Last Sunday I decided it’s time to make deck on my own. I read somewhere about the basic idea for it, and I tried to build it from the scratch. The plan was to bring it to the Warsaw League on Tuesday.

It was nerve wracking experience.

After compiling first version I went to sleep, only to wake up in the middle of the night with the idea of refining it a little. I couldn’t sleep, thinking about it for a while.

In the morning I made those changes and then went to work. Only to spend whole day on thinking what other things I could change. In the evening, finally at home, I switched some final cards and spent some time on simulating how my first hands look. They were looking all right, I thought.

The Plan

My plan was to put as many Virus cards into my Noise deck, to mill down the corps R&D and then make final run on the archives to grab my prize. I didn’t check any deck sites, deciding I will learn more by doing it all by myself.

I have cards up to “Double Time”, so as some of you know, this leaves me without some very useful tools that can be find in Lunar Cycle. I also decided to not include stuff from “Creation & Control”, silly me.

But when life doesn’t give you Cache, you try to make lemonade out of Deep Thoughts.

I managed to put about 16 virus cards into it, and with two Deja Vus and Retrival Runs it should gave me about 22 corp cards to mill. Back up plan was full set of breakers with Gordian Blade, Mimic and Corrorder, with Plascrete Carapace on the top.

Most of you probably know already how this will end…

The Waiting

Then came the waiting. It was painful. I knew what I was trying to achieve, but I could only test it in the heat of league matches. So I had no clue if this is working. But I had almost 24 hours to think about it.

When you try to do something new in deep strategic games like StarCraft or League of Legends, the feedback is almost instant. You log in, you try your new build, you win or lose and then try again. After three hours you have enough data to know that you want to play like this for a little bit longer, or you need to scrap your idea and try something different.

Netrunner is different. Of course I can always try Octagon, but I didn’t pay hundreds of Polish Zloty for physical experience to play with unofficial mod which looks just awful.

So you have to wait.

Each hour was another bullet into the heart of my confidence. Should I face check ICE? What if hit something with net damage and my precious viruses go to thrash? Djinn or Scheherezada? Or both? Should I put out my breakers at the beginning? What if I won’t find Katie Jones in my opening hand? Do I really need Plascrate Carapce if I’m only worried about net damage?

Before I was playing only basic decks, with few minor changes, those things were designed by someone else. But now all responsibility for was on me.

But then I sat at the table against my first opponent and forgot about all the nerves. I was in the zone.

The Execution

The best thing about playing against more experienced, simply better, opponents is that you learn a lot. They have more cards, they are faster, they make less mistakes. The randomness of the draw mitigates those factors a little, but Netrunner is a game about gaining knowledge and using it, and I’m only at the “gaining” phase.

The first game I won. The most funny thing is I did not by milling, but with using breakers simply to get into R&D. Few lucky runs and I managed to steal 7 points. I installed few viruses, but mostly I was running on open archives to power up Hemorrhage and thrash cards in corps hand. That wasn’t my initial plan, but it worked.

My first lost was against your typical Near Earth Hub which was simply faster then my Noise. Second was against Replicating Perfection Jinteki. With secure central servers, I was unable to threaten the remotes, so corporation was free to use all the Howard Jackson’s it needed to move away all important cards from the archives. My final defeat was very similar - Blue Sun Wayland hided behind the walls of ICE and just scored agendas on the Off The Grid server. I didn’t have enough credits to power up my breakers, I didn’t manage to draw any Katie Jones, so he just used Howard Jackson when he decided it’s time.

Afterthoughts

So yeah, this deck has many issues.

Most notably, corps almost always have few Jackson Howards in their deck and runner need a lot of luck to thrash them all at the beginning. If he doesn’t do that, they are able to save agendas from the archives when you try to get them.

Once I got too attached to tokens on my Data Sucker and installed breakers to early, so I wasn’t milling much. Another match I spent too much on simple viruses and I didn’t have enough credits to build up economy.

The most embarrassing/entertaining/enlightening game was the one I lost as a corp against Noise. He showed me how to do it, he showed me really good.

His deck had everything that was needed to make short work of my poor R&D: three Deja Vus, three Caches, enough copies of Aesop Pawnshop to draw it at the beginning of the game and finally Levy AR Lab Access to reset the thing and start from the beginning.

And of course Hades Shard to access my Archives without any problems.

It was most brutal game of Netrunner I have ever played. Mostly because it showed how weak was my own design. I felt like a poor cousin, weak imitation of proper runner.

But the guy was very friendly and we chat about it for a while after.

The Future

So what’s next? I don’t feel the need to buy any new cards at this moment because I don’t understand how those I already have work. I should probably finally look into my Creation & Control box and take out Clone Chips and Levy AR, maybe replacing Liberated Accounts with Daily Casts won’t hurt.

Unfortunately with only one Core Set, having one copy of Aesop Pawnshop and Grimoire doesn’t bring a lot of reliability to this deck.

Another thing I learned from that defeat was using some AI instead of three breakers. Which gives me a little bit more space for few more viruses. But which one should I use? And how many copies of the card should I use?

My opponent used Darwin, which needs time to build up, and gives corporation some room to breath after cleansing virus tokens. So maybe Crypsis is better choice? I need more credits to use it, and sometimes spent half of the turn to power it, but it’s less exposed to token purge. But maybe I should scare corporation into wasting turns on Darwin?

In both cases my plan B is using Surge which can bring both Darwin and Crypsis to 3-5 virus tokens so I can run on third or last click. But what if he is using Enhanced Login Protocol? And what if he has some ICE with strength higher than five? And I don’t have any tokens on Data Suckers because I didn’t run at all?

What if..