I do hope you’re kidding.
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I Used Escher Twice, once against a NBN:MN where I put a Femmed Tollbooth (it was used first to snipe a remote server) and a Wraparound on R&D to make an indexing run right after, the second time against a HB Red Coat to put 3 Ichi on R&D before making the indexing run to win.
I think I also used the LARLA against the the HB player after I used my third clone chip and my third LF.
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No I’m actually not. I’m not saying there’s a kill risk (Jinteki are still easy enough to play around especially for Shaper) but one-off net damage is bad for decks in which individual cards have a lot of value. An econ card in PPVP can be worth as much as $9, which is a lot to have sniped from your hand.
You have a really conservative way of thinking and analyzing the situation. Even if an econ card is worth 9 creds, if you’re already ahead, it doesn’t really matters. Yeah it sucks to lose a Lucky Find on a random net damage but it isn’t the end of the world. You can still play around the econ loss and find other way. I’ve played a couple of Lucky Find or Sure Gamble with an installed SoT and it was always worth it because that was what I needed at the moment. Right, the SoT could have been used better for a legwork run, a LARLA or an indexing but in the end, if it wasnt what I needed at the right time, it’s pretty worthless.
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Hey, take it easy. Just because you just won a large tournament (or, flipped a coin correctly a few times, in some people’s eyes) doesn’t mean you know what you’re talking about.
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I guess my good performance on every tournament i’ve gone these last two months (2 CP, 3 regional) are also probably worthless then :<
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Sarcasm detector - failed.
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Eschering 3 Ichis onto R&D so you can Indexing (I’m assuming you didn’t bother breaking?): badass. Kudos.
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I think that PPVP Kate is quite strong. However:
I am extremely wary of the “deck X has had success at tournaments, therefore deck X is good” arguments given the scale of the netrunner community. Recall this article: which decks strong players choose has a HUGE impact on which decks win tournaments given how (relatively) few strong players there are at any given tournament. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Yellow Jackets deck that took down San Antonio regionals was a great deck, but when an entire carpool of (presumably strong) players takes the same deck to a 43 person regionals then it’s pretty likely that that deck will come out on top even if it’s only mediocre.
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NBN and Kate are strong identities. The fact they’re winning with ANY build is no shock.
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I think this is a good example of David Sutcliffe’s article on variance. This is an excellent deck and I think it has quite a bit of variance. The perfect choice for (winning) a large tournament.
I’m also wondering if part of the success of the deck is that you’re adding 6 economy cards (Lucky Find and PPvP) and are simply richer than many runner decks. Perhaps other runners haven’t adjusted to things like NAPD contract yet.
I am sensitive to the “strong players pick strong decks” argument, but I’m not sure how you want to apply it here @Crunchums ; I am unaware of evidence that a group of strong players playing mediocre decks will come out on top, in large part because I have no evidence that strong players will take mediocre decks. At the very least this is a question to which I don’t think the current data has answers.
OK, argument mode engage:
Picking a high-variance strategy is exactly the wrong choice for winning a large tournament, given the tournament structure of netrunner. I encourage all of my potential opponents to play high-variance strategies, unless they are bad players already :). This is especially true now that the top-n double elim bracket extends the trial period!
You pick a high-variance strategy when you are uncertain that your baseline odds of success will be sufficient to carry the day, and then you hope to catch a break. It works really well in limited trial environments, e.g. american football. It works incredibly poorly in extended, deep trial environments, e.g. hockey, (pro) basketball, tennis.
Rafael Nadal doesn’t play high-variance tennis. The Spurs & Heat play low-variance basketball. Andromeda is strong because she restricts variance. High variance specifically excludes a deck from being “excellent”, for at least my definition of excellence.
/argument mode off 
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I think mediocre was too strong of a word for what I was trying to convey. Let me try again:
Recently there has been a change in “runner fashion” - PPVP Kate (so hot right now) is in and Andy is out. But suppose Andy is actually somewhat better than Kate. My point is that when you have a relatively small amount strong players at tournament (and given the variance in Netrunner), if most of those strong players choose Kate then Andy needs to be hugely better in order to tip the probability away from a Kate deck winning.
Basically: I think PPVP Kate winning a bunch of tournaments definitely suggests that it’s a top tier deck. But I don’t think it says anything about how it compares to other top tier runner decks (because the effect of the difference in strength between PPVP Kate and any given top runner deck is dominated by the effect of PPVP Kate being the most common choice among strong players).
I hope that is more clear; I have difficulty being articulate :<
PPVP Kate definitely has one of the best match-ups against Jinteki PE decks, and it’s not even close. If you’re afraid of losing econ cards, just play them. Other than that, you can pretty much afford to lose anything that isn’t Clone Chip, Same Old Thing, or preferably Indexing.
That said, it’s not an inconsistent deck because “some players are too conservative”. It’s inconsistent because if you draw insufficient economy against a corp that has its act together, you will lose. Now, this is true for almost all runner decks, but like I said, this one has only 9 cards that actually give you credits. 3 of those are Dirty Laundry, which becomes a tempo card rather than an economy card against some corps if you don’t get it really early.
