LinkedIn™ Kate

This is a deck I've been tuning for nearly a month now. It started off as an Andy connections deck as I was trying to make a Criminal deck that went into the late game.

The Andy deck contained a bunch of cards to ensure that I had at least one card in my opening hand and turn on Underworld Contact as soon as possible. In play testing, I found a lot of the Corps didn't handle a high runner very well. Commonly played ICE like Resistor, Assassin and Archangel were rendered useless.

I then decided to go all-in on a linked-up runner and imported the idea over into Kate, as I had been splashing influence in Andy for R&D multi-access and card draw, which was in-faction for Shaper.

Surprisingly, it's been performing quite against both fast and slow archetypes. Due to all the pieces required I was worried that NBN would just thrash this deck, but I found in playing that a lot of NBN decks seemed to struggle against this deck because many of them relied on cheap tracing ICE to de-motivate the runner from face checking servers. With a bunch of , face-checking no longer became an issue.

The deck plays much like Daine's Congress, as a hard control deck. Contest remotes only when you have to and if they look relatively easy to contest. Once the Corp starts shoring up that remote, focus on setting up as quickly as possible and establishing the R&D lock. Sometimes you just have to let that agenda go and focus on setting up and I often play this deck by how I feel the game state is.

Sometimes, I'll contest a remote knowing I won't get in, but just slowing down the game is good for this deck. If the game goes into late-game, it will be very hard any Corp to keep you out of a server, short of throwing Caprice in there. Then they have to make a difficult choice of shoring up the remote and letting you dig R&D or shoring up R&D and having no secure remote to score in.

Card Choices

Rabbit Hole, Access to Globalsec & Sports Hopper - Link cards that turn on your Underworld Contacts and allow you to deal with pesky tracing ICE. Rabbit Hole is particularly nice as it is a and 5 for 3. Sports Hopper functions as both and Scorched Earth protection if needed in a pinch. Access to Globalsec is just a cheap resource that provides .

Faust - This is simply here for contesting early remotes and ensure that a cheeky Corp doesn't get away with scoring behind a Paper Wall or Quandary while you set up. Sometimes I just drop this breaker with no intention of using it, just to force the Corp to find a better (and more expensive) ICE solution. Anything that slows the game down will be in your favour.

Lucky Find - Just good economy cards to ensure you're rarely clicking for credits and aren't afraid to play Quality Times to dig through your deck and find your pieces quickly.

Underworld Contact & Data Folding - Similar to Congress, this is one of the best late-game economy engines that will let you get in anywhere you want. Having a clickless Lucky Find each turn is no joke.

Clot & Sacrificial Construct - I felt that the match-up against Fast Advance was still not as strong as Glacier, so this was my solution to address that. With Clot & 2 Sacrificial Constructs, the Corp will need to purge 3 times before they can fast advance any more agendas. This buys you a lot of time to R&D dig, check HQ and drags the game closer to late-game. Sacrificial Construct also has the added benefit of dealing nicely with Marcus Batty trying to trash your programs.

GS Sherman M3, ZU.13 Key Master & GS Shrike M2 - Cloud breakers to ensure that your Data Foldings never turn off. They're all relatively efficient breakers as well. GS Shrike M2 in particular is a good solution to many Sentries (barring perhaps Architect)

Security Nexus - I used to have 2 of these, but I found that it was more of a luxury that I wanted in the late game to help the R&D lock and get into heavily secured remotes. Early game, you'll be using Faust to contest weakly defended remotes and you'll hardly want to be dropping this to try and bypass an ICE.

Closing Thoughts

I am worried about lack of recursion in this deck, but right now I feel deck slots here are so tight. Maybe swapping out one of the Sacrificial Constructs for a Test Run may be a good idea.

Also, the match-up against PE isn't all too great right now, so it might make sense to put in a Feedback Filter to address this, but it might hurt your NBN match-up (not by much but it will slow you down by a card).

Anyway, play around with the list. It's quite fun and feels a lot like playing Netrunner in a time before all this ICE destruction. I've had a lot of fun playing around with this list at least.