It’s been a little while, mostly because of being sick as a dog intermittently for a month or two and having to wrangle life around that, but also because I haven’t had that much incentive or opportunity to get out and play.

However, regionals has come around and I played yesterday! I finished 15th out of 40 after a slow start, I came back and 4-0’ed my last two rounds to finish at 14 out of 24 for the day. My corp deck was a fairly standard Near Earth Hub affair, one I played purely since I’ve never shuffled up an NEH deck let alone played one in a tournament. Down here in Australia we barely didn’t get The Valley in time for it to be legal, so I thought it would be fun to give the astrotrain a last hurrah. My one bit of tech was a trio of Crisium Grid that did some pretty good work for me on the day- I played against three Leela Patels and Crisium is a great tool against her.

My runner, however, was Noise. I’ve been working on a modern Noise deck for a little while now, ever since our local meta shifted towards more of a glacier/murder dominance. Noise seemed a natural response to this, forcing them to play against their game plan and opening up the chance of denying them critical combo cards like Oversight AI, Scorched Earth, Neural EMP and Ash 2X3ZB9CY.

It’s tempting to play with all the fancy new tricks available in Order and Chaos, but in reality my deck ended up being pretty traditional with only a couple of new pieces of tech, but those includes were absolutely crucial to the deck being as strong as it was.

Here it is:

Identity: Anarch: Noise: Hacker Extraordinaire

Cards: 45 / 45

Influence: 14 / 15

Event (12)

1x Day Job

2x Déjà Vu

3x I’ve Had Worse

2x Lucky Find ●●●●

3x Sure Gamble

1x Vamp

Hardware (3)

3x Grimoire

Program (20)

3x Cache ●●●

3x Crypsis

3x Datasucker

3x Gravedigger

3x Imp

3x Incubator

1x Medium

1x Nerve Agent

Resource (10)

3x Aesop’s Pawnshop ●●●●●●

3x Daily Casts

3x Earthrise Hotel

1x Hades Shard ●

The basics of the deck are all traditional Noise control style. Cache, Aesop’s Pawnshop, Grimoire, Crypsis, Datasucker, Imp, Deja Vu and so on. I’ve avoided the trap of putting in a lot of drippy economy cards like Cyberfeeder and Scheherazade as having economy that gets off the ground quickly and keeps you rolling is super important- it’s simply stronger to have economy cards that pay off reliably and quickly, even if you lose a credit or two over an ideal case with one of these. My one tempo concession is a Day Job that I use to either set myself up for something big or dig myself out of a hole.

Earthrise Hotel and I’ve Had Worse are both recent additions that are really critical to keeping pace. If you’re spending half your turn drawing new cards to install, you really can’t do a lot of work as Noise, so having 21 additional click free draws (23 if you count the 2 for 1 Deja Vu gives you) in the deck is really important. So important in fact that I oscillate between Lucky Find and Diesel as more valuable as a use of four influence in the deck. In the end, Lucky Find won out in this version as being able to show a big credit total or quickly bounce back from bankrupting yourself is also pretty critical.

The real core of this deck, however is the package of Imp, Gravedigger and Incubator. Gravedigger in particular has been the MVP of this deck ever since I put it together. With Grimoire online it’s kind of like a lucky find in that it gives you two mills for one card, reducing your need to draw. With Imp sitting around you can often get even more value out of it, and even a smallish Incubator can be turned into another four or five cardless mills in a pinch. Imp can fuel your Gravedigger or allow you to ‘pseudo mill’ cards by trashing them off the top of R&D to dig deeper when the corp is low on ICE or money to rez it with. If the corp doesn’t respect your Incubators, you can often go for a turn where you install Medium or Nerve agent, trigger your incubator, run the relevant central then hard install Hades Shard to clear out archives, often easily netting 7 points in one turn. Just be careful of ‘just not quite making it’ against Punitive Counterstrike bearing glacier builds or Argus Security.

Before Gravedigger, the problem with Noise is you had to either over-commit to low-value viruses like Gorman Drip or Lamprey, diluting your economy and resulting in a deck that often clogged up or stalled, or run too few to really put the fear of mill into your opponent as the game played out. With Gravedigger, you can get another 5-10 mills over the course of the game without having to dedicate card slots to them.



Some might question the lack of Parasite in the deck, which is a fair question. I find that I often hit a board state where I the corp has no rezzed ice (or what is rezzed is a Curtain Wall, Architect or similar) and as a result Parasite is a dead card in hand. If you sit back and just try and outpace the corp (which you will almost always do if you play for maximum efficiency) Parasites end up cluttering your hand and not giving you mills. Their exclusion also means Clone Chip is a lot less of an important tool in this deck, which is why that influence is instead spent on Lucky Find. Since taking out Parasite I’ve found the deck plays more smoothly and runs into a lot less situations where my hand is clogged with viruses I don’t really want to play out (Parasite, Crypsis, Medium/Nerve Agent) and Situational cards (Vamp, Hades Shard). If you’re playing against a lot of rush decks, Jinteki sentries, Grail or NEXT, it might be worth switching out the Datasuckers for them though.

Well, that’s all for now. Hopefully I can get back to writing these, Breaker Bay and Chrome City are looking fantastic. Happy running (or copping out and just dumping your opponent’s deck into archives) folks!