Pyrrhic Argus - Undefeated through two store championships

Decklists
61

Let me help you out a bit here:

You play with 5 fewer major economy cards and complain that your deck didn’t make enough money. Interestingly enough, the first version of this deck that I kept losing with also ran three Data Ravens, two Snares, and The Cleaners. I also think you need to learn how to better leverage the Argus ID ability, because this would also explain some of your trouble:

If the runner hits 3 or 4 1-point agendas in a single archives access, they probably just lose; especially if it’s still too early for them to get a massive credit lead. That’s why you can draw for combo pieces so freely early on and save Jackson for recycling Snare and Ravens. I always try to leave at least 3-4 points in archives until the runner manages to steal a few from elsewhere.

I think you misunderstood a few things here:

That’s why I run 3 copies of both Scorched and Punitive. It’s not uncommon for me to be sitting on a full house hand of both.

62

Won three games against Noise with this deck today. Either he got unlucky, or his deck needs some work, but he’s usually a pretty strong player.

First game, he makes an HQ run while he had less money than me, and finds a HRI, takes damage and draws up to 4 cards. I had barely enough credits to kill him with IOP (IHW and another event) and Punitive. Mistake on his side there; if he had pumped the IOP trace, I’d only have been able to get him to 0 cards, with both of us being broke. (He had 4, I 8.)

Second game, I left R&D undefended for quite a while, which eventually led to a 7-counter Medium. He only got 3 agenda points that way. While he was doing this, I scored out HT, False Lead and an HRI behind a two-ice remote, both unrezzed. After I purge and ice up, I find another HRI and IAA. He installs D4v1d, I trigger False Lead, and he bounces off Engima on the last click.

Third game, I score some agendas early behind an ice wall with an unrezzed Archer in front. I don’t think I used False Lead. Put a third ice on the remote, money up and IAA a second HRI later. At this point, his rig was an Eater, with a Parasite in the heap and Grimoire and a Clone Chip out. He takes Kati money, installs Mimic & Yog, and then plants into Rainbow.

There’s probably nothing particularily enlightening about this story, but Rainbow can definitely work. It’s no Eli, but it’s a decent tax on centrals and can give you some ease of mind against cutlery events. (Which was the reason I put it in front of the Archer after he installed Eater.) Playing this deck was a lot of fun and reminded me of the good times I had with GRNDL Supermodernism last summer.

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63

That’s not a bad frame of reference for this! It’s not quite as fast, and it tends to skew more toward flatline focus, but they do have some key similarities. Glad you enjoyed it!

Or maybe this Argus deck is a little better than you expected? :wink:

64

Are you suggesting pitching both false leads to timewalk and score a 5/3? Not my idea of how to win a game, especially when the hope is to flatline. Sure they cannot run through Data Raven without keeping a tag, but that is assuming you have one of the 2 Data Ravens in the deck, and that you were able to put it on a remote. I never drew GRNDL Refinery, but would have had no way to leverage one if I had. All of this is not to mention if the runner just installs plascrete, they can just keep the tag and not worry about it.

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65

That’s actually exactly how a decent number of games with this deck end. Other than that, I’ve never had to pop more than a single False Lead to score a 5/3. Just find a turn where they’re too scared to run it on their first click.

66

I think it’s pretty clear from the middling to unimpressed reports that the way to most effectively pilot this deck is not immediately intuitive, and evidently requires considerable practice and nonstandard plays. Having given the deck a few goes now myself, I really struggle to see how, in the majority of matchups, you will have sufficient economy to perform your key Invasions or Punitives. I do think that the swap-over to HRI from GC is almost certainly correct at this point (for this exact reason), but even there, I just feel that “False Lead scored basically = GG” doesn’t quite seal it for me.

You mentioned earlier on that you would try to get a video in of some gameplay. I think, at this point, we would all greatly appreciate that. I realize that a man doesn’t like to give away all of his tricks, but given that you posted the list and then actually decided to do us the courtesy of engaging and defending your deckbuilding decisions, it would certainly go a long way to proving us wrong.

Either way, thanks for contributing and congratulations on your success.

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67

Why would the runner be scared to run with a full hand, 30+ credits, and a full rig? Especially when it is going to cost them about 6 credits to get in and take it, they can easily take the meat damage and remove a tag if need be. Where are you getting all this money from?

68

What were you doing while they were building a rig and making 30 credits? You should be installing something and forcing a run about every other turn. You only need one or two pieces of ice to start scoring out, because they always have to respect the flatline threat.

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69

The person with the most success is also the person who played it more like Supermodernism. It’s not hard to score an early agenda or two with this deck. Make one of them a 5/3, pop a False Lead or two to score your second, and topdeck a Hostile for the win. That’s how most of my games go. I’m not afraid to throw small agendas at them because if they make a mistake when they take one, they die.

The only two losses it’s taken were to a Leela and a Noise, and I scored 6 points in both. The Noise got supremely lucky hitting 5 agendas on an R&D glory run the turn before I scored out, and the Leela won because I missed my timing on False Lead.

