Internet Famous - 1st and 2nd (11-1 across two SC)

Every time I look at The Gauntlet, I think, Wow, I gotta throw this card in my Smoke deck! And then I take a look at that cost again. Whew is 5 credits a lot. Shaper econ is basically balls, and while Stealth does break for cheap, you still need money, and Temujin credits can actually run out.

Astrolabe is a sick card, and is also gives Shaper some kind of help against the asset spam game that they have a harder time dealing with. Personally, I think it's the right call. Sure, HQ pressure goes down, but the ability is amazing and you can't argue with the single credit install cost.

This deck is nowhere near as consistent as I'd like. I just played 10 games on Jinteki and every single time something was missing. Against NBN NACH or Critic would be missing, against Asset Spam Astrolabe and draw would show up after they already had an impenetrable sprawl, and against Glacier neither copy of Mercur would show up until they'd already scored a Food or 2.

So what is plan vs standart CtM?
Do you trash SAUs, sansans?

I guess the plan is to mulligan for Temujin : get the money to contest SAU early while building the board (finding NACH is ofc critical to avoid the BN tags later on).

I wouldn't say it's favoured against CtM but if you put your hand on money + NACH you got a fair chance of winning.

I have the same question about CtM - I'm assuming you leave SanSans full stop, don't see how you can take the tempo hit of trashing it. Keep the clot threat live so SanSan is irrelevant (no CVS, as CodeMarvelous said), and make sure you can always get into the remote.

Also, once NACH is online you don't need to check unrezzed remotes for them sneaking out a BN, because you can't be tagged.

But... What's the strategy if they get their dream start of Sensie and Bankers turn one?

What corps did you play against in those tournaments? Who did you lose against?

I played Sync, NEH, CI, PU, then the same NEH twice more in the cut. Went undefeated.

My view is that the deck is good against everything other than CTM (which is obviously a problem), IG and Gagarin (which is less of a problem at the moment). If glacier came back you'd just slot in a political operative somewhere.

If you want to consistently beat CTM don't play this. If you're an idiot like me and want to play stealth shaper regardless of its lack of meta-relevance right now then this is sweet.

Nice. I'm an idiot and want to play stealth shaper right now : oldschool anr with big breakers paid by good old credits. I'll try The Gauntlet for fun cause I want to put pressure everywhere. Did you have enough stealth credits to run twice with Indexing ?

Yeah. No one is running significant ice these days. Worst case scenario is three Eli I guess. If you come up against blue sun just make them Rez a curtain wall on r&d every turn, bounce and camp the remote.

I am not sure how much I like the deck, because it is not parallel to my personal playing style for stealth, but I love your description of the deck. It shows exactly how you play it and it really works for you it seems. Job, once again, well done dear friend. :)

@jimmiusI find this to be a very consistent deck. Play slow, draw when you need to, and do the most with the pieces you have right now.

@gozik @MrMint @matthopkins CTM is the deck's only truly hard match up. I mulligan for Temujin, get up to a min of ten credits and then start trashing. Against their dream start. Get to ten, trash SAU, clear tag and end with 8 credits. If you can't do that focus on building your board state until you can.

@TooSharp I faced ETF, ETF, AoT, CTM, BS, NEH. I won against everything but the Blue Sun. I was one credit short of stealing the final agenda and got boomed the next turn.

I really like the look of this deck and your explanation of it is great. Not been playing long but I fell in love with the Ele "Smoke" Scovak: Cynosure of the Net id as soon as I got my hands on it and have been building my own stealth deck.

Main issue I have is dealing with tags but reading this as given me good ideas on how to solve the problem

thanks

J.

Unfortunately Worlds stats show that CTM is like 80% of top 20%.

I get that people are having fun at the begining of new season, but if we talk about compeptitive runner deck it still have to deal vs CtM in some way.

@gozik Only whizzard is strong against CTM. Everyone else has to work for it.

What about Scrubbers against CTM? Don't most fast advance decks run Ark Lockdown against Clot anyway?

Tested scrubber. If you had the tempo to install and use it you didn't need it. Influence has actually become quite tight since adding clot.

Clot is for nbn (who don't run lockdown), not HB, who you should comfortably beat with or without clot.

@TooSharp @seamus and I found that money is just better than scrubber.

@Seamus As an often Blue Sun player I have to say, if they don't put a horrible facecheck on servers to discourage bounce camping (and annoy cutlery users), they're doing it wrong :P

Right. But if it's a facecheck penalty ice you can almost certainly break it for recurring credits and take the access.

I'm afraid of Foxfire.. I may pop a Levy in to help with the butt clenching. Great, simple deck though! Big fan.

@Feisty Funny you should mention that. The blue sun that was my only loss on the day used foxfire to tax me down low enough to HHN me.

Well in the case of the blue sun I was playing on the day, as soon as I saw what the breakers were R&D would probably be Tracker then a couple of mid-range barriers, seeing as how as you say, all my sentry facechecks would be neutered by switchblade. But there isn't much blue sun about atm anyway.

