Ping Pong! (3rd at Scottish Regionals)

Hey everyone, its dis here, you might remember me from such decks as 221b Baker Street and here I am back on my bullshit. Tags in HB, two great tastes that taste great together even eight years later.

Feels

I’ll talk about the deck in a few paragraphs, but first let’s get deep. I’m stealing a thesis outright from Ping Pong (the Animation) whose narrative pits productivity against playfulness. Play is something we begin willingly, merely for the happiness the act itself brings. But the habits we're forced to form, moulded by the society we endure adulthood in, push us to see hobbies as something more than just fun. We expect ourselves to be good at them, that our time wasn’t wasted. We expect to generate some tangible distillation of our accumulated effort in trophies, placements, and acclaim for our art.

I’ve played Netrunner for nigh a decade now and often struggled with this difficulty; the guilt at playing something fun and silly when I could be being productive at increasing my tournament chances. Heck the time as Creative Director at NSG I didn’t actually play netrunner at all without stress because it felt like letting people down when I could be getting tasks done. The weight of For The Game, not for the game.

Nowadays, time commitments mean I only play every six months or so at a big event, and I’m mainly going to see the lovely people I've met playing netrunner. I thus try to be very mindful of joy in my deck building. The best way in my opinion to be joyful at netrunner is, perhaps counterintuitively, to take a proven competitive deck and make it a few cards worse. Building silly from the ground up will mean your deck will fall apart on the day (not very fun), but having a solid framework that you then do fun and personally meaningful things with will make you feel like you’re ‘in’ a lot more games over the course of a multi-round tournament. Winning isn’t everything, but failing to get off the ground feels pathetic.

Returning to the Hero of Ping Pong (whose theme song is great gym music); they do not defeat their antagonists, they redeem them by reminding them of the joy of play they’d each lost in the pursuit of competitive acclaim.

And joy is why I put Ping! in Sportsmetal, to gently surprise my opponents, to make them recontextualise the game and reevaluate tempo and find a little joy that might have been lost on the way to finding the best deck.

I also put Stegodon MkIV in to remind them pain still exists.

Cards

So this is obviously forked from jan tuno’s Amani Sports, which is a good deck that appealed to my interests. You do Asa-like things, but by being in Sports you can draw faster and play the score/steal synergy assets more freely.

As I played a few games I did find the occasional derezzing of an ablative barrier to be possibly one the best feelings in netrunner, and the gears began to turn.

One flashback to a silly Sportsmetal deck I made in TAI times with Oppo Researches and Pings later; and I had a deck idea.

Ping is the ice that Pulse wishes it could be, always costing tempo, hard ending the run, and costing two credits. It's the hero of our story, my favourite child.

The deck here has the HB asset engine, with 9 hard ETR ice to rush behind that gain value from being derezzed. Sportsmetal can play 3/1s like Stegodon without shame, and your cheaply iced remotes can gain big value with Fully Operational and good assets.

Where’s the tag punishment you ask? Well you can just trash their resources but also:

(Hey, thats a netrunner card!)

The greatest corp turn two in netrunner is the incautious runner hitting a ping turn 1, then greasing out a Luminal. Note you do not actually get to do the FA play very often, but it is the threat of it that forces your opponent to clear the tags rather than check your remotes.

Active Policing/M.I.C combine to give your game enders - either making the unstealable Ikawah or forcing the runner to check three/four/five remotes with but a singular free click. Policing is very good but only when the threat is active (hence having only two).

Flaws

Hermes is a bother, but you can just out-tempo criminals a lot of the time.

Deep Dive is the real problem - you can’t make centrals strong enough and also build your board, so if you ever skip on agenda tempo for a few turns (as happened in the last match of the cut where I bounced a lobisomem, had a huge credit pool, but just didn’t draw agendas for ages and eventually lost to cataloguer)

If I was evaluating this concept less joyfully, I would probably take tuno’s 2x Amani Nottingham deck and experiment with putting crisium grids in over the cohort.