sebs wins (2nd @ Birkenhead District)

Foreword because I wrote the rest of this earlier this week - holy shit lmao I got second at Birkenhead. Seb's good! Thank you to everyone for the games, the company, and the tournament organising. Particularly thank you for your great fixed seating arrangements, the separate room made a huge difference on the day.

This is the finalest form of the Seb list I've been playing with and tweaking for the past few months. All credit to Council for the original shape of this (https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/2cafc210-2eb3-4831-8ecf-b22f2f40575e/emperor-in-exile-cbi-2025-), I've just been playing a lot of games. Look at the original write-up (https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/dba6243a-8c50-4c66-bb9c-f6064ef4c1ad/der-kaiser-sebasti-o-at-italian-nationals) for a history of how it got built- this Seb is a denial deck that aims to lock the Corp out from their win condition by recurring trash effects while using an engine to efficiently draw cards every turn, then eventually win off centrals once the corp is out of options.

This deck is really hard and I'm only just starting to feel like I properly understand what I'm doing with it. Every loss feels like it's my fault, however, not the deck's, so if you're willing to stomach a lot of difficult and thinky games for the sake of skill expression I highly recommend this deck. This deck absolutely murders corps that are unprepared for it or are playing suboptimally, which is a big morale booster in the Jnet mines.

This deck is also psychologically ruinous to lose to. I have likened the ideal gamestate for this deck to "trapping them under a heavy object". Depending on your personality, this may be a positive or a negative for you.

In some more detail -

The core concept of this deck is that with Seb's rules text protecting your resources (and the choice of when to become tagged), the only meaningful tag punishment in the format for floating exactly 1 tag is Self-Growth Program, which people aren't playing much of.

With this established, we have access to a powerful draw engine in Solidarity Badge and Amanuensis. Take a tag and gain tempo with Seb, trash something, float it over the corp's turn and draw two cards and lose the tag for free the next turn. This is crucial for you to set up because the whole deck is built around trashing one thing per turn and paying cards from hand to get in and do so. A lot of your first few turns is going to be spent getting money and clicking to draw so that you can get these on board and be replete with cards for the rest of the game.

Your supplementary draw engine, which in a lot of games will come down before your Hardwares, is Lago Paranoã Shelter. This card absolutely rocks. You are clicking to draw twice on a lot of your turns, this saves one of those clicks every turn more or less.

The Class Act amplifies all of these draw cards to obscene levels. There's a lot of cards in this deck that we mostly want later on, so it's really valuable to be able to bottom them and rip through your hand with wild abandon.

Your econ is tight, until you've got everything down and you're breaking ice for nothing with an Audrey that never runs out of cards.

Friend of a Friend is incredible, you are mulliganing hard for this card in almost every matchup because you badly need the fast unconditional money and tempo install. You should most often be using its tag-gaining mode. Do not take the piss and leave this on the table while you're banking on its tag-losing effect the next turn to get your Amanuensis payout - using this mode for that is good, but you've got to keep it in hand, any good corp will pay the Seb tax to trash a Friend in the early game.

Fermenter is useful glue that you can incidentally recur multiple times with Privileged Access in most games. You're low on real credits and spend a lot of clicks drawing, so it covers an important gap, and usually lets you play Ashen at the end of your deck without clicking for credits.

Hot Pursuit is primarily there to force respect from the corp, and as a payoff for trashing HQ ice- it's devastating if you get it for free, but in a lot of games I only start firing these off once I have my tools to contest HQ ice and I have at least one part of the hardware combo to increase the payoff or decrease the cost from taking the tag. This is why we're only playing 2, now.

There's also the obvious matter of Arruaceiras Crew combined with Privileged Access, Labor Rights and Ashen, to spend anywhere from 3 to 15 Crews in a given game. This is why the deck works.

Crew's role is 90% to get rid of gearchecks - it's extremely good with Seb's ability and our hardware combo to take one tag per turn and trash one thing a turn. You kill Tatu-Bolas, BCs, Afshars, sometimes Drafters, 0str Gatekeepers, Ice Walls, and you're laughing. You also have the very strong option of tagging in another Crew from hand with Seb and trashing a 4str ice - this is also a really good play a lot of the time, particularly good targets are Mestnichestvo and Winchester. Occasionally you'll build up 3 Crews on the board and trash an Anansi, it's fun and good and often correct, but don't laser focus on it. We have exactly 1 Charm in the deck to make Crew more explosive, sometimes getting Archers and Anansis etc, but it's important to not be precious about getting maximum value, because tempo matters a lot here - I'm often happy just killing a Drafter with it. It was put in here so that I can kill big ice vs the EOTL Nuvem deck without taking excess tags, it does the job there to tip that matchup into being a lot more reasonable.

When we've cleared out all the baby ice from a server, it's way easier to stroll in with Audrey and/or Bankhar.

However, do not mulligan for Crew. You don't have enough econ to play crew turn 1 and remain able to threaten meaningful pressure, short of a high-roll world where it will hopefully be obvious that the stars have aligned for it. Crew's value goes up enormously once we have our hardwares down and enough money to not stall after using it.

You get inevitability in a few ways. Ashen Epilogue resets us and gives us all our econ and denial tools back for a victory lap. Eye for an Eye combined with Manuel gives us a total sweep of a 5-card HQ in two clicks, if you can get in twice and have cards to spare for trashing everything. This is good in pretty much every matchup. Manuel is a scary good tool for locking R&D, as well - he's not once per turn. This way, you've got pressure on all four servers in the endgame. Asset decks crumble vs recurring Miss Bones (Valentina and recurred Fermenter drip credits are also great). Hannah is good.

You'll usually be able to trash combo pieces out of hand with Eye for an Eye and Imp, but this can be hit or miss depending on the speed of the combo deck. I haven't had enough serious games vs Azmari with this to know how much reliable game it has into it, unfortunately. My best guess from the sparse testing I've done there is that trashing Neurospike/Punitive is more of a last resort than a primary plan of action, but it can be good to charge up an Audrey.

Glacier, you tax out the amount of ice in their deck by getting into HQ and R&D and trashing ice before it gets played.

Fast advance, particularly fast advance Outfit, is our worst matchup - it takes a while before we're ready to lock R&D with Manuel, usually. Just try and set yourself up fast and take low-investment opportunities for disruption where you can. My best advice is that Botulus gets you through Valentão with a single counter.

Audrey and Contaminate round out the list with a really brutal way to get into otherwise uncrackable servers, and in particular help with the situation where the corp ices Archives to attempt a lockout against Privileged Access. Sometimes it's rough trying to get counters back when the corp manually purges, but often a Contaminate on a pivotal turn is enough to swing the game in your favour anyway. Labor Rights does a lot to make sure you have the option of recurring and using this if the corp slows things down to a crawl and you need to break the deadlock.

Buffer Drive is installed in maybe half my games. This is the necessary third recursion card to avoid Ashen being stranded, but it does power up Audrey a lot, is valuable into PE, and is pretty nice with Lago to avoid milling your crews/recursion pieces. Can do cute things with Strike Fund but don't get too distracted by that.

Changes: -1 Hot Pursuit -1 Botulus +1 Miss Bones +1 Fermenter Makes the econ way less conditional. We struggled a lot into assets without the Bones money so this was the way to fit it back in. Rounding it out for matchups where Bones is less relevant and as extra value for Praccess, Fermenter gets us real money. Cutting Botulus is greedy but currently unpunished.