The game was a lot simpler back then, and people were worse at it, (unbelievable, right @edmund_blake_nelson?) so spamming Siphon was a lot better than it is now.
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One more thing to add is that a new deck often requires different strategy than what youāre used to. If youāre losing games itās helpful to review afterwards and see if you lost them simply by being unfamiliar with how to pilot the list.
Itās easy to say āthe deckās economy is weakā if youāre making inefficient runs, or āthe ICE is wrongā if itās just placed on the wrong server at the wrong time, or āthe deck canāt scoreā if you misjudged a scoring window. Itās too early to scrap the deck if the real bottleneck is adjusting your mindset.
If youāre testing and reviewing and can honestly say āI made the best of things and didnāt blunder but the deck held me backā then youāve truly got a dud and can move on.
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I honestly canāt tell if youāre trolling. If you are, please stop. If youāre not, please take a moment to look at the top 16 decklists from the SSCI.
http://www.acoo.net/anr-tournament/444/stimhack-store-invitational-event/
If you were instead bemoaning the fact that PPVP Kate and desperado+sectesting are the only good runner economy engines, I might be able to take it seriously. But this āthereās no skill and there are only 2 decksā crap is getting out of hand.
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also I never said āthereās no skillā I said skill was overrated relative to other games 
Itās just less skill based than people say it is and has much higher variance than it looks. Thereās lots of decision points but each one of them is a very small % difference between the correct decision and the second best one. Adding up to typically 1-2 additional accesses, or around 5-10% increase in win rate. netrunner games arenāt decided by large margins of EV win rate, they are decided by minor decisions that yield small deviations in the gamestate that SOMETIMES lead to a win
I meant Prepaid kate falls into the second catagory, Stimhacks+strong multi access+Super powerful draw engine same with regass Maxx, Siphon recursion is the other deck that works really well. Say the quetzal deck,
this was more of a history of the game best decks (meant to say in C&C era), I played siphon recursion in tons fo decks and also played Fast draw+strong econ decks with stimhack. Both of those just have such high powerlevels, Indexing/TME/medium/stimhack are just such strong cards. And siphon is barely as strong as that.
Back to the topic at hand.
Big +1 on this post. Being able to tell the difference between your deck being demanding versus it being underpowered is perhaps the hardest deckbuilding skill to develop. First you gotta play the existing best decks a bunch (sound familiar?) to know what to expect a competitive economy engine, set-up speed, etc. feels like. Then when youāre playing your new deck, does it match that? If not, can it do something different, something thatās orthogonal to fighting the standard econ/multiaccess war, that makes it irrelevant that you make money slowly or canāt beat your opponent on remote servers?
For example headlock reina can either make a lot of money slowly, or repeatedly get into remotes, but not bothā¦ but it doesnāt matter because the corp has to play really carefully to avoid getting stuck clicking for 3 creds each turn. RP rush has a suckier ice suite than conventional RP, but its āauto winā gameplan of assembling nisei+caprice or nisei+excalibur becomes a threat much sooner which forces the runner to play their set-up phase suboptimally. MaxX Eater-Keyhole gives up on the remote game but puts pressure with the threat of straight-up racing with high-impact run events. All these decks make opponents contort their playstyle to try to respond. Then you just gotta ask, is that a resilient enough threat that it works in all the matchups you expect to play?
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ugh iāll bite
what other games are you talking about here? chess and go? dominion and twilight struggle? i used to play magic (and vs system), and transitioning to netrunner was like moving from a rail shooter to counterstrike
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(Trying to keep the thread on topicā¦)
Iāve personally only ever actually made two decks, and those were the decks that I made when I got my first core set last christmas (HB glacier and anarch good stuff). That was, of course, before I discovered this wonderful site. The decks were able to win against my cousin (who had both C&C and H&P, as well as a few datapacks). Now, While I havenāt copied anyoneās list specifically from this site, or on NRDB, many of my card choices have been influenced by things that Iāve learned from this site. While this isnāt technically the kind of ābrewā youāre talking about, I still feel these decks are mine, and not just something I copied.
What really ended up happening with my decks was as I got new cards, I just took the ones I liked most and tried them in my deck. Sometimes they worked in the deck, sometimes they didnāt. There were some tricky cards that theoretically would have been good (looking at you pop up window), but just didnāt fit my style of how I wanted to play. Those were the hardest to cut.