70

I was scoring false leads. And the runner, because he was smart and a good player, was NOT running, because they recognize that scoring an agenda or two (especially after the first was a 1 pointer) isn’t actually pressuring them to run at all.

Almost everything you have posted here about runner behavior leads me to believe you are not playing against the best players. Installing and advancing something does not “force a run” against a good runner who recognizes when they are pressured to run, and when they are better off building for late game.

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71

But everything in this deck except the Shattered Remains (and the Snare I guess, but I rarely install it) will hurt the runner if they don’t run it. If they don’t run it, score it, or make GRNDL money. Pretty soon they have to run or there won’t be a late game to build for.

72

This is just plain untrue. Agendas scored don’t inherently hurt the runner. A lot of the time the best thing to do in Netrunner is let the corp have an agenda or two, and then win the game after building up to inevitability.

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73

Agree to disagree, I guess. Maybe someday I’ll get to try it out against a stouter meta.

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74

I played this tonight at my league, after testing it in a few practice runs at a random Netrunner night I went to yesterday at a different store. Last night, things didn’t go well, but I figured I’d give you the benefit of the doubt. After all, you said that you took it to several tournies and bombed out with it before you got good with it, so who am I to judge off of a game or two? So I tried it out again today. As a note, I switched out the Government Contracts (which I used last night) with the High-Risk Investments.

My first game, I lost to a couple lucky accesses that got the runner 6 points on turn like 3-4. I almost won early game with a double Punitive off the first three pointer, but hit the dreaded IHW, stymieing my plans. I was able to build to 3 points, but wasn’t able to close it out. He found his last point, and the game ended. I’ll chalk this one up to variance, especially because I was doing fine on money, and had a reasonable flatline threat in my hand, had the runner not just blown out in the early game.

The other 5 I played, I won. One was to an Andy player who made a mistake and ran unthinking last click with one card in hand with an RDI down. He’s a new player, and just wasn’t thinking. He was forced to take the tag off the 3-pointer he found, and I had the scorch. GG. I’ll chalk this win up to just him being new, and don’t really count it. He lost the game more than I won it.

I played the Supplier Quetzal deck, which I was originally worried about, since Quetzal can just invalidate 6 of the ice if they’re not stacked, but the fact that it was a slower deck made my match up pretty good. I abused the setup time Quetzal needed in order to score out an early False Lead, got 20 creds off a Refinery, and scored and a High-Risk, which I got a good chunk of money off of. He threatened some Centrals with a couple knights, but I just replaced the ice and moved on with the gameplan. Eventually, he stumbled onto the 3-pointer I had chucked in Archives, and took then shook the tag. My turn I fired off the Invasion, which cleared out his entire hand (including IHW), and the Punitive finished things off.

The most interesting game was off a Stimshop Chaos Theory playing both Plascrete and 3 IHW, as well as Opus. The Opus was an obvious problem, since he could gain quite a lot of money, quite quickly, which makes traces useless and servers able to be assaulted. This was one of my store’s stronger players, so he played around being traced and the Argus ability quite well, but I was able to get out a 24 credit Refinery while he tried to find the breaker he needed to get in. He had assumed because of all the advancements that I might be trying to sneak out a Government Takeover, but nope. Just 24 credits. I used the threat these credits created to score out a High-Risk, which made him trying to use the Opus to match my credit lead very awkward for him. I then used this window to score out a single-counter Atlas. By this time, he had found his Plascrete, and felt safe running into RnD, where he found a 3-pointer.

THIS IS WHERE I FUCK UP. I have 2 Punitives in hand, as well as an Invasion, so I go ahead and invasion him to remove several cards (fuck you, IHW), putting him into double Punitive range. I proceed to Punitive him, removing 3 Plascrete counters. I go for the second Punitive, and he gently reminds me that Invasion is a double. SHIT. I’VE SPENT SO MANY CREDITS ON TRACES. SO MANY. So I’m at 5 points, and he’s at 3, and I’ve basically pissed away my money. On my last click the net turn, I topdeck a Hostile Takeover, planning to score it next turn. Next turn, I topdeck another, giving me the win in my hand (I also have another High-Risk in hand, and this is important). So I score it out, putting me at match point. Incoming Legwork, click one. I have 4 cards in hand, and 2 are points totaling exactly how much he needs to win. He hits the Hostile, but somehow missed the High-Risk. i Atlas for the second Hostile and score out. Really fucked up that trace turn, and almost lost because of it. If I hadn’t, I was looking at an easy win.

The other three games I don’t really remember, other than I scored out one time using a False Lead to neuter the runner from running my last 5/3, and then winning off a Hostile, and the other one I killed the runner by making him take 3 1-pointers from archives on click 2 (he had 5 cards, so he took 4 meat damage and a tag, shook the tag, then drew a card) and then Punitiving him in the face, thanks to a couple operation econ cards I was storing in my hand that he wasn’t expecting me to have to beat his trace. And the last one I won… somehow. I think through another Invasion into Punitive.

