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Prepaid Haley - is this viable?

Netrunner General
#1

Long time lurker on here and figured I should post something and start commenting.

After attempting to play Stealth Haley for a few games, I quickly realized that Haley struggles for money early game and then decided to see what would happen if I just played the common prepaid kate build in haley. I’ve made a few changes that seemed appropriate to help with Haley’s early game money woes, the most important of which I think is adding in 2x Symmetrical Visage to counteract the loss of Kate’s free credit. So far this deck seems to play possibly a little faster than the Kate version and I was wondering what all of you thought about this. Here’s the build:

Calimsha Haley (46 cards)
Haley Kaplan: Universal Scholar
– Event (20 cards)
3 Diesel
3 Dirty Laundry
1 Legwork **
1 Levy AR Lab Access
3 Lucky Find ** ** **
2 Quality Time
1 Stimhack *
3 Sure Gamble
3 The Maker’s Eye
– Hardware (10 cards)
2 Astrolabe
3 Clone Chip
3 Prepaid VoicePAD
2 Q-Coherence Chip
– Program (11 cards)
1 Atman
1 Corroder **
1 Cyber-Cypher
1 Deus X
1 Mimic *
1 Parasite **
3 Self-modifying Code
1 Sharpshooter
1 ZU.13 Key Master
– Resource (5 cards)
2 Same Old Thing
2 Symmetrical Visage
1 Utopia Shard *

The biggest change you’ll notice is Corroder is in for Lady and Scavenge saving 3 card slots and initial install money. I put in a third SMC for more Haley goodness and combo that with Q-Coherence so you can have room in the rig if you need it (and it installs free off of a haley trigger). I’d really like to fit another Stimhack, but I’m not sure what to pull out. Currently sticking with the 46 card theme of Calimsha Kate just to make @mediohxcore angry. You can easily remove the second Q-Coherence I think. Also, not sure about the CyCy without any scavenges in the deck. Might be droppable for an Indexing or something.

What do you all think?

2 Likes
#2

Don’t you run into a lot of money troubles? Your breakers are very expensive. The Q-Coherence chips are an interesting choice, though. Do they feel like worth having?

#3

I think that, to justify Hayley’s ability, you need to run a lot of installable cards and you have already spent a lot of your deck dedicating to events, making installable cards less likely to be drawn (I mean, of the same type, of course).

P.S. I’m brain dead at the moment and can’t really express myself. I hope someone will understand what I mean.

#4

I think I’d take out one of the Q-Coherence chips. I put two in just for better value with Haley in the build but now that I’ve thought it through only one should ever be needed. It’s really nice for situations where you’re stuck on MU (you haven’t drawn astrolabe yet or you have both CyCy and Zu.13 down already) and you’d like to throw down an SMC for a safe run. I’ve only played this with an Akamatsu MemChip in that slot so far and decided a Q-Coherence is just better because the MU isn’t needed to stick around and saving the credit is really good for Haley.

With regards to the breakers being expensive, I haven’t run out of money and this deck is really good at get getting pretty rich in a few clicks (it plays almost identically to prepaid kate) and then making one good run a turn if needed. With a full breaker suite out, the corp will be reluctant to IAA unless they’re 3 or 4 big ice deep and you can stimhack in almost at any point out of nowhere. This is why I think I’d like a second stimhack in the deck. Maybe a third SoT instead will be good enough since it’s more flexible to legwork/maker’s eye/money up again and also adds another free Haley trigger card.

The idea of this deck isn’t to maximize Haley’s ability to the extreme like the Stealth Workshop builds, it’s to determine if Haley’s free click ability has enough value to rival Kate’s free credit ability. Of the few games I’ve played so far, I really think it does. The minor early game speed boost is really strong. I think it comes down to determining if draw variance has a bigger negative/positive effect overall playing this as Haley vs Kate. I think a good draw in Haley is better than a good draw in Kate for sure. For instance, it’s possible to install 2x prepaid, then Lucky Find up to 9 and install an SMC on turn 1. That’s bonkers.

#5

Haley’s ability says ‘good with everything except events’.

1 Like
#6

No, it’s not viable.

#7

In a typical starting hand you will have 2 events, 1 hardware, 1 program and 1 event/resource. This means that to be able to use Haleys ability you will have to draw 1-2 cards in average. If you play Kate, you already have 2 targets in hand.
Hayley, despite being faster on paper, will have a slower setup.

Basically, Hayleys ability wants 2 installable cards in hand per turn, Kate wants 1 prog/hw per turn. Think about that when you build Hayley decks.

#8

I agree with this idea of Haley on paper, which is why I built her with stealth like most others are doing. The thing is, this deck has tons of card draw AND Haley naturally needs lots of card draw. If you happen to not have 2 same targets in hand at the start, you are fairly likely to have a diesel, QT, Astrolabe, or Symmetrical Visage at the start. Turn 1, click 1 Diesel is probably the most common opening play if you have it. On top of that I slightly modified the standard Calimsha Kate build to have a few more free/cheap installed cards.

As I stated in a previous post, trying out prepaid in Haley like this isn’t an attempt to spam her ability. Doing that I think is possibly the wrong approach as instead of running and doing cool shapery things, you end up being too focused on drawing and installing cards, and then losing. This is an attempt to determine if saving a handful of clicks over the course of a game is a larger benefit over saving 10-15ish credits during a game. I think it might be, especially due to the added benefit of a boost in speed during the early game.

Maybe I’m just flat out wrong and it’s not better, or maybe it’s one of those non-obvious situations and you don’t see how good it is until you take it for a spin.

#9

If you really get a faster setup than Kate and can start applying pressure earlier it might be worth the loss of Kate-credits. If you can do it consistently.

Why I think stealth is the best option for Hayley right now, is that Hayley could potentially set up a stealth rig in much shorter time than any other runner. Since stealth is super-efficient once it is setup, this would transform Hayleys ability to cheap runs.

I think to maximize Hayleys ability, you should concentrate on 1 or 2 of the installable types. Since programs are needed for breakers, you could have either resources or hardware as backup.

If you want this kind of deck you should look at ct stimshops rather than ppvp Kate. Something like http://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/19037/ssci-top8-chaos-theory

That is my theory, I might of course be totally wrong. :slight_smile:

#10

Replicator in a stimshop stealth deck id pretty awesome. Got one of your stealth hardware? Guess you just got the second one installed from the deck :x

1 Like