Good seeing you at Worlds, @mtgred. As last year, you proved you are one of the best in the game.
Love the build. I would’ve loved to run a Siphon Anarch, but was too chicken. HB is hard, but the lack of Crisium everywhere has made life easier for it.
This is so cool! I’ve been playing your Quetzal deck since it showed up on Acoo. What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages between Quetzal and MaxX?
Very cool. Having play-tested with Minh throughout the different iterations of the deck I can attest it’s as an absolute beast!
A few questions regarding card choices:
What’s the purpose of utopia shard in the list? Do you use it most often as a pseudo-legwork? Have you considered hades shard instead? With the retrieval run, I could also see a single femme in that slot to get around pesky tollbooths and swordsman. Speaking of which, what’s your plan against swordsman? Have you ever regretted cutting the imps? Without Val or scrubber it seems like it would be quite good here vs asset spam and combo decks.
Not @mtgred , but in conversation he said that a major way of losing is NEH fast-tracking their agendas. This can be popped after the fast track in order to try to stop it. I don’t think he’s that keen on this card, though.
I favour it as a method of Scorch protection, getting at cards in hand if HQ is super secure, getting rid of things that have been Archived Memories back, and generally adding pressure to the Corp. Just having it as a threat modifies what Corps are willing to keep in hand and changes their behaviour.
Also a good way to beat dlr is to store agendas in hand, Utopia shard combats this strategy.
Super late answer here, but I just won a game vs Minh MaxX by doing exactly this. Eventually he got in and trashed it, but after he Levy’d and I’d killed 2/3 of his Wireless Nets, 2 Fall Guys, and a DLR. His DLR installs I trashed on sight after that. I would have loved to bring the Corp Town back and do it again, but I literally had no windows to score agendas to sac to it until the very end of the game when his deck and hand were both at 0, so I had to do things manually. Basically, my entire strategy against Minh MaxX DLR is to stop playing regular Netrunner and start playing Make Corp Town Live At Almost All Costs. Once I figured that out, my win percentage went way up.
Mkay…
What I would say is please, here and on NRDB, do stop making your deck some sort of a mythological construct, driven by passionate discussion.
This is falling to a lot of things that are not in the world meta. It is just full rock, or full paper or full scissors.
So… This is not as invulnerable as said in the op (for exemple, this would have trouble vs Industrial Genomics, Swordman, or other pure mushin Jankteki or many many other things like BS glacier, tag&bag, cheap HB glacier, etc).
Be realistic, stop the myth. When I see the first page of NRDB, it is a cock length competition and I wonder if the accompanying text is just suffisant to get you love from users.
Anyway : I would like to say I also liked to read this deck, so thank you Minh for sharing. The above is just a general feeling I’ve got since monthes, that is slowly destroying any visibility coming from non fluent english speakers. This is not fully directed against you. I just would have liked more coldhead analysis than wow-effect.
Can’t really tell what you’re going on about here. This post is quite close to ‘completely off - topic’. I’m not sure what you mean by ‘mythological construct’ , for example.
Edit : removed pointless ad - hominem attack. Sorry @Syntax!
-edit- mkay.
Mythological construct as “this deck is invulnerable, click me”. This game doesn’t allow a list to be invulnerable. To me a decklist represent 33% of the strength of a player. Other 33% is pilot’s skill and the last 33% is luck. And you could cut this by quarters if you count the meta environnement.
So basing deck comments with arguments like “this will destroy everything ever done” is purely a myth, and it’s a construct by intent of click whoring. That is what prevent some intelligent decks, and I’m not speaking about mine, with no mythical comment parts to have visibility.
I also said this is not directed to Minh specialy. This is just against the general bullshit that comes with every single T2 deck posted in english here or on NRDB that have visibility.
I’m starting to stop commenting and posting mine, even T1.5, because of this. I posted on R4G never less than 2 never-seen-before decks per week last year and most of them were never-seen-before T3 BS. I do not brag those were awesome, but I do brag some are funny.
