NBN Advance! Push! Advance! [Startup]

Greetings, dear reader. This deck represents my attempt at a deck with the Pravdivost Consulting ID. Given that the new rotation is within sight, I was a little torn at the idea that this deck would go unremembered, and I am leaving it here, for posterity's sake, if anything.

Introduction

I originally thought that this ID would suit a shell game strategy, but, clearly, this is not what I found with this deck. Pravdivost is useful for that last minute sting that might push the Runner over the edge with an additional net damage from an Urtica Cipher, but a more consistent strategy, I found, involves constant access to money, preventing the Runner from stealing agendas quickly, and having enough cards to get back on your feet. Netrunner is, after all, a game of having the credits to make credible bluffs, more than anything, for the Corporation. Thus, we have a situation where you can essentially focus on finding the credits you need to score the agendas you want. Card draw may be a little tighter, but I have never come across a situation where the cards in hand were completely useless.

The deck has three main areas of focus, which shall be discussed below.

A. Money for (almost) nothing

You can tell if the money cards in your deck work when you can play Hedge Fund without the fear of having lost board state to get there. Predictive Planogram, Regolith Mining License, and Ubiquitous Vig offer significant returns for very little entry costs. If all else fail (to materialise), a Loot Box or a Congratulations! over an often-run server shall be enough to get you some starting cash to get you going again.

B. Advanceable ICE, Vladisibirsk, and Trick of Light

Advancing ICE is, essentially, the key to this deck. Not only does it make Mestnichestvo so much more potent, but an Ice Wall becomes a very cheap repository of advancement tokens waiting for you to use Trick of Light. Sure, there are options that break subroutines, but this deck is supposed to make Boomerang and Endurance inefficient. So long as the ICE themselves are either Vasilisa, Loot Box, Congratulations!, Ice Wall, or Gold Farmer, stacking them should not be a problem. Vasilisa can also be extremely useful generating those advancement tokens. With two Seamless Launches present for contingencies, you have, functionally, four Seamless Launches. And Vladisibirsk City Grid and Seamless Launches go quite well…

C. Tag-and-impoverish

While the possibility of the Runner keeping tags in the (current) Startup meta seems remote, even one of them is enough. A Funhouse F2P combo should be a tall stack for any Runner not using the dreaded Hardware breakers, and even then, they should drain the Runner of precious credits. Retribution shall keep the Runner at bay, either defensively, after the Runner sees it, and offensively. ‘Get the other Endurance out’, you shall say. ‘See what happens’. In addition, a Bellona getting stolen is not that bad when Reversed Accounts and Gold Farmer are going to keep taxing the Runner. AMAZE Amusements should keep the threat of a Retribution attack potent. And, obviously, it is very likely that the Corporation can simply trash the Runner’s resources.

Conclusion

The deck currently stands at a 52% win rate on Jinteki.net, which is, unfortunately, the only place I can try this deck out with a lot of people, all the while accounting for the previous draughts of this deck that drag the stat down. The current meta has been quite interesting. When Nisei (now Null Signal Games) announced that Midnight Sun shall not replace the Ashes cycle until Parhelion's release, as was predicted before, it felt like a more iterative move compared to what the current lead designer at Nisei had led me to believe. Still, designing this deck (and winning so many times) has been quite a stimulating exercise, and I hope that someone else has fun playing with this deck, tweaking it, or completely destroying it, as I did. Thank you for your precious time, dear reader.