How to Build a Reg-Ass Runner Deck (1st @ NANPC Montréal)

Alright script kiddies, today I’m gonna teach you how to build a reg-ass runner deck. This is deckbuilding 101 with Chouxflower, and I’ll be pulling examples from my NANPC Montréal-winning 419 deck.

There are two halves to every runner deck: economy and interaction. Economy is simple – it’s money and draw. Interaction is the fun stuff – it’s breaking ice, stealing agendas, winning the game. Economy is your heart pumping blood throughout your body, without it, you’re going to wither and choke. Interaction is your bones and muscles, and it lets you reach out and interact with the world.

Economy

Let’s talk turkey first. Clicking for credits is one of the worst actions you can do in the game as runner. You want to minimize doing that as much as possible, and for that, you need a strong economy. I see economy as coming in two different forms: Fast and Slow. Fast money is sweet, sweet credits that you can spend on anything. It’s burst. Slow money is more varied. This includes conditional credits, value-adding cards, or anything that gives infinite credits. It’s sustain. You need a balance of both.

For fast money, it’s anything that gives you a one-time burst of pure creds. Sure Gamble is the ubiquitous example. Fast money usually comes in event (Sure Gamble) or resource (Daily Casts) form, however there are program and hardware forms. These cards both give you unconditional money, to spend however you choose. Even though Daily Casts pays out slowly (over five turns), I still call it Fast money because it’s still just a one-time gain of 5c and the credits are unconditional.

The best Fast money is unconditional, but that can’t always be the case. Sometimes that money is tied to making a run, like Dirty Laundry, or guessing correctly on expose, like Falsified Credentials. The more conditional your Fast money is, the less reliable it is, the less it fulfills its duty as Fast money.

Now, I try to aim for a minimum of 12 Fast money cards in a runner deck. In this 419, I have 3x Sure Gamble, 3x Dirty Laundry, 3x Bravado, and 2x Falsified Credentials that I would consider my Fast money cards. Which only adds up to 11, bad Chouxflower. And the Falsifieds can be very inconsistent in terms of money (this is somewhat mitigated by 419, but still). The Dirty Laundrys are also somewhat conditional on me being able to make a successful run, but that’s usually not so much of a problem. There’s also Diversion of Funds, but that is so conditional on a number of things (being able to run HQ cheaply, the corp having 5c for me steal, etc.) that I don’t really count it. You can see, in one of my matches in the finals, I really struggle with economy, because I don’t have quite enough Fast money in the deck. I think if I were going to make changes, I would either go back to 3x Falsified or drop the Falsifieds for 3x Carpe Diem, or perhaps a mix of both.

However, there’s a problem with Fast money; it runs out. You can add more Fast money to a deck, but after a point, that yields diminishing returns. Too many Fast money cards, and you won’t be able to find your draw cards, or breakers, or tricks. This is where Slow money comes in. It’s a catch-all term for a few different things: cards that give you fake credits, cards that multiply the value of your Fast money cards, cards that improve your ability to click for credits, and cards that never stop paying out (drip).

I think you should have around 6 Slow money cards in your runner deck. You want fewer Slow money cards than Fast money cards because it’s much more important to see that Fast money in your opening hand and early game so that you can build your board state and threaten the corp. In the Swiss, I kept a hand of just Slow money cards, thinking I could get them down early and draw into my Fast money. This was a mistake, and I was clicking for creds all game, and lost.

In this deck, I have a few different ones. First there’s 2x of Mystic Maemi. As all of my Fast money is event econ this multiplies their value. Now, all of my Gambles give 5,6, or more credits, my Laundrys are up from 3c to 5c, and so on. In addition, many of my tricks and interaction cards are events, so I can save paying real credits on playing them.

The other Slow money I have is 3x Mining Accident, and 2x Cevze. These give me fake credits (i.e. credits that can only be used for specific things) for use during runs, saving me from spending real credits. And I can use Maemi to pay for Mining Accident, so there’s synergy here. The net effect of this is to give me a long-term, sustaining economy, so that I run out of the real credits provided by Fast money slower, and when I do run out, I still have a solid base of econ underneath clicking for credits. In that same finals match where I was starved for Fast money against PD, the Mining Accident I had landed early on gave me lots of value in terms of giving me ability to maintain a pressure without having to click for credits too much.

The last part of economy is draw. While clicking to draw a card isn’t quite as bad as clicking for credits, you do want to be able to Draw More and Draw Better. You probably want between 6 to 8 draw more cards, leaning more towards Draw Better cards. Drawing More is just drawing at a higher rate than 1 card per click. Cards like these are not just important for digging deeper into your deck faster when all your breakers are buried but are also important for bouncing back or overdrawing against damage match-ups, like Jinteki Personal Evolution. In my 419, I have 3x Earthrise Hotel, 2x Bahia Bands, and 2x The Class Act for burst draw.

Drawing Better are cards that let you search for specific cards or filter your draws. Drawing a Self-Modifying Code is like drawing any program in your deck for example. Drawing Better is important because sometimes your important cards are just buried at the bottom of your deck, and drawing more won’t get you there fast enough and it will waste all of the cards you had to overdraw to get there. Here, I have 2x Mutual Favour, and 2x The Class Act (Such a good card when it can occupy two slots on the economy checklist.)

So, to sum economy up: 12 Fast money, 6 Slow money, 6 Draw more, 3 Draw better. That’s about 27 cards, which is more than half a runner deck. To get more slots for deckspace, you want to be looking for cards that can pull double duty, like The Class Act being both Draw More and Draw Better.