So overall the deck can be really, really fun. There’s a lot of interesting, subtle interactions that can occur that I didn’t go over in the broad overview above, like where I was putting Data Ravens or the benefits of early Shadows. But the GRNDL Refineries put in a LOT of work, and that was surprising to me. I really, really like seeing one early. The High-Risk investment was also a powerhouse. The two together are a monolith of cash.

There’s a couple things I didn’t like, though. Something that never really felt good was Rainbow. It feels bad having a piece of ice that any non-fixed breaker can just walk through. Yeah, it’ll probably tax 3 credits, which is what it took to rez (or just a single credit to the Torch the Stimshop CT deck was packing), but sometimes I wished I had better ice to throw at my remote when the one Data Raven I was able to find was Femmed. I understand that tactically allowing accesses is okay in Argus, but a lot of the time I just wanted better ice than that. Dunno what I’d replace with, haven’t given much thought. Also, I never rezed Checkpoint. Most of the time, I’d chuck it in Archives when my hand got full of meat damage. I’m honestly not sure when the right time to rez it is. If I do it early game, they just jack out and now I have a bad pub for the rest of my life. If I do it late-game, they can just pay the trace, since it almost never makes sense to boost it, since if it’s high enough they’ll just jack out. I’ll have to give more thought to it.

Anyhow, that’s my fucking book on how I played this deck tonight. Do with it what you will.

8 Likes
75

To be honest, that sounds like your opponent is just not used to playing against Weyland. When hitting a 3-pointer, you do not draw up to four cards. You draw up to three and take a credit. I also don’t understand Noise players who don’t threaten remotes, I think it’s just bad play. Noise is like a Criminal in that he can attack anywhere, only with Parasite and Datasuckers. In the third game you describe, he could have clone chipped Parasite onto the Rainbow to break it with Yog.

I’ll give this deck the benefit of doubt and I might test it today in a Netrunner meetup. But this sounds to me like it only wins against bad players, or good players who have no idea (yet) how to play against Argus (which is entirely fair, I won games with Nasir because people had no idea how his ability and timings work). I mean, I played almost exclusively Supermodernism for a very long time, and I scored the 5/3 once or twice. Seeing how this deck has less money and less ETR ICE than Supermodernism, I can’t help but feel that something is very wrong here.

3 Likes
76

Yeah, he could have gotten through the Rainbow, but then the Ice Wall would have stopped him. He didn’t have a Corroder out.

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No, that’s not true at all, I played with three fewer economy cards (I had Cleaners where you have GC, now to be replaced with HRI). But as I said, I never managed to score one in five games, so it’s irrelevant as to what they were.
I really don’t know what you mean about “not knowing how to leverage the ID ability”, the Runner just takes two meat to the face, ditches the tag from DR and passes back to me. Unless I have two Punitives and a boat load of money this isn’t a killzone and it’s very rarely a scoring window either. The servers are pretty cheap to penetrate unless you can get an Archer rezzed early. You may be creating a tax on scoring an agenda (or clearing a tag from DR) but the ICE itself doesn’t cost much to get through so the Runner can pressure everywhere.

I’m not even going to entertain discussions about “double Data Raven” because it simply doesn’t happen. You see less than half of your deck in a game of Netrunner so you don’t see a single DR about a quarter of the time, let alone two. Even in the games when you do see them both, a good percentage of the time a smart runner will deploy Femme or a Parasite and that’s pretty much game over.

4 Likes
78

What did you run for econ instead of GRNDL Refinery? The refineries and the 3-pointers are where this deck makes most of its cash.

Because you don’t seem to realize that it allows you to hide a bunch of agendas in Archives without popping Jackson to save them. I’m going to go back to what you said earlier:

And then you would score four 1-point agendas. Would you take all four tags? You’d have to take at least one or burn a Plascrete.

79

Supermodernism doesn’t generally run False Lead, which is the lynchpin of this entire deck. With False Lead scored, IAA anything behind a Data Raven and the runner is forced to run it with their first click. This is a lot more disruptive than you think. Even a good player who understands that will have trouble planning turns when they can’t use a click to set up before they run what might just be a trap anyway. Unless they have Raymond Flint, they can’t even use expose without the risk of me scoring out a 5/3 or a GRNDL.

80

I dunno about that, a lot of the supermodernism decks I’ve seen run 2 false lead to punish hitting snares or running Account Siphon. Also, against this deck I think if I saw an IAA behind a Data Raven with a False Lead scored, I’d probably draw twice then run it click 3. I can shake the tag on 4, and take 2 meat damage from the agenda, putting me at 5 cards in hand (assuming 5 cards at the beginning of the turn, I suppose). It has the possibility of being punished by an Invasion into Punitive, but that takes just a boatload of credits to pull off, so I’d obviously have to make a judgement call there. But running click 3 is generally safe, since False Lead can only suck away 2 clicks, not less, and I don’t have to take a tag from the run.

That being said, I don’t think I’d IAA behind a Data Raven as the corp unless I knew the runner would be fucked running it or unable to get in the server.

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