[3rd@EMEA District] SA Stands For "sorrgy accident"

This is the Corp deck that I took to the EMEA District. It went 3-2: killing Freedom (Sauc3), losing to Lat (profwacko), killing Hosh (cmur2), scoring out on stream in the first round of the cut (l0velace, also please watch the VOD that game was incredible) and finally losing to Hosh in the second round of the cut (OF15-15). The record is mixed, but the deck is immensely fun and I'm excited to keep building on it. Combined with a resurrection of girls post-banlist which went 3-0-1, I made third place at the district. I was not expecting to do this well, and am still surprised as I type this!

This deck is also the result of a secret collaboration over the past few weeks predominantly between myself, AceEmpress and Ish. (This decklist description is also authored by those three people, but mainly by me.)

It's a long story, but hopefully one you'll enjoy. I'll talk about deck strategy later, but for now please enjoy a story of intrigue, secrecy and saying "it's just a pile of 54 cards".

London Regionals

This all started on the slow train back from London Regionals: a sleepy two hours after a tournament in which none of us had done that well. We'd had time to recover from the games, so were casually discussing Corp ideas. Ish brought up Nuvem, an ID which I thought looked cool but hadn't had a chance to build for and play. I'd had a brief idea written down in my notes: the key cards in my never advance Ob deck called six seamless - Seamless Launch and Slash and Burn Agriculture - both triggered Nuvem.

So, we decided to try and build it. This is normally the sort of project I might turn to QEH (the local testing group) to work on - but after reading about deckbuilding conspiracies and wanting to work with Ish who isn't in QEH, we decided to go it alone. We had a dream and three capable Netrunner players who could pilot meta decks well enough for testing.

The aim was to surprise Sheffield Regionals (which is on the 22nd March you should go) with a well-tested Nuvem deck piloted by all three of us, throwing off the competition and maybe making cut with it. As you might be guessing from the fact that's in the future rather than now, this plan changed.

This aim also meant that we had to keep the deck as secret as possible. We also thought it'd be funny. (It was funny. I promise the funny bits come later. Please laugh.)

Over the weeks following London Regionals, we refined the six seamless Nuvem. We focused on a plan of quickly never advancing The Basalt Spire and then recurring those never advance pieces for the rest of the agendas. Sometimes the deck would lose on R&D or lose an early Basalt and it would suck, but in general it felt good to play. We were happy enough with it, making extremely minor changes to the point where we felt it was focused.

In a bit of a surprise twist, other locals had also suddenly become interested in Nuvem independently of us. These lists took a different approach to ours, so we were fortunately not stepping on their toes or stealing from them! I'm very excited to see their lists grow over time, and now that this list is out in the wild hopefully we can learn from each other how to make Nuvem really sing.

Scotland Regionals

Nearly two weeks after starting our little Nuvem quest, Ish messages the group chat:

I will say it’s felt hella weird to have a deck that feels this good and not to take it to Scotland

And we agreed that yeah, it was weird! Especially with Sheffield Regionals more than a month away, it felt silly to just sit on a deck. So we decided to frame it as testing, and try to keep the deck as secret as possible while playing it in a tournament. If it made top cut then open decklists would reveal the deck, but frankly if it made top cut then we'd already completed our objective.

This lead to the decision to keep the deck hidden until the actual event. Unfortunately, Ish was going to be in an AirBNB full of Netrunner players who wanted practice before the event. We didn't want the deck to be revealed, so Ish went to the lengths of bringing a fake deck that he would jam in practice on the day before, and then perform the grand reveal on the day.

The reveal happened sooner than we expected with round one: he got paired into Sobek, a local, who had the rug pulled out from under him by the reveal of Nuvem. Unfortunately this was the deck's high point, as it went on to go 0-3. This wasn't ideal, but after some thought we were able to draw some conclusions from the data we had got at Scotland.

The main takeaway was that trying to combo out early and consistently was very difficult due to the nature of Nuvem. The deck's size and want to mill cards meant that you couldn't easily assemble multiple combo pieces quickly, especially as the combo took the entire turn to play and didn't immediately win you the game! It was unable to play like the original rushy Ob list that six seamless worked as.

We also needed to make sure that our Nuvem experiments remained hidden. Fortunately, since Ish was the only one who was playing this specific Nuvem deck, it didn't look like he was part of a group working on Nuvem: it just looked like he was having fun with a deck. He also did some very suave talking to make sure no questions were asked about the deck:

Zack: can we talk about your deck?

Ish: it's a pile of 54 cards.

Zack: good ones?

Ish: yes.

(the conversation ends)

Damn, he's good.

EMEA District

We needed to reconsider the deck. We needed a game plan which didn't require two combo pieces out of a set of six hidden within 54, of which half could be stolen. I suggested Oppo Research kill, combined with a handful of other tagging cards so that we weren't reliant on holding multiple combo pieces, and then End of the Line with Pivot as our finisher.

Version two of the deck was born. Much of the ice and learnings of what made a good Nuvem deck stayed, but a new kill package went in. The first version ran Ping and Economic Warfare as well as everything else, but we found that it basically could not score due to weak ice and having so many slots dedicated to kill. I showed the list to krysdreavus, who suggested the Unsmiling Tsarevna and Forced Connection which helped the deck no end. We put Audacity back in, NGO Front as a little bit of bluff, and an easy-to-score agenda suite.

