Kateman Prepaid (Top 16, 4th after Swiss and Top Shaper)

To those disappointingly misled by the title in the belief this was anything different from your regular prepaid variant out there, it is not. This is your good ole prepaid Kate, gone up to 46 cards and two plascretes in anticipation of a lot of Butchershop NEH and Haarpsicord at Worlds. I kept the name to honour the deck that started me on my Kate path last summer and has been the same one since on my netrunnerdb page. Despite moving away from two Atmans down to one, and bringing in a full breaker suite, the deck has undergone very few changes in the past year. I was one of the many who realized prepaid is a great card, and that it becomes even better with a one credit discount, and oh, they just released a new economy card called Lucky Find, that's cool, lets put that in there with all the other economy cards.

I used to run a single Replicator and I still think it is an excellent choice. Makes the Levy a lot easier and helps speed up the prepaids arrival. I'll be going back to it again and I'll also be going back to Pro Co. (likely as two of) which I used in other earlier competitions to great success but ditched for fear of the Breaking News and thinking that yellow was everywhere (which it was). Even when I faced 5 NEH and 1 Haarpsicord in Worlds I came out believing that you should probably go with two Quality Times or go the Pro Co route. Overall I found the baby to be pretty uninspiring. Sure, it's fine to get it out, and it isn't a loss to lose it, but there were games where I could have installed the Pro Co, lost it a few turns later, and it still would have been better than the baby.

Lady's arrival freed up the corroder influence for legwork, and due to heavy hitting code gates like Turing and the ever-excellent Tollbooth Gordian Blade took a backseat in favour of Cyber-cypher and ZU.13, a change pioneered by Calimsha and one that I adopted late in the day, a month before Worlds. That means that Scavenge is a natural include. I was pretty disappointed by parasite on the day and am pretty certain that it will be replaced by a legwork in the future. The pressure on SMC is so heavy that you never get the chance to pull the parasite, in matchups where the parasite would be great (e.g. killing pop-ups in low ice lists like NEH fastrobiotics) it's usually more important to get out the clot, and if you need to get the clot out you'll need the clone chips for it too. I'd be tempted to include D4v1d if I thought the list could stand the loss of Stimhack, but I'm not sure it can. There are times when the corp anticipates the Lucky Find burst, and then you break down their door with Lucky Find into Stimhack.

I actually think there's a lot of little changes that could be made to the deck to optimise it against certain opponents, but for those hoping that Pre-paid Lucky Find Kate will not be with us for a long time, I think they are mistaken. The deck does everything pretty well, is adaptable and has strong economic power. To hurt this deck you'd probably have to fundamentally hurt Shaper as a faction, and I think that's a pity, because this deck is not unbeatable, it just does basic netrunner things really well.

Anyway I thought I'd give some thoughts on the deck. I had some great games during Worlds, had my apartment blown up in the first round by (Jesse I think, apologies if I got the name wrong) an awesome Haarpsicord deck using Shattered remains which killed my plascrete, and had headshaking game against Lucas Li where I was drawing oh-so-hard to find my SMC and of course as he scored out the Beale for the win we looked at the next card in my deck to see it sitting there (of course!). Conversely I got really lucky in my second game where the last run of the game (before the corp scored out the astro for the win) on HQ and with five cards in hand I plucked the astro from out of the disbelieving corps hand. The judge commiserated with him as he took up the result "That was tough." It certainly was, but it reminded me why I play this deck. It always feels like you can make that last minute play to try and win. You're always in with a shout, provided you listen right.