…?

On topic: Great article, congrats on the win. The RP deck is very nice.

It was a fun time to be had! I made way too many fatal mistakes on the runner side to get in the top 16 but corp did very well winning 4 out of 6 games with astrobiotics having high variance at times.

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I was the English Kate/HB. FWIW, my wife did get me to repeatedly say Magic card names to her when we were just married, so it’s not just you. :smile:

“Slightly flooded” == “I had drawn every agenda in the deck except one”. The key mistake I made was the turn before the last, where I used 2 Jacksons when you ran on one. I had forgotten that Security Testing was mandatory and was afraid of you killing it as there were 5 agendas in Archives (and another 3 in HQ). If I didn’t do that, it would probably have been a draw since your R&D hit would be unlikely to hit an agenda.

Your RP deck seemed fantastic. I hadn’t found a decent Jinteki deck so I hadn’t tested the matchup and didn’t really know the best way to approach it. I still don’t, really, even after playing against it a bit afterwards. Once RP gets set up the runner is in big trouble. Camping the remote doesn’t really work because of Caprice, and denying their econ assets is difficult because of RP’s ability. I’m curious as to people’s thoughts on the best approach to take when playing against it.

In our match, your play was excellent - you deserved to win. 3am is so brutal though, that’s just a whole lot of nets to run.

I believe I was the closest to beating @SneakySly’s RP (very similar to Bazooka’s). I also just beat this deck last night. Three things you need to beat the new RP Archetype:

  1. Have money to trash asset economy right away. This could be Whizzard, Desparado, and maybe ProContacts. MO and Kati Jones are too click intensive to get the money fast enough in order to keep up with the Asset Train. Recurring creds are huge here.

  2. Don’t run centrals with less than 4 credits. This should be obvious, but the agendas are so hard to steal anyway that you don’t want to get caught without enough to steal NAPD, Fetal, or play TFP Psi game.

  3. Run through Komainus very aggressively. Most of these RP decks don’t run damage and if you let Komainu stop you for more than a turn or two then you are done. Get the cards you want to install on the board and let the rest be trashed!

Just one man’s opinion here. I have to say that a good game with an RP deck, win or lose, is some of the most fun Netrunner can be. Either that or, FFG BAN. SO OP. WTF?!? Netrunner is SOOOOOOO broken!

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MO is flippin’ amazing against assets, including RP.

In my experience it is not. MO is great economy, but very click intensive (where Desperado and Whizzard are not). RP causes click compression on the runner side, so adding more clicks for credits, albeit a lot of credits, has not turned out well for me.

Think of an open Archives (or any central server, probably only an open archives in the early game) and a sundew behind an Eli (very common tactic. In this situation you [click 1] Run Archives, [click 2 - 4] run Sundew and trash it. With MO only you will then need to spend another click [click 1 next turn] on getting those two credits from trashing sundew back. With Whizzard or Desperado you have already broken even.

The above example is one of many examples where MO slows you down against RP.

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Desperado only sustains your current momentum; it doesn’t provide you with any. If your RP opponent is letting you have free archive runs or other cheap runs, he is either ICE-screwed or playing badly.

To keep RP’s assets down, you need lots of credits quickly, and repeatedly, and MO provides exactly that. If you have to let them have 2 more credits so you can take 8 this turn and kill multiple assets the next turn, so be it. If you have Desperado in addition to MO, all the better. The Magical Kate deck posted on these forums has both, and they work extremely well in tandem.

Whizzard is another story entirely, which I won’t go into, but his ability is obviously very effective in the match-up.

My RP deck went undefeated in my local Regionals, and 4 out of 7 of those games were against Desperado Andromeda. None of them were any trouble, that day or any other day. Later that week I played 2 games against Opus decks and got absolutely obliterated because I could not keep an asset alive for more than 2 turns.

In my experience, the actual method of econ isnt totally important. Most competitive decks seem to spend about the same amount of clicks on econ. Opus alone, though, isn’t that imsane. I think if you built the right whizzard deck it’d be better than an opus deck. Parasites + security testing or desperado can be a real pain if you stumble on setup, but overall I think the deck is pretty resiliant.

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Yeah Kati Jones let me beat BazookaJoe twice(anecdotal, but there is a strategy there and the 3rd game was winnable), Kati Jones/MO really isn’t that click intensive against RP since well, you can’t make runs every turn against their taxing servers anyways. I think it’s a large stretch to call those specific cards bad, when they are actually one of the key components of beating any taxing deck. Not having them means you are running a different game plan and trying to win early or not encounter/pay for the ice. The Whizzard deck in question ran through Komainus without paying for them, it killed off taxing ice with parasites, and forces through account siphon. This is simply a different method of playing the game and doesn’t require Kati.

The absolute best thing to do in those turns where you can’t afford to run against RP is gain a bunch of credits so they don’t have some scoring window on their next turn. if they gained the credits, and time, while you sit there and durdled to draw cards and do things that aren’t important/key rig building or gain ground, they will crush you.

Cards like Kati Jones/Pro Con/ Especially Hostage/etc I’ve found to be weak in matchups like astrobiotics where I race and just want to make run after run. Doing something like Hostage for Pro Con gives them a huge scoring window.

Definitely not calling MO or Kati “bad cards”. Quite the opposite, they are GREAT cards. IMO, recurring creds (scrubber, Whizz, etc) and getting paid to run (Desperado, Security Testing, etc) are simply better at defeating this RP build than the click intensive economies of MO or Kati Jones.