There were also weeks where I would try something janky (Mushin No Shin in HB. Is it a cerebral over rider, or a Mandatory upgrades?) and quickly decided it wasnāt going to work (though every game I DID score a mandatory upgrades, I won) (Iām also not playing that card anymore). By trying new things, and filtering out what does and doesnāt work for me, Iāve gone from winning maybe half my games with my HB glacier and 75% with my Anarch good stuff, to my HB having dropped only one in 10 games these past few weeks (to my cousin, who knows the deck), and my anarch only ever losing to to flatlines (which i wasnāt facing a lot at the beginning of the league, and am still learning how to play against meat damage) with the corp never even getting close to having 7 agenda points.
I will say these wins are something, but then that something is just a casual league I play in. Iāve played against good players who have won SCs and won, but theyāre not always playing the best decks, especially since the league has incentives to play IDās that are suboptimal. I still personally have a lot to learn, and my decks have a long ways to go. Iām still personally just going to keep putting in cards I like, see if they work, and go from there.
As someone who brews a lot, hereās things I look for when deciding whether or not to keep tweaking:
- Is it losing to one card specifically thatās commonly played? if so, can you tech against that card? if not, toss it.
- For corp decks, if you make it to whatever point you were setting up for (tagged runner + CA/UCF, caprice + nisei counter + excalibur out of biotech), and still lose, barring absurd, 7 points in 6 cards, accesses, it is time to scrap the deck.
- For runner decks, itās a bit trickier, as there are good runner decks that put very little early pressure on the corp, but if the corp is free to score 4-5 points before youāre ready to go, you better have a damn good lategame plan. If it takes you 6 turns to get set up and threaten remotes, you need to be doing something much more powerful than standard kate and andi lategames of small R&D lock + legwork + remote pressure.
As an example for the above point, this is where connections criminal usually falls flat on its face. It gets this super strong money generating engine, pumpable breakers that can get in everywhere at the cost of a little more money, and then doesnāt do anything a datasucker build canāt do, without the early speed and flexibility of suckers. They donāt convert the synergy engine into anything better than light multi-access and the ability to snipe remotes, and donāt have a good way of dealing with the now 2-3 ice deep centrals.
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I meant magic, what I meant was that stimahck people will post something like āat high levelā¦ā you can generally say the same in magic. Magic players put 100s of games and put 100s of hours into learning basic concepts, dominion similarly is just as hard.
Whatever though, Iām somewhat tongue in cheek right now and somewhat annoyed at how netrunnerās direction is going (printing powerful hate cards for narrow archtypes rather than going for generic stuff like The makerās eye, clot is bad design Legwork is great design.) and also just sad at how people think skill in netrunner is somehow magically changing massive things, I have 84 games of netrunner total, yet somehow poeple consider me āgoodā while in MTG I played over 500 gams and have 300 hours of studying of gamestates and lines and yet Iām barely even hitting 42% in the pro tour while otherās are able to hit 60%. I figure netrunner to be similar, if there were a netrunner pro tour netrunner top vs top level would mean 55% or so win rates.
still In terms fo deckbuilding here are some things people tend to overrate
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Narrow hate cards, (plascrete/Feedback filter/Dues X/Clot) generally speaking the win rate increase in a matchup you arenāt likely to see anyway isnāt worth the card slot a huge proportion of the time. Doubly so if you want to win where the winners metagame is going to have a higher proportion of decks that arenāt beaten by hate cards.
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Fancy tricks, Efficient runs that access multiple cards made often win games for runner side. and there isnāt much room for other things. A card must make runs
A; possible (ICEbreakers/money)
B efficent (ICE destruction/sucker/desperado/bad pub)
C Often (Money
D Accessing agendaās (Multi access Like TME/indexing/Medium)
The reason I consider siphon so good is that it often serves roles ABC as you can deny someone money which lets you attack R&D.
Corp side is where you have very little room for interesting things since you need
3 Jackson howard
8-11 agendaās depending on composition
12 econ minimum (and likely 14)
17 ICE
and a way to win the game.
So around 40 slots at a minimum are devoted to cards that arenāt scorched/biotic/caprice, and then you have to put in the way you actually win the game, and one can see why corp decks are often so simple.
Nice spread on the runner side, a bit heavy on Kate, but overall nice.
Corp side is sadly a bit depressive. But HB is my goto, so it is nice to see it has a shot going into the regionals. 
If you draw an irrelevant hate card it only sets you back a click, compared to Magic where you are potentially losing a whole turn. So netrunner decks can put āsideboardā cards into their maindeck.
