Honeycomb Crunch (SG Nationals 5th place) on NRDB

What’s up nerdbears! We’ve been stumbling around drunk in the woods of Data & Destiny for two months now in a desperate quest to return the jankronomicon back to the cabin where we found it — and at long last our quest has finally ended.

With this deck that is inexplicably named after an imaginary breakfast cereal, we complete our review of all three D&D corp ID’s and all two runners. Yep. That’s all of them, so there is no need to any more D&D identities.

Before we get onto the list, let’s all take a moment to reflect on all of the good times we’ve had together with Data & Destiny.

…uh

Sol was pretty cool?

SYNC: Everything, Everywhere Agenda (10)

3x AstroScript Pilot Program

2x Global Food Initiative ••

1x Project Beale

3x Quantum Predictive Model

1x 15 Minutes Asset (6)

3x Jackson Howard

3x News Team Upgrade (3)

1x Crisium Grid •

2x Cyberdex Virus Suite Operation (14)

1x Archived Memories ••

2x Biotic Labor ••••• •••

1x Blue Level Clearance ••

1x Closed Accounts

1x Fast Track

3x Hedge Fund

2x Psychographics

3x Sweeps Week Barrier (4)

2x Resistor

2x Wraparound Code Gate (2)

1x Archangel

1x Enigma Sentry (5)

3x Data Raven

2x Gutenberg 15 influence spent (max 15)

18 agenda points (between 18 and 19)

44 cards (min 40)

Cards up to Does anyone read these things and Destiny

This particular deck has an interesting lineage. I noted that the ‘derived from’ deck listed Sync Psychobiotics, but Honeycomb Crunch only vaguely resembled CJFM’s original list posted in October. It’s more likely that it comes from this Sync Biotics list circulated by French National’s Winner Calimsha.

To speculate further, I think the seal was popped on these decks when kookoobah nearly took down the PSI games playing Tanktop Butcher a 24/7 deck based on a new kill deck that World Champion Dan D’argenio and Asclepius had been working on.

If you don’t know who any of these people are, don’t sweat it, they are just runners in the secret underground world of competitive netrunner, where decklists are perfected in off-campus apartments, and corporate bathroom stalls.

What matters is that players around the world were looking for a way to feed 24/7 News Hour for Scorch kills off Breaking News – what they found was this Schrödinger’s cat: which playtesting proved to be neither dead, nor alive, but bananas.

The QPM threat bolsters NBN’s typically mediocre sentry suite, and will often just serve to increase the number of accesses the runner needs to win by 20% Quite annoying on its own; however, when played alongside the other Agenda density reducers Global Food Initiative and 15 minutes — it is damned sinister.

Do you know what the worst thing in the world is? Violence? Crimes of Hatred?

You’re wrong, it’s News Team.

2 tags or -1 agenda points on access from anywhere… for free. All you have to do is sleeve it and News Team will make your opponent’s life miserable. News Team is the most despair inducing thing since the great puppy fire of ‘89.

It is too difficult for me to express just how much I hate News Team without using a numbered outline:

THINGS I WOULD RATHER DO THAN ACCESS NEWS TEAM

Play through 5 rounds of swiss using angry chinchillas as credit tokens. Help my grandmother set up her Tinder profile. Eat glitter. Watch Schindler’s list extended edition performed as an experimental rock opera by my upstairs neighbor and his 8 cats. Play Apex

Seriously, I’m just taking tags everytime I access this card, on the chance that someone will follow it up with a scorched earth and end my suffering.

Coupled with a critical mass of this annoying bullshit, the SYNC identity card gets used pretty well. The R&D dig followed by removing the Gutenberg tag is just too taxing between the extra credit cost and the high number of accesses needed – eventually they are going to take all of the tags and just try to race you, giving SYNC more options to close the game which they are greatly favored to do before the runner unless they are getting Keyholed or DLR’d.

Speaking of DLR, it turns out SYNC has some stuff printed on the back of it too which reads: “If the runner takes a tag before they set up their entire DLR combo, GG”

Before you sleeve up…

The above list is, in my opinion, extremely well-tuned. The only thing that really sticks out to me is the Crisium Grid. Crisium Grid is amazing in decks that can use it as siphon AND keyhole protection. SYNC has built in siphon protection in an environment where runners almost always have to remove tags after a siphon — in this deck, Crisium Grid is going to be something you use exclusively as hate against Keyhole/Apocalypse Max. Which is a narrow use of a card, but probably still a reasonable choice.

The previous iteration of the deck just ran a Green Level Clearance as its 15th influence point, and I think that is the card that you should be running when you start playing the deck, and only tweak into a crisium grid to suit your metagame needs.

The other small tweak that I would make right away is -1 Psychographics +1 Fast Track. By the time the runner has decided to go all-in on tags, you will have already drawn your 1 copy of psycho and been staring at it sighing for the past 15 turns. With another fast track you give yourself more power to close games than with the 2nd psycho.

Sync Biotics is a big stack of annoying cards in a familiar astrobiotics shell that has different matchups than NEH, making it a possible alternative for certain metagame environments that would not favor a standard NEH Astrobiotics deck (expect many DLR decks for example). Expect to see a lot of News Teams/eat a lot of glitter this store champs season.

Ruining the game,

-Chill84