We decided that, like at Scotland Regionals, the EMEA District could be used as effective testing - at worst I would just claim that it was me trying to make something funny. We tested the deck a lot internally, which gave us a good idea of how the deck felt in open decklists as we were all very aware of the kill lines that the deck could make. I booted up my smurf account and played some games against random people on Jinteki.net who were significantly less aware of the kill lines and left a respectable trail of corpses in my wake (and some scores) (and some losses).

By the end of the testing, and a silly number of tiny readjustments, I felt comfortable playing the deck and enjoyed it - I didn't think it'd do well at the District but it'd be a nice way to spend a day.

Coming third was well beyond my wildest dreams.

How do you play this, then? Give me the deckbuilding content I crave, Phoebe. Give it to me

Okay okay let's talk about the deck. Contrary to what you might think when reading the list, this is not a pure kill deck: the kill package acts as a deterrent for the Runner getting ahead too quickly. This is closer to the Supermodernism days of Netrunner's history, where SEA Source + Scorched Earth would act as backing to a Weyland rush plan.

The key idea is that Oppo Research is either a tax or a kill enabler, and you are happy in either case. It's ideally combined with some kind of push in a remote: in my streamed cut game, I installed and advanced a Project Atlas before playing big Oppo to provide an ugly fork to the Runner. As a cute side effect, Nuvem allows you to pretend that you're Reality Plus by gaining 2c after the Oppo resolves.

A small Oppo is lovely if you managed to stick one or two tags during the previous turn. Against Sauc3 I played a small Oppo after he took two tags from a Forced Connection and then trashed it, keeping him down while I looked for kill pieces. Again, the idea is to slow down Runners so you can score, killing them only if the opportunity arises. Unsmiling Tsarevna is the other piece of incidental tagging that might help, either forcing them to draw up after taking net damage or forcing them to spend valuable clicks and credits.

The ice suite runs a little more expensive than traditional rush decks, because to put it simply Runners are very good at getting in quickly right now. Tsakhia "Bankhar" Gantulga walks through single ice servers especially when aided with Botulus. Inside Job and Boomerang cause similar problems. We needed to run enough ice so that an early two-ice remote is feasible.

The ice themselves needed to be strong enough, however. Arruaceiras Crew deletes low-strength ice. Propeller gives Shapers a one- or two-time pass through a large barrier, and their other breakers are similar. These solutions call for multiple mid-strength ice: we run Logjam, Tree Line and Stavka for them. Expending Tree Line to boost a Logjam to seven or eight strength is a nice way to make Shapers think twice about running a remote.

Logjam and Armed Asset Protection need calling out because of their natural play restriction: to be good, they need to have enough card types in Archives. This is a real deckbuilding challenge: you need enough operations and expend cards to trigger Nuvem (particularly cheap ones like Predictive Planogram and Subliminal Messaging), but you also need a range of card types so that you're able to throw those different types into Archives quickly. I'm not sure if this deck has successfully towed the balance between these two factors, but it's getting there. (As an aside: the Nuvem mills are face down as well, so need a Runner to actually check Archives before you get to count those card types.)

The agenda suite is a mix of rush agendas, helpful tutors and cards we are okay with the Runner stealing. Oaktown Renovation pays you while you score it. Project Atlas gives you access to kill pieces from R&D and The Basalt Spire gives you access to kill pieces from Archives - and when stolen gives you the Oppo Research you need to throw at the Runner. Hostile Takeover is a nice finisher that you also don't mind being stolen to give you a chance to Oppo.

There is definitely room for optimisation and improvement. I'm less convinced by Unsmiling Tsarevna than I was - it is a very taxing ice on the first encounter but doesn't help you score so might be better as Gatekeeper. Forced Connection is very cool but the majority of popular runners have a link at the moment and just pay 2c.

Finally, Lat stomps on this deck. He can see an Oaktown Renovation in the remote and challenge with Self-modifying Code + Overclock with irritating consistency, and then manages to pull of Deep Dive fairly well due to a lack of tech against it - we're only on two Border Control and zero Crisium Grid - and the fact that we run three point agendas. The best I've done in practice against Lat is build a big Logjam, but it doesn't do enough. I don't want to cut Oaktown Renovation, but that might be what's needed to deal with the most boring man in Netrunner.

Conclusions

Oh gosh that got long. There's much to think about with this archetype, and much that we need to do with the deck. But it was fun to surprise people with a little bit of unpredictable deckbuilding, and I am immensely proud of making 3rd place with Nuvem and Akiko.

Thank you to Ish and AceEmpress for being my collaborators in this silly project - building this in secret was very fun and I'm delighted that I could do our work justice during the tournament! And thanks to krysdreavus for eir suggestions of two very good cards.

Thank you to my opponents for the very good games, in particular my long-time friend and an incredible opponent for our cut game on stream l0velace. And thank you to aksu for running the event!

Finally, here's a picture of the secret fourth member of the collaboration, Plato, and his contributions to the deck: