Decklist of the week

Playing The Same Game - 11th at London Regional (4-0)

Description by the author: Sobek 114

Haters will say that he took an excellent Hosh list, swapped the ID and changed 5 cards.

And honestly, the haters are correct. Great call from the haters.

Too much of this list is a netdeck for me to go into too much depth about card choices. CrewCharm is obviously the best thing to be doing in Anarch, and I liked the tech includes enough to copy them wholesale. It worked. I’ll talk about the few swaps I did end up making further on, but most of this writeup is an excuse to yap wholesale about my obsession with this one bad ID from 2013.

Since rediscovering Netrunner around 2 years ago, I've been consistently trying to make a Reina deck work, in a variety of different flavours and formats. A Reg build scrubbed out hard at UK Nats 2023, my first big in-person event since the FFG Era, getting 1 win all day. My startup attempts went nowhere. An unsuccessful few months were spent refining Jeitinho Reina, where even getting a win on JNet felt like an occasion worth celebrating. I complained so often that Reina should have been a Criminal ID that my good friend KingSolomon built me a Steve Cambridge: Master Grifter Meeting of Minds deck, so that through the power of DJ Fenris, 'Reina Azul' could become a reality. Despite my consistent lack of success, I had fun all the while.

Then NSG announced a release date for Elevation, and with it, a deadline for rotation.

I’d have around 3 months more to play Reina in standard before she was gone. Yes, there were other formats, but she would be even more hopelessly outclassed by the power levels there. A goal crystallised in my mind. I wanted to get one good performance with Reina before rotation. Thankfully, the UK regionals circuit would give me ample chance to do this. I started testing a slew of Reina builds. My first attempts were meh. Hermes feels great when it works, but you just don’t have the economy to install a real rig whilst maintaining pressure. We don’t have Hosh’s built in engine, or Freedom’s ability to pressure asset economies. Patchwork worked well, but too many games ended with a total lockout. The Arruaceiras Crew Devil Charm combo was the obvious way to go, and I was already doing a lot of testing with a Prepaid VoicePAD Aniccam Aumakua version that relied on Reina’s ability to force Mining Accident through. Despite it all, I never felt the deck click. I wanted to build my own version of Reina, but I also felt this strange sense of responsibility to perform well before she rotated. It was a weird, and not entirely pleasant headspace to be in. Two days before the event, I saw Kikai’s CBI Hosh, the tech cards and ratios all looked correct. Not expecting to do all that well in spite of the proven strategy, I made some edits, sleeved it up, and started thinking forward to the next regional where I could implement whatever I learned from London.

Then Reina went undefeated in Swiss?

W - Weyland Consortium: Built to Last

W - Jinteki: Personal Evolution

W - Haas-Bioroid: Precision Design

W - Ob Superheavy Logistics: Extract. Export. Excel.

If I hadn't made some crucial mistakes as Corp, playing AceEmpress's extremely cool Thunderbolt Armaments: Peace Through Power list, then maybe Reina would have made a top cut. Who can say?

CrewCharm is very good. Annicam is very good. The deck played smooth like butter. Most of the tech includes came up during the day. I don’t think I want to play Anarch without a copy of Light the Fire! ever again.

The best advice for playing Reina Roja: Freedom Fighter is to read the flavour text on her original printing.

"Analyzing the board won't help. Your mistake was thinking we're playing the same game."

She, quite literally asks you to play the game in a different way. We care about different things. You play fast, then slow. Don’t underestimate how much a single credit matters. You’re rewarded for knowing your opponent’s deck very well. Knowing what ice is likely to be where, and then punishing the fact that you nudge that number by just enough that the corp can’t be everywhere at once. Finding the hole that Reina makes is hard, because its not immediately obvious where that hole is! But once you learn to see those holes, you can take this D-Lister Anarch, and….

Bump her up to C-Lister at best. I’m under no illusions that she’s good, hah.

Again, most of this deck is not mine. So I won’t talk too much about the specifics of the build, and the rationale for including them, aside from my swaps:

Tread Lightly - Might not be the most underrated card in the game, but I think it deserves a podium position. The number of games where this card is functionally Blackmail is absurd. We’re playing a bad ID that people won’t play around, let alone an out of faction niche tech card in said bad ID. It’s extremely versatile. No turn 1 Rashida Jaheem for you! A line I love is to hammer centrals early, allow the corp to have 2 Ice unrezzed on the remote by the time they jam something important, then Tread Lightly it and watch them stomach the idea of spending 7 extra credits on top of their rez costs to keep you out. Tsakhia "Bankhar" Gantulga, Tread Lightly and Raindrops Cut Stone were a lovely trio that fuelled my early to mid game aggression throughout the tournament.

Cleaver - I’d heard rumblings of Wraparound in the week leading up to London. I knew that Ob would be a popular choice, (UK players love Ob.) and that it was potentially a popular x1 include for the deck. And obviously, NBN in the UK scene is also a constant consideration. Testing with Mezzie told me that a remote with Wraparound + any ice was too tough for me to crack. Turtle could never beat Wraparound, and I couldn’t be certain that I would always have a Leech counter to enable the CrewCharm. Cleaver wasn’t installed once on the day, but only because it was never needed. I was glad to have it in my deck as insurance. This could easily be a Corroder. Dealer’s choice.

Moshing - I’m not Hoshiko Shiro: Untold Protagonist. I needed a little extra gas to churn through the deck, and I was never unhappy to see a copy of Moshing in my hand all day. It does everything we want and more.

Further Changes: Ashen Epilogue did come up in my testing games on occasion, but not once on the day. I think it’s ultimately better to take the risk of running out of gas and apply the 2 influence elsewhere.

Of the tech cards, Eye for an Eye felt like the weakest. It could be replaced, or cut wholesale for slots. I'd lean towards the latter, or slot a third Moshing.

I’m not sure I’ll play Reina for the rest of the regionals season. In the two weeks leading up to London when I was getting multiple games of practice in every day if I could, I started feel a pressure starting to build. Doing well has been a weight off my shoulders, mentally. I feel a strange sense of attachment and responsibility towards this card. She was the first runner I built when I got back into the game, and I’ve been able to meet so many great people and make new friends over the past two years. In some weird way I have Reina to thank for that. The mission to make this thing work had me constantly thinking about Netrunner, and maybe without this weird, clunky card from Spin, I might have stopped playing and left this game I love behind again.

But here I am, after 10+ years of playing this game, off and on. Despite what Reina might say, if I stop for a moment, and analyse the board, I find that I’m still playing the same game. And that’s certainly not a mistake.