Help me fix my losing streak

Decklists
1

I’m a casual NR player and I’ve been playing for years. Lately I’ve gone 0-17 at a local tourney, then casual games with a friend, then jinteki. I get 3-5 agenda points but then lose. I decided to try to slow down and not change decks all the time to help isolate what the problem is. Help me tune this deck to be casual/competitive? Please be as specific as possible with ideas of how to PLAY this deck the best or how to tune it to be more competitive.

-First of all, I don’t find the AgInf ID to be super helpful. I find that I’m almost never using it.
-I can’t seem to ever pull off the combo of activating my “kill server” by redirecting someone into INAZUMA/BRAINSTORM or INAZUMA/DNA TRACKER. Inazuma never ends up rested so when I redirect (if ever), they just jack out and rerun the original server successfully.
-the political dealings/3-2 or 3-1 fast score mechanic doesn’t reliably fire. I usually end up two-turn scoring my 3 advancement agendas.
-my opponents have always kept full hands of cards (wisely) so snare and other net damage things never threaten them with a kill
-my ice never seems to stop them. They have breakers and lots of credits.

AgInfusion: New Miracles for a New World (Earth’s Scion)

Agenda (10)
3x Merger (Fear the Masses) •••
3x Obokata Protocol (Blood and Water)
3x House of Knives (Honor and Profit)
1x Philotic Entanglement (Honor and Profit)

Asset (9)
3x Political Dealings (Democracy and Dogma)
3x Snare! (Core Set)
3x PAD Campaign (Core Set)

Upgrade (3)
3x Tori Hanzō (Honor and Profit)

Operation (9)
3x “Clones are not People” (Democracy and Dogma)
3x IPO (Terminal Directive)
3x Hedge Fund (Core Set)

Barrier (3)
3x Wall of Thorns (Core Set)

Code Gate (9)
3x DNA Tracker (Escalation)
3x Mind Game (Martial Law)
3x Inazuma (Honor and Profit)

Sentry (6)
3x Brainstorm (The Liberated Mind) ••••• ••••• ••
3x Chrysalis (23 Seconds)

15 influence spent (maximum 17)
20 agenda points (between 20 and 21)
49 cards (min 45)
Cards up to Terminal Directive

2

Only a n00b myself, so take my advice with a pinch of salt, but if you’re finding that the ICE on your kill server never gets rez, why not jam agendas in there? Then the runner either runs it (and you get to rez, setting up for a future kill - potentially sacrificing an agenda in the process, I guess HoK or Obakata would be good candidates for agendas to jam) or they don’t run it and you can score out from that remote server?

Obv if they can “always” break the Inazuma, this is not going to work, but you should have the opportunity to try this before they have their decoder out, right? Plus Inazuma isn’t super cheap to break, is it?

3

Hey there, I will try to help you the best I can with this deck,

First of all: What is your win condition? at first sight I see some kind of fast advance-net damage- glacier deck that tries to do everything but fails at doing anything good enough to win (you have not enough net damage to kill, not defensive upgrades to score, and not enough fast advance tools to score 7 points), once you find how you want to win, then you can start removing and adding tools that support your strategy.

AgInfusion: I think the best way to use this ability is having derezzed ICE on HQ and R&D to avoid things like legworks, Indexings, Counter Surevillances and so (redirect them to archives or to another random server), this only makes it an amazing ID but you can also redirect the runner to a rezzed DNA Tracker… even if they can break it is a lot of tax.

Now let’s review the deck in depth:

Agendas: First of all, Merger is bad, merger will lose you games, period. Braintrust will be always better than merger (also does not cost influence). Remember that Braintrust did not rotate, is in the new core set. The rest is okay, but of course keep in mind that House of kinves is often included in net damage heavy decks, if you refuse that strategy you can swap it for bigger agendas and gain slots.

Assets: Let’s say you want to go for the political dealings play, your agendas have to adjust to that, I think the proper agenda composition for that is x3 Braintrust, x3 Medical whatever, x1 Philotic x2 Defensive 5/3 so you can always score the agenda you reveal. If you dont want that gameplay, consider taking them off and going for some defensive upgrades (Batty, Ash or something like that)

Upgrades: what is the point of tori hanzo? If your goal with the deck is winning, the cards have to support your win condition, in case your goal is do cool things (we all sometimes build decks just to do cool things) Hanzo is perfect :slight_smile:

Operations: With Snares in the deck I miss Celebrity gift, In general you lack the economy to rez your things look how much your ice cost you can gain 27 cred from all your econ operations, that is like 3 rezzed ice per game. You definetly need more money. In case you want to go for the fast advance thing, consider Biotic Labor, with all that brain damage in your deck punitive counterstrike is an option also. I also thing that 3 clones is overkill consider 1 or 2.