Interaction

Let’s move on to interaction. Interaction cards are really going to define the theme of your deck. What are you trying to do? With my 419, I’m trying to focus on credit denial. This doesn’t mean I throw every card that says “the corp loses X credits” into a deck, but that every choice for my deck will try and keep this theme in mind. This category is a little more nebulous than economy, but broadly it falls into two things: breaker suites and disruption/multi-access.

For breaker suites, it’s important that your breaker suite matches your deck’s playstyle. For 419, Aumakua is my main breaker, as it’s a very efficient AI breaker that has an obvious synergy with my ID and the theme of credit denial. However, Aumakua is also a very vulnerable breaker, so I need to have back up breakers of each type. And because the deck wants to be aggressive the breakers should be cheap (3c or under), and because they’re the backup for Aumakua, they should be reliable (they don’t “run out” like Revolver) and efficient (they don’t cost 6c+ to use like Flashbang). I went with Cat’s Cradle because it fits the bill of being cheap to install and helps with my credit denial theme (this deck is not good at installing big programs, so Amina, the other breaker that would fit is out). Carmen and Curupira are also fairly cheap and decently efficient/reliable.

When conceiving of your breaker suite, you need to take your memory units into account. Both your starting amount and your final rig. For example, a deck that runs a lot of utility programs, like Shaper, might find itself constrained by MU limitations early on until they find some hardware that adds MU (so they’ll likely want to run more memory-boosting hardware than normal). For my 419, my early rig usually looks like just Aumakua, so there’s not really a problem with memory. My late game rig is Aumakua + the three backup breakers and a Cevze. Depending on my opponent’s ice, I might skip installing one of the backup breakers in order to have two Cevzes on the board. In any event, I need more than just the 4 basic MU, so I’m running Hermes as my console.

The last important factor in breaker suites is what I like to call R&R or Redundancy and Recursion. Rigshooting happens, as does random damage. If your rig is so fragile that a bad SDS Drone Deployment or Anemone rez can end your game, you’re going to have a bad time. Redundancy means you have multiple copies of your breakers, and multiple ways of breaking ice. While multiple copies of your breakers can be dead draws later on, it can also mean that you see them earlier more consistently, meaning you can apply better pressure. And if you have sufficient Draw Better econ, like filtering, you can mitigate those dead draws. And a multiplicity of breaking effects let you again pressure earlier and not get blown out by corp combos or tricks, like Stavka + Hafrun in Ob. So, to this end, I have 2 copies of Aumakua (instead of 1 copy and 3 mutual favour), 2x Boomerang (which combos with Diversion of Funds for very potent early game threats). Recursion is anything that puts cards, especially breakers, back into your deck or onto your board. This is important because not only are there dedicated rigshooting decks out there, but things happen in game. For this deck, that’s eating a bad Hagen, or PE snipes a breaker with random net damage. For this, I have 1x Harmony AR Therapy. It shuffles back in breakers I’ve lost and a couple econ cards (or other cards I think will be highly relevant in the matchup). Again, it’s an operation, so Maemi can help pay its cost. Other options, like Labour Rights, Simulchip or Ashen Epilogue, don’t fit with the deck’s problems and playstyle.

Finally, the fun cards, multi-access and disruption. Multi-access is fairly simple; it’s anything that lets you access multiple cards in a single central run (or see a bunch of cards and access specific ones). This is important, because eventually corps will stabilize their defences and running on central servers will cost a significant amount of credits. Multi-access makes your central runs more efficient, saving you from having to make multiple runs. For this, I have Docklands Pass and Wake Implant. Again, it’s important to select multi-access cards that synergize with your deck’s theme and playstyle. For my 419, they’re both cheap to install and can synergize with run events that hammer HQ, like Diversion of Funds. They also synergize with my disruption, Hermes and Reprise. I can save up counters to do a big dig, and then spend them all on critical turns in order to hopefully trigger Hermes and Reprise.

Disruption cards are those that mess up the corp’s gameplan. This can include derezzing or trashing ice, draining credits, shuffling cards back into R&D, exposing cards, and many more. These are important because every corp has a different plan to win the game and the runner has to be able to react to all these plans. Some disruption abilities are innate to runners, such as the ability to trash assets and upgrades, or clear tags, but there’s lots of different corp strategies. Focusing on simple disruption tactics that synergize with your deck’s theme maximizes your ability to fight back against the corp’s plan for you. For example, the disruption in my 419 is 3x Diversion of Funds, 2x Hermes, 2x Reprise and 2x Pinhole Threading (and to a lesser extent the 2x Falsified). The Hermes and the Reprise bounce ice back to HQ, forcing the corp not only to lose clicks reinstalling them, but to reincur the 419 tax on the reinstall, thereby draining more credits. If the corp doesn’t reinstall the ice, I have major threats in Diversion of Funds, Docklands, and Wake Implant.

Diversion of Funds can also be used to threaten remotes. For example, if the ice on HQ and the remote is unrezzed, and the corp is sitting around the 7-12c credit range, I can play a Diversion of Funds not really caring whether or not it succeeds. The point is to either force the corp to rez the HQ ice, or lose credits to Diversion. They lose the money either way, and now I can run the remote. Waiting to use your disruption to maximum effect like this is how you win tournaments.

For a regular runner deck like this, that’s 25-27 econ/draw cards; 8-10 breakers, memory and recursion; and 8-10 multi-access and disruption. Find cards that fulfill multiple roles to open up more space in your decks. Run safe out there, kiddos!