"Let's not rush, but let's not waste any tempo." - J0S3 S4R4M4G0

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This is a writeup for a deck I took to the first 2 rounds of Fite Nite (facing QtM and Psi Game respectively), and to the Vienna Nationals that took place on xy. It went undefeated in both events.

It is a deck for a past meta, and unlike some other A Teias this one’s certainly not timely. Still, I felt that the lessons from this deck would be worth writing up and passing on. I hope you feel the same. :)

Strategy & Competitive History

In trying to overcome some Fite Nite teams, I had to essentially crack the code of how some testing groups operate in regards to their approach to the game, what play style they prefer, and what logic they try to apply to win the game.

This also applies to Unband: Unband’s always been about control. That is, take away your opponent’s decisions until their best choice is a losing one. Some people might call that prison, and prison, like the Drago Ivanov and Industrial Genomics decks of old achieve the above through repetitive action that consumes the runner’s action economy (clearing a tag / drawing back up after taking chip damage).

This is not a prison deck. It’s a rush-glacier hybrid, but I like to think there’s another facet to control, and that is minimising randomness. Card games being inherently random, Netrunner is relatively unique in that the runner wins by accesses. A run on HQ is a known random factor, a run on the remote is usually deterministic, same with archives, which you can control by having a Spin Doctor on the board.

But a run on R&D is only a known quantity insofar as you know how many agendas are left in your deck. It’s a X out of Y (X agendas in the deck, Y cards in the deck). Now you may think not losing on centrals means protecting them via ice to the point where runners are discouraged from running them because it’s simply too expensive, but this is a losing game. Runners have ways to multiply the value of their central runs - filtering your deck for agendas is their way of controlling you, and thus nullifying your victory condition. Even the best of us WILL lose to random R&D access. Don’t be that person. Achieve full control.

The Key Card: Rearrange the Future

This brings me to the most important card in the deck: Bacterial Programming.

Bacterial Programming is how we achieve control. Notice that the deck name is German-Japanese for “The High Tower Net”. A Teia, literally translating to The Net, has a couple of Spiders that let us achieve Precognition. Yagura, meaning High Tower / Shrine, is an old rotated pet card of mine that has 2 subroutines:

• Do 1 Net Damage

• Look at the top card of R&D. You may add that card to the bottom of R&D.

If this gets to fire, you get some degree of control over whether the R&D run, which is where we want this ice to be placed, is going to find an agenda. There’s something psychologically enjoyable to me in the interaction between runner and corp of the “I know you know I know” you put that there - should I still access it?

But this deck doesn’t run any ambushes (bar Bacterial Programming). Instead, we build a massive 5+ stacked ice tower in the remote, protected by trusty Surveyors, in the cellar of which we brew [La Costa] our bio-soup and score our [Bacterial Programming]. This lets us project our force onto our central servers.

Bacterial Programming: A Deep Dive

What you should do with the 7-card effect depends massively on the game state:

If you are scoring out of the remote, it is often advantageous to chain score into score, e.g. have a Bacterial Programming hit 3+ advance counters at the beginning of your turn, score it, find the next agenda, put said agenda into the well-protected remote (some might say unassailable), put any other agendas you found on the bottom of the remaining 5-6 card stack (grab whatever else you need). Keep in mind that a Bacterial Programming scored as your 2nd agenda will usually translate into you scoring your 3rd agenda on the next turn. That means that despite only running 7 agendas for the lowest agenda density possible, we win on essentially 2 agenda scores, while the runner needs 3 agendas to win.

When it’s stolen, Bacterial Programming lets you ensure that a R&D multiaccess run doesn’t hit any more agendas (sequence is big here, another agenda being accessed first means that both will get stolen, but it’s still good protection). Beyond that, a stolen Bacterial can refuel your hand. In fact, when my starts are very slow, I sometimes feed a copy of Bacterial Programming to an unwitting runner to draw 6-7 cards and use said tempo to win the game before they can stop me. Still, this line should be considered as a last resort in matchups where speed is of the essence.

What you should always do is plan out your Bacterial. Yes, that means taking out your pen and paper (or digital notepad), and noting down where you’re going to put the seven cards Bacterial has shown you. Some may go into HQ. Some will go back on RnD, and the sequence is critical, because now you know the future. When the runner makes a run on RnD, you know when they are going to access an agenda, and when they’re not. While many runners are dissuaded from running RnD entirely, you can also manipulate the top of RnD via your assistance tools (Spin Doctor, Attitude Adjustment, Sadaka). This is important because sometimes the future says you lose. Alas, 95% of the time is good enough.

Big thank you to Armin and Kikai for helping me develop this deck :)