Smoked (3rd at Realms of Gaming Store Champs)

This is the Runner Deck that took me to 3rd at the 13 man Realms of Gaming Store Championships today. The deck went 3-2 on the day over the course of swiss and the cut. I agonized a lot over which runner deck to take today. For most of my competitive career in netrunner, I have favored shaper. I like having access to what I need when I need it. I have managed to pilot Anarch decks with some small success though, and I was seriously considering taking it this time as well, with Sifr having just been released. I tried 3 varieties of Whizzard and a Valencia deck, all running Sifr, and all seemed strong. However, they were all missing one crucial element, I wasn't having fun playing them! I had always wanted to try Smoke but hadn't gotten around to it yet. So I threw this together a few days before the tournament and had a blast with it online. I decided to go with what I enjoyed and it payed off.

As far as the deck itself, it is pretty standard for Smoke, apart from Legwork. I was a big fan of Prepaid Kate back in the day, and one of my favorite things about that deck was having legwork for hq pressure when needed. Notably, I also elected to include no silver bullets in my deck (plascrete, film critic, etc.) other than clot. This is because I expected most of the field to be HB with Friends in High Places, with most of the CTM players scared of by the threat of Aaron Marron. Though I was correct in my CTM assessment, I ended up not facing any HB that day.

I was pretty pleased with my performance and with this deck as a whole. Most importantly I had fun playing today, and as a bonus made the cut for the first time at a store championship.

Here were the matchups:

R1 vs Sync w/Boom: There wasn't much hope for this game when by turn 3 there were 2 scored Breaking News and I had accessed 24/7 in hand already. I made it a fight and got to 5 points before I died a fiery death.

R2 vs Butchershop NEH: I was starting to regret not having Plascrete in my deck at this point. However, I managed to avoid dieing to a Psychic Field/Prisec server (yay for accessing Prisec first randomly!), snipe some random naked installed Beales, and use a timely legwork to close this one out for a win.

R3 vs Potential Unleashed: The matchup I didn't want. Not only did I know that I wasn't favored in this one, but I also knew that this was piloted by my wife, who is REALLY good at Cambridge style net damage decks, which this was (she made top 8 at a regional a year or so ago with a PE deck that went undefeated in swiss). I was lucky in this one, playing it really careful and getting a good read on what was safe to run and what wasn't. A good indexing helped me narrowly walk away from this one.

R4 vs Palana: At this point, my opponent and I were both on the bubble for top 4 with the same record, and he has already beaten my corp. I know I need a win here to have a shot, and since its Palana I think I can pull it off. Things start to look grim when he scores an early Nisei Mk II while I am setting up. I also fail to get the philotic from his hand with legwork after he fast tracks for it and that gets scored too. Fortunately for me, his R&D is kind and through a combination of Indexing and lucky random accesses over a few turns, I put this one away. I ended up 3rd in Swiss and he ended up 5th, just missing the spot.

Cut vs Potential Unleashed: After winning one and losing one as corp, I find myself running against a different Potential Unleashed deck piloted by a friend of mine. This one is focused on Batty shenanigans to disrupt the board and Ark Lockdown to eliminate threats from the heap. I get super unlucky on random accesses as my deck whittles away, and eventually lose my Dagger to a random mill followed by Ark Lockdown. With that gone, there is nothing to protect against things like Cobra and Cortex Lock and I die a slow painful death, ending my Store Championship at third.