ICE: I miss Chiyashi here, is way better than wall of thorns and also has IA hate, with x3 Chyashi and x3 DNA tracker you have more than enough expensive ICE so the rest has to be very cheap, like vanillas, mind games or miraju, if you want to include Brainstorms consider cutting some trackers/chiyashis, but I think brain storm in general is worse.

Other: If you wanna go for FA, also consider some clot hate such as Ark Lockdown or CVS. if you run biotic, consider some card draw, so you can:
1: draw a bunch of cards,“oh! there is an agenda there”, install.
2: biotic for extra clicks.
3, 4 & 5: FA a 3/2

Recursion: Probably in form of preemtive action, you want to keep installing PADs, retrieve trashed ICE and playing your operations again and again.

TL;DR: This deck want to accomplish a lot of things but does all of them poorly, focus on one. More money, like a lot more. Merger is bad.

I hope this helps, If you don’t agree in something I said or do you want to share what kind of win condition do you want to accomplish, just reply so we can tweak that decklist more precisely.

8 Likes
4

That was amazing. Thank you. I’d like to focus on the fast advance with a punishing server to redirect the runner into with AgInf.

So here will be my plan:

  1. Add more Econ with recursion options.

  2. Remove Tori and Merger

  3. Add braintrust (I thought it rotated out!) My deckbuilder app on iOS doesn’t recognize the 2.0 rules yet.

  4. Add Medical Breakthroughs

  5. Remove snares to make room for Econ

  6. Tighten the theme down to FastAdvance

5

18 ices, 3 positionnal : 3 positionnal is huge (you shouldn’t put more than 2. I like this card very much but never put more than 1). I’d agree this is better in Ag but you just have there 15 usable ices for 10 agendas and no recurence.
Only 3 etr costing 8 each : this means you almost cannot rez etr T1. Now if you look how much it is blocking for 8, I think it is too much. Thorns is a bad barrier for beginers, don’t use it.

Then :
18 ices, half of them costing >= 8, this is 6 of them too many. Choose 3, stick with it, especially with the last thing…

Only 9 economical cards with no recurence. Bring 12-15. You can remove at least Tori and 1x Clones. Because of Maw spam, especially with no recursion, Dealings is not to be put there and lacks deck synergy. It doesn’t help to have all tools to kill a runner if you can’t use them. Money is giving yourself the means to be dangerous.
I’d suggest Mining, because Brainstorm Mining is a combotastic synergy that is very little known (so it will work). Install Mining + Brainstorm, then pass your turns to clic on MIning. At one point if not very early the guy will come.
The only thing is within Jinteki this will work a lot less than in other factions, because you cannot yolo facecheck Jinteki.

Agenda speaking, Merger is a very bad idea and 3 inf spent for nothing when you can put Medicals or Braintrust or even Nisei.

x3 everything is simple to pilot yes, but you have the risk of the runner discovering sooner what your deck with x3 everything than x1 everything. You should find more synergically/functionally cousins cards if you can than puting x3 everything.
x3 works for economy & agendas. All the rest, especially danger cards, should be subject to interrogation : this is saying “hey, I have 30 guns in my deck” then stop to smile because your opponent is coming in a tank : you have to put one gun, one tanks, and one plane and this is better than 3x one because it is less win-more and more stable (tank vs tanks at least work a little, but plane vs tanks works).

This should covers the first problems I see there :slight_smile:

1 Like
6

If you want to keep the Inazuma + monster ICE thing, consider batty:
If you trigger the firs subrutine of inazuma with batty, then they cannot break inazuma :slight_smile: so they cannot jackout, this is cool because does not rely in the runner having or not a decoder, keep in mind that this is a combo involving a lot of cards, so you cannot rely on it 100%.

FAdvancing agendas requires a lot of money (even more with biotics, and political dealings cost 4 itself) so tune the ICE cost to adapt that strategy, Chiyashi and tracker still very good options.

EDIT: I honestly consider that maybe doing all of this in a single decklist is too much, maybe you can split the “server-of-death” and “FA Dealings” mechanics in two different decklists in case you like both. you don’t need to to so of course, maybe you can fit it all togheter, just keep it in mind.

2 Likes
7

I should also ask: is the fast advance, punishment server combo a valid strategy? It might not be.

I was going to use the junebug/trick of light thing but I felt like it was doing too much.

How do the pros use AgInf to good effect?

8

It depends in what do you want to accomplish with this deck, I can assure you, this deck we are building is far far away from a tier 1 list, but it might work well enough to win. The known “good decklists” for AgInf usually go glacier with obokata and sometimes they run punitives too, you can check that decklists on NRDb but i think here you want to build your own deck, which does not have to be the best. Netdecking sometimes is very useful, because then you can build your own decks and check how powerful or weak are compared to a competitive list.