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One thing Iām actually surprised about with netrunner design is the paucity of the hate&marginal advantage card. You see this in MtG with narrow hate effects having cycling or being stapled to a cheap creature and in netrunner with cards like Fall Guy.
If hate cards had marginal economic alternative modes (better than clicking for a credit/card, but worse than a proper econ card) it would open up a lot of space in deck design (particularly for corps) as you could say go to 9 econ cards rather than 12 if your 5-6 hate cards can help pull up the slack.
For example stick the tiny bit of text ā[Click][trash]; Gain 3cā onto Blacklist so that in the irrelevant matchups for the main ability drawing and using it is still a little better than clicking for credits.
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While Corp builds are very restricted, I think you are underestimating just how impactful ICE selection can be. If you carefully consider what you want your ICE to do, you get a lot more out of the deck.
ICE might be a bit like creatures in Magic. Most decks want a lot of them, a few decks do without, but simply saying āI have X Creature Cardsā in my deck doesnāt tell you all that much.
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Youāre right, other than Fall Guy, the only one I can think of is Infiltration. Itās definitely a shame since a large class of bad cards could have been interesting and playable just by adding āor gain $Xā to the their text.
For example, Big Brother, Cyberdex Trial, Foxfire, Freelancer, Rework, and Sub Boost are all Operations that cost $0 and are still way too expensive to see play. If these cards could either do their narrow effect OR give a small economic boost then I wouldnāt be surprised to see them across the table.
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Iāve had worse! Reactive hate, but still.
My first knee jerk thoughts when seeing the thread title: beer and Jewish skinheads.
Another thing to work on, once youāve got a list, is to see if the list works better with a different ID. People say āthat Exile list would be better as Kateā for more reasons than just the joke, after all.
Some examples: Lots of tagstorm-ish decks work better as NEH because it helps draw combo pieces and gives extra influence, which is why Butcher Shop isnāt a Making News archetype. Many NEXT decks that trend toward being glaciers work better in ETF because the slight delay is worth the constant economic advantage. This is leaving aside decks that depend on the ID to even seemingly function, like Cambridge PE, most RP lists, Pyrrhic Argus, Iain decks (for a given value of "function), Kit and Noise, etc.
On the other hand, the NEXT deck I run right now would be terrible as ETF, because itās a rush deck with only mild glaciering ability due to NEXT ice. The biggest rez cost I have is 4, and I hate to pay it because I want to win before theyāre set up. If I canāt safely Mushin no Shin on my first or second turn, in theory, then Iām in trouble, because I want to drop the āIs this a Vitruvius that Iāll overadvance like hell, or a Junebug thatāll wipe your great opening hand, or a Cerebral Overwriter that will render the rest of this game miserable and make future Junebugs all the more frightening?ā question in the Runnerās lap ASAP. Iāve got the economy to rez Ice and score out, and no Ashes to dump the extra econ into, so an ETF-switch doesnāt do me a lot of good because of the tempo loss.
Was still worth it to try the switch and see, though, because I donāt want to just play NEXT to play NEXT. I want to play a deck that is fun and interesting, but which can also win me some things. Is it the best deck for Regionals? Maybe not, and Iām overhauling it and looking at other options for that. But itās done me reasonably well otherwise (even against Leela, to my surprise) and I think it holds up decently enough, though Iāve been finding a few weaknesses. That said, so long as I can vary my gameplan well enough, repeated exposure doesnāt hurt the list all that much. āHe did Vitruvius last time, is he trying to sneak it by me twice or land the Overwriter for real?ā is a fun question to present a runner.
Thatās another thing, actually. It was mentioned earlier, too, butā¦ donāt count on surprise to win you games if you want to win tournaments. Maybe I take the Supermodernism Motto too much to heart, but you should be able to show your opponent your decklist before the game and have that not significantly impact your chance of winning. If the only reason you can squeak a win is that they donāt know what to expectā¦
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In my experience, HB Rush works well against Leela because your ICE is cheap and everywhere. Rush can backfire against Leela if your rush is allowing your boardstate to disintegrate, but if your ICE is already rezzed because itās cheap and if youāre already covering a lot of bases, you can withstand the bounces ok 
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Itās the Mushin no Shin trap part I was expecting to see fail, and it might just be luck that it didnāt. More testing still required, but yeah, itās really not as terrible a matchup as Iād been worried about.
Oh yeah, if I saw you Mushin something Iād try and slam a central to bounce it back into your hand. Doesnāt always work though, and sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and check, then scoop your brains off the floor.