I guess if folks really want to do a R&D hammer style deck, they could swap out Clot with Chakanas and get their multi access from The Turning Wheel. Maybe toss in a Data Breach to round off the multi-runs into R&D. Personally I like the HQ/Remote Camping. It's like sniping with Valencia Estevez: The Angel of Cayambe, which is the only Anarch I would think about playing.

Damn you @CodeMarvelous for doing everything I want to do, better than me. "Smoke Testing" has been a great deck for me but this makes choices that I didn't have the heart to do.

@Ralphus1701I want to try Chakanas ! Maybe too slow but I will spare 2 inf and it's annoying for all corps... My Smoke is slower than this one, must try both... netrunnerdb.com

@Grimwalkerits ok. I lost a mountain of games to get to this point. The cuts of beloved cards such as Mirror and Patron came only after watching the deck crash and burn with them dragging it down for over a month.

I feel like The Gauntlet is probably better in the Stealth Kate version, where she's probably playing Modded anyway, and swapping the Switchblade for Dagger. That said, did you run into a lot of stacked sentries? That gave me fits during the Worlds Icebreaker when I was running Switchblade.

With NACH I've found a single Kati Jones helps a lot (it's good when it can't be trashed!).

How do you feel about cutting a Clone Chip or swapping out Corroder for one or two Employee Strike? I feel that gives you slightly more game against CTM and helps in other matchups like PU, CI, and Blue Sun.

@dawspawn I had employee strike and it can be very good. The decision to cut it was a meta call.

This looks awesome. So tempting to swap the Switchblade for a Dagger and upgrade the 2x Astrolabe to Gauntlet to freak the corp out. Also allows full rig to be installed. Dagger can also run with just 1 stealth cred. But can't fault this list at all. I'll try it card for card.

@ren666why not to cut 1 Hunting Grounds and 1 clone chip to run 2 Gauntlet ? Usefull cards but more situational than Switchblade. You know, I'm afraid of Jinteki's sentries.

Gauntlet is too expensive in all close games I found. It's great if you are already doing well. Against yellow you will never have the free credits to install it unless you are already way ahead.

@CodeMarvelous Sadly, I'm sure you're right in a competitive meta, but let's play it for fun : here we don't play much yellow 'cause we're old punks. ;)

Very nice. I completely agree with the Corroder inclusion as well. I've been toying around with stealth and I've found the full rig is a bit heavy to maintain. Even with Mercur.

Been really enjoying this deck! THanks for sharing! What do you think about adding in a Dai V or an Atman? The main losses i've had have been against weird mother goddess decks...

Atman would probably be the better choice @CF just because it can also help you deal with 3 strength codegates in a pinch.

OK thanks! That's what I was thinking, i'll give it a spin :)

Yeah because play a deck based on Stealth with enough Stealth is too mainstream. Just install 1/2 cloak and hope you'll find asap mercur or you're just fuc**d

@Simone Sukaplay the deck. There are plenty of stealth credits if you pilot well. Slots are better spent on tech and power than a stealth credit buffer you often won't need.

@Simone Suka It can actually surprise you. I ran something very similar without the Ghost Runner and I felt I had enough stealth Credits, but to be fair I had Dagger of Switchblade. I imagine this deck ran with more stealth credits and was refined to only include the amount it needed to make way for other cards.

Something I just realized thrashing a smoke as CtM today: you can pump breakers on an un-iced server with the smoke cred just to trigger net mercur.

What I realized after later googling: according to the FAQ you dont even have to run, you can pump breakers at any time!

@romakarol Net Mercur specifically states "the first time you spend at least one credit on a stealth card each run", so that line of pumping breakers any time wouldn't work. You got the first part right, though. Bonus points if the server in question is targeted by Patron-Temujin.

@romakarol``@cygnalsits all about the Temüjin Contract Patron Stealth pump run. feels great

I tried this deck few times, very nice to pilot cause it can be fast. @CodeMarvelousyou were totaly right The Gauntlet cost too much in every matchup, the tempo against CtM is very high and Katy Jones, wich I've had, helped me a lot (didn't even had time to play film critic and nach), money, trash assets, repeat ! Temujin Contract and Patron are great against CtM but less against EtF FA or Jinteki trap, so, in a less yellow meta, I've tried this one : netrunnerdb.com so you're less dependent of running. Stealth credits are far enough but real credits are few...

How about swapping Patron for The Maker's Eye? Between Net Mercur, Astro Labe and Beth ... I don't feel the card access is super useful. Temujin-Patron on archive seems to be a bit of a fringe use case? Is that really worth the deck slot?

... I so wish you could edit after posting :) card access=card draw

@gegenzeitThat is something worth testing

@CodeMarvelous I'll try to get 10 games or so before actually changing stuff and then test it. There is actually someone playing a Jinteki attrition deck in my meta right now - so I can see how much weight Patron is really pulling. But my current thinking goes like this: Shock in archive is a very special case, while getting a deeper R&D dig is almost always good.

hey man; what did u cut for Mad Dash? Guess that´s the better place to ask for it... :D

(and for Arrrron)?

@1337J4NK5P4MM3RI will post my new list today.

netrunnerdb.com @1337J4NK5P4MM3R