Now, one could argue that this does not happen often, but in my case, it happened 3 out of 8 games in a single tournament.
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But in that tournament, you also played a 46 cards version which will always be more inconsistent than a 45 cards deck. And since you also played only a single SoT, you couldn’t really afford to recurse your econ the same way than someone who’s playing 2 or 3 SoT. By doing so, you made your deck a little less consistent than other versions of the same archetype.
Yes, that might have made the difference. Or it might not have. There’s no real way to tell.
It’s still a top-tier deck, and probably still my go-to choice for a tournament right now, but putting your fingers in your ears and denying its weaknesses is not doing anyone any favors.
It’s Wall of Text o’clock!
Well, since you mentioned argument mode, let’s see what I can do with this 
Argument the first: skill > deck; personal testing
Part one: “strong players playing mediocre decks will come out on top”
It’s been said that the player matters more than the deck in Netrunner, and from my personal experience, that’s true.
If you’ve ever had a Netrunner apprentice whose game you’ve been trying to improve by tutoring, surely you’ve had those moments where you’re standing by their table, looking at how they’re playing, and just dying inside. You mentally go * “oh CHRIST, why the hell did/didn’t he do that? It’s painfully obvious”, *but you don’t want to interfere with a game in progress because hey, sportsmanship. Those are moments that nicely demonstrate that with the same card pool of 45 cards, and even the same pool of {0…5} cards in hand, you can do a lot of different things. Choosing the best play for now and/or the future is definitely a player-dependent skill, not a deck-dependent one. The cards in the deck define the borders of your universe of valid plays, but there’s still infinite variations within that universe, and this is about picking the right one.
Another situation when this is obvious is when you play with another person’s deck. Even if they explain the deck to you, you’ll often do better/worse than they do, depending on both how well the deck fits your style and how your personal player skill compares to theirs. I see this particularly often, since my wife usually plays my decks at our local game night. She will often decisively lose against the literally same matchup (same opponent, same decks, approximately the same quality of shuffle) that I decisively win.
Mind that this might not work for extremely non-interactive, autopilot-style decks (go away, stupid yellow cards - nobody wants you in this argument), but that’s really the exception.
Part Two: “strong players take mediocre decks”
@SamRS said it best in this very thread:
Strong players usually won’t take mediocre decks on purpose (unless it’s some ego-fuelled thing about getting some unusable piece of crap into a tournament-winning decklist database or something :P), but… sometimes you don’t know if a deck is mediocre or not until you’ve actually tested it in a competitive environment. It might turn out strong, or it might turn out mediocre. Could be that you had better luck in testing, maybe you misjudged the meta, whatever.
I’m going to go ahead and guess that this sort of “testing” was something that happened a lot with Store Champs - let’s say there’s 5 tournaments you can actually go to and you’ve won your trophy at the first one. Are you really going to be a douche and play the same decks at 4 more events, winning 4 more trophies? You better have a huge fireplace. Or are you going to use the chance to see if you can manage wins against the general field with progressively more and more untested/weird decks? Some of those will likely turn out to be, well, mediocre, and yet you may still pull out wins, simply because you’re awesome.
Argument the second: anecdotal personal evidence
(don’t worry, this part will be considerably shorter)
We have a couple of top-tier players in our local group. I’ve won my fair share of trophies, but I definitely consider myself a weaker player than these guys. Being the TO of our events, I have the privilege of actually seeing the steaming piles of crap they manage to win with regularly They’re often decks that make you go “this is way too flimsy to work with any kind of regularity in a tournament”, and yet for them, it does. I would definitely qualify this as both “strong players playing mediocre decks” and “<–, and coming out on top”.
Some people just have a stupid amount of personal luck, I guess. Either that, or the quote from some ONR card (don’t remember which) comes to mind: “If someone’s consistently having good luck, consider the possibility that it’s not luck at all”.
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This is the point I was making.
Moreover, the “PPVP” part of the deck is essentially a combo which means you’re relying on drawing it early enough to be of value. Past the halfway point it’s borderline whether it’s worth playing one or not and doing so is nearly always a tempo hit.
I wasn’t trying to be facetious, argumentative or offensive - I really like Shaper and I wouldn’t have played PPVP if I didn’t think it was good. But it does have a level of inconsistency built into it.
What happend to the good old “agree to disagree”. Can’t there be more then one view… 
Ooooookay… lemme try and steer the conversation back to something a little more positive.
Kate’s been knocking it out of the park in Regionals so far… FOUR wins in the past couple of weeks, and several overall, most of which were Prepaid VoicePAD decks. I think that speaks for the efficacy of VoicePAD, and the reliability of this deck archetype. I personally have enjoyed the burst economy Lucky Find provides over Magnum Opus. It also puts a lot of uncertainty in the oppnent’s mind about my ability to get into their servers…
I know I’ve been having a lot of success with my version, which basically follows the standard archetype, with a couple of minor tweaks to suit my personal taste. I piloted it to my first ever Top 4 placement in my local store a couple of weeks ago, so I’m a big supporter of this deck.
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