Is this deck annoying? Sure. Consistent? Yes. Is it unbeatable? No. I beat it with Spark Fast Advance on saturday, just doing my normal thing. I beat it with Argus Sunday, though i did tech 3 all seeing I against it. And I beat it 2x last night to win a GNK. Just play smarter. So what if Valencia cancels the first one by dropping the bad pub? Play a 2nd one. For 1 credit and 1 influence it’s not hard to tech 1-2 into almost any deck- maybe dropping that ever-present crutch, aka Jackson Howard for it instead. I put this deck into the same category as those Accelerated Diagnostics/Power Shutdown Kill or Beale decks… It’s Netrunner, but it’s really not. I’m with Syntax on this one- it’s not some be-all end-all deck.
EDIT I must say, though- Well done on a killer deck combo. I may not like to play against it, but damn does it work!
While I agree is not a panacea deck, that solves all problems, I disagree with your view that Jinteki is a strong counter.
With this and my own Val deck from Worlds, a lot of the strength comes from Account Siphon and keeping the opponent low on credits, and Jinteki is notoriously rubbish at defending this. Typically PE and IG decks leave HQ relatively lightly defended, and landing Siphons is much easier (I did well against an RP last night despite it having Lotus Field and Crisium on HQ). Also, the default IHW provides good value against spiky decks.
Tag and bag also suffer due to well-defended Paparazzi plus IHW, removing one of the Corp’s main win conditions.
BS Glacier would be more of a challenge - but you’ve got to put things in context - in a world full of strong Kate decks, BS glacier is simply risky to take into the competitive environment.
Minh went undefeated with this deck at Worlds, and I played against it and can confirm it’s strength - I also played another version at Belgian Nationals and can confirm it was equally brutal. I’m not saying anyone could play this deck with as much efficiency, Minh is an excellent player, but the deck is clearly Tier 1 and highly effective.
You may have problems with other people’s Mythical Decks or the front page of NRDB, but I don’t feel this is one of them (speaking as someone who’s played against it in top level competitive environments).
Additionally I think Val DLR (and my own Siphon Spam Val disguised as DLR) are extremely strong and this was proved at Worlds. It has little to do with how big someone’s willy is, or what the english-speaking internet hivemind thinks, and a lot to do with consistent results achieved (by and against) the best players in the world.
Incidentally, I’d love to see some of your decks posted up. I find on NRDB quite often its something entirely janky and untested that gets a lot of likes and favourites as the community responds really positively to new and exciting (or simply humorous) ideas.
As a side note, I got to say that as a newer player it’s difficult to assess the strength of a deck. All the troll builds going up lately (which gain lots of fake positive reviews) do not particularly help.
Having played around a
Iittle with Sync it seems like an interesting ID for its primary ability. But the flip side will certainly help if you have to eat through resources manually. You could certainly try going killy with it (obviously no use vs. Paparazzi), but I’ve just tried more subtle ways to punish tags so far. QPM really helps against trash-focussed decks (Noise and also DLR) since that’s three points that running Archives will score for you. Accessing Archives too early (especially with Jackson installed) can win the game for the Corp from 4+ points! Reality Threedee seems a pretty good way to punish both being tagged and/or playing a no-run game too and ought to help you munch through Net Pavillions.
I feel quite strongly anyone posting these is at best an idiot. Primarily for the reason you give.
Check out this article for a great run-down of the current strong deck as shown by worlds results. It’s a great read, and gives you a really nice picture of what the current decks to beat (and play) are.
I read these every month(?) when they come out. 
I’m at a point where I get when posters are trolling or not, but I’m sure others might not.
Didn’t mean to hijack @mtgred’s thread. Thanks for sharing the deck, looks really interesting! Will give it a go.
I’ll open a separate thread for this.
Do you play Caprice in your Industrial Genomics ?
Because this is sounding like an hard counter to me. Sub/Allele combo wombo too : in definitive, using DLR makes the corp draw & having those cards during her turn. Not sure you would not find agendas or the cards you need to put with a 10-to-trash-caprice, sacrificing 1 or 2 agendas in the process by enforcing a scoring “window”.
Not running in front of an SubAllele deck is plain stupid. Increasing what the corp can find in archives is even better.
Caprice is tough on any Siphon deck, but it’s by no means a hard counter. The deck does run Faust and even failing that, DLR does not require access to HQ to screw things up. Caprice on HQ does harm the game plan but it doesn’t hose it, unless you’re trying to argue that any deck with Siphon is hard countered by Caprice.