THE FUN ENDS HERE on NRDB

Hey Nerdbears, we’re back to our regularly scheduled dank memes and signature snark this week. Thanks again to Josh01 for filling in and writing what was this blogs most popular post to date; proving conclusively that shitty pictures and jack-assery are strictly worse than thoughtful, well-researched opinions.

Henceforth I pledge to give you, the people more high-level pontification, engaging discourse, and elevate the quality of — Hey look, a Kitty!

MaxX: Maximum Punk Rock Event (25)

2x Account Siphon ••••• •••

1x Amped Up

1x Apocalypse •••

3x Day Job

3x Déjà Vu

2x Hacktivist Meeting

3x I’ve Had Worse

2x Inject

1x Levy AR Lab Access •••

2x Retrieval Run

3x Sure Gamble

2x Wanton Destruction Resource (9)

3x DDoS

3x Liberated Account

3x Same Old Thing Icebreaker (7)

1x Corroder

3x Eater

1x Femme Fatale •

1x Mimic

1x Yog.0 Program (3)

1x D4v1d

2x Keyhole

15 influence spent (max 15)

47 cards (min 45)

Cards up to Data and Destiny

What is this blog about again? Right, cats. Cats were originally invented in 1991 by Timothy Berners-Lee to stress test the internet. TimBL’s struggles getting them to hold still long enough became the basis for the musical Cats, as well as the reason that Cat Stevens changed his name and converted to Islam. Since then, numerous uses for Cats have been discovered including laser pointer entrapment, Cat food disposal, and baiting nerds into upvoting netrunnerdb.com decks.

Especially post MWL, the Siphon Max archetype needs to be in your playtesting pool. Fortunately, these decks are easy to build, here is a handy step-by-step deck building guide:

Step 1: Set aside 2 siphons, apoc, yog and a levy.

Step 2: Have your cat randomly select 43 other orange cards.

As easy as microwaving a cheese potato! “Whoa, Chill easy with the carbohydrate-based derisions there! Anarchs are hard-working runners just trying to get an access like everybody else!”

Bullshit. Anarchs have nearly as many competitively viable cards as Shapers and Criminals combined. Here is my very conservative checklist as proof.

The worst part is the card draw. It would have all probably been fine if FFG hadn’t crammed so much quality draw into the faction in the last releases kicking decks like Slysquid’s Motherfucker Deck into the catosphere.

Then DDOS dropped in September… and despite raising alarms with it’s powerful effect, the card didn’t actually make it’s way into decklists for the first month. Anarchs had too many good cards and no one was quite sure what to cut for DDOS. Which is why LSK’s deck stirred up so much excitement when people saw it doing work during worlds last year.

The Stack

Let’s talk about the deck itself. Dien’s list here is 6 cards different from LSK’s and for any other deck that would be a huge difference, but in Anarch all of the cards are so good that swapping out a few situationally overpowered cards for some other situationally overpowered cards isn’t that big of a deal.

I’m loathe to admit it, but there is actually some finesse involved in playing this deck, you need at least as much intelligence as a Noise player or a house cat to pilot these decks. Steal all of the credits, make free keyhole runs. Sometimes your opponent will make you pay a trash cost. Repeat. It’s a very anarch-flavored style of play, and by “anarch” I mean “salt”, and by “style of play” I mean “repeated punch to the gonads”.

Almost the inverse of a regular anarch deck, Siphon MaxX front-loads all of its threats and falls off after spending all of it’s money on a few keyhole runs late game. It’s a quick deck that takes some different risks than the typical runner deck – No other runner deck is capable of bringing this much early aggression to the table, and as much as I hate it, I’m glad the archetype exists and is viable.

Before You Sleeve Up

Tuning a slot-machine deck like this one is an interesting deck-building challenge. You see all of your cards, usually twice per game, yet you are holding a different set of 20 each loop through your deck. It makes more sense to think of your stack in terms of threat-density, or rather it would, if you were ever forced to make any deck building decisions harder than choosing between Inject and Queen’s Gambit.

Dien’s MWL suggestions are on point, keeping the yog and losing the femme for something else is the best choice. Faust is the default non-yog code gate breaker for anarchs, but you don’t want to double down on your anti-AI weakness. Or whatever your cat wants to play, nothing really matters as long as the cards are all orange.

Siphon Max is a good choice for MWL tournaments, it doesn’t seem to struggle against anything except losing psi games like everyone else. The volume of redundant effects and easy economy make the deck very forgiving of mistakes, if you can memorize your own decklist, and check your heap every turn, you have a fine choice for a runner if you are too cool to just play Noise.

-RTG,

Chill84