9

Yeah. I’m a strong advocate for competitive casual play where I want to build my own decks. I’ve always been about a 30% Win kind of guy against other adults. I beat my kids maybe 50/50. Lol.

Unfortunately, I have no people in my area to play with so I rely on webcam games with a friend who is becoming better and better and now I can’t beat him now. I went on Jinteki and got owned. So I have to assume that I’m falling behind on the skill curve to I have to up my game or risk not really being able to play at all. I have to give up some of that “casual” kitchen table vibe and get gooder quickly. (I know that’s not a word!)

This is my first attempt to up my game with a Pimp My Ride type of discussion. I’ll make some changes, playtest on Jinteki over the weekend and report back for more tuning advice based on how it goes.

2 Likes
10

If you want to have a rezzed Inazuma, try Executive Boot Camp. You can even put it in the death server, guaranteeing a rez whether they run or not.

Also, you seem to be trying to win with the most expensive ice (DNA Tracker, Brainstorm, Wall of Thorns), the most expensive agendas (Obokata, Clones are not People), in the most expensive way (Political Dealings, Tori Hanzo). I would pick one strategy to focus on. From what you’ve written, it sounds like you want to rely on your ID to score out behind dangerous ice.

In this case, I would cut all the fast advance tools/agendas, Tori Hanzo and Clones are not People. I would add Celebrity Gift so you can afford to rez your ice and the aforementioned Executive Boot Camp to rez it. If you’re sticking with Inazuma, the Batty suggestion is a good one, but you would be fine with just a rezzed DNA tracker–if they break it, it’s still taxing enough to do its job.

Feel free to PM me if you want to set up a session on Jnet to play through different iterations. :slight_smile:

1 Like
11

Excellent advice. I appreciate it.

And yes I’d like to practice with you on Jinteki. I’ll send you a PM.

12

If all you care about is winning, the easiest step is to play a better and proven deck. If you watch the topdeck streams most (though not all @anon50033301) of decks are good and proven.

1 Like
13

Sure Simon. I am prepared to straight up Netdeck if that’s what it takes for me to up my game.

However, as a man who appreciates the intellectual game-within-a-game that is deckbuilding, I prefer to think it out and try to learn by trying.

However, it is also completely valid to Netdeck and “cut out the (crappy) middle man (me!)”. If my attempts to edit and revise my deck doesn’t at least win me an occasional game, then I’ll go Netdecking until I feel like I’m better prepared to begin building my own.

14

often you try to have an Excalibur rezzed and then use your ability. So have 2 ICE, the outermost being Excalibur and install advance in this server, they either let you score or run the server. If the runner can’t break Excalibur (more uncommon today with Aumakua) you use your ability with the next ICE to redirect them somewhere else (at best into a rezzed DNA Tracker or Chiyashi). So now they can’t run and you can score your agenda next turn. Ideally a Nisei.
Now you have a rezzed Excalibur on the field and can use it and ideally you have a Nisei counter…

15

If you’re interested in Political Dealings based fast advance, I would recommend switching your ID to Industrial Genomics. Adding facedowns to archives will increase the trash costs of your assets and ideally allow you to get the ball rolling a bit easier. Combine it with something like Palana Agroplex, Illegal Arms Factory, Daily Business Show, etc. to get more consistent card draw and easier Political Dealings triggers. Jeeves is a natural fit here as well, because he can let you advance cards a 4th time in a turn, allowing you to FA the first Medical Breakthrough, or even a game closing Improved Protein Source.

I did a quick search on NetrunnerDB and found This List. Now, it isn’t currently legal, but it should provide a framework for the type of deck I’m describing and you can probably make it into something that functions alright in the current environment.

Lastly, and I know others have mentioned it, but seriously, DON’T PLAY MERGER. There may be an edge case where a 1-of Merger is okay (probably in Titan as the 4th Atlas), but generally speaking, it’s terrible. Consider that Global Food is widely considered one of the best agendas in the game, because it’s a 3 pointer that’s only worth 2 to your opponent, effectively reducing the number of points in your deck below the required 20. Playing 3 Merger means you’re effectively playing 3 more points worth of agendas than you would need to have a legal deck. It might not be as terrible if it was a 3/3 that was worth one less to the corp, because at least it wouldn’t warp deck construction as much, but as written it’s probably one of the worst corporation cards in the game.

16

What if I drop Political Dealings then and add Sandburg x3 in addition to the other changes. That might add just a little more bang for the buck for my ice punishment. With more Econ, maybe I can make that BRAINSTORM a more significant tax/threat.