1st Place at UK Nationals 2016: Silver Bullet Kate on NRDB

For 112 days and 112 nights I’ve wandered through the desert of jank in search of water. High profile tournaments came and went.

While Stimhack’s finest tuned their Faust decks, I was clicking Armitage Codebusting.

While the Euro runners painted the streets of Reading red at the President of Servers event — I was paintbrushing code gates into barriers.

While the Canadians were scoring naked Restructured Datapools, I was boosting Datahound traces.

Now, like Jeremy Irons in Eragon, I’ve returned to teach the next generation all that I know about running nets and riding dragons.

This is season 2 of NRDBir, things are going to be different around here! I’m older, wiser, more tolerant of bad cards and as my first order of business, I’d like to take my new, enlightened perspective and apply it to the last 16 decks I missed:

Alright I tried to be cool, but there is like 59923 Making News decks up there, what the hell nerdbears? Let’s get on with it and see what madness you’ve saddled me with this week…

Kate “Mac” McCaffrey: Digital Tinker Event (17)

1x “Freedom Through Equality”

3x Diesel

2x Employee Strike ●●

3x Indexing

1x Lucky Find ●●

3x Quality Time

3x Sure Gamble

1x Vamp ●● Hardware (9)

2x Astrolabe

3x Clone Chip ☆☆☆

1x Plascrete Carapace

3x Rabbit Hole Resource (6)

3x Daily Casts

1x Film Critic

1x Political Operative ●

1x Salsette Slums ●● Icebreaker (6)

1x Atman

1x Inti

1x Mimic ●

1x Sharpshooter

1x Snowball

1x ZU.13 Key Master Program (7)

1x Clot ●●

3x Magnum Opus

3x Self-modifying Code 12 influence spent (max 15-3☆=12, available 0)

45 cards (min 45)

Cards up to Salsette Island

The Deck

A funny thing happens when you take the nexus out of nexus Kate – you end up with a lot of influence left over to spend on cards that don’t send your tempo back to the bronze age when you play them.

Here are some interesting facts I found about silver that aren’t made up:

Webster’s Dictionary defines Silver as “a light meal eaten in the middle of the day.” Silver is the 69th element on the periodic table. It is atomically different from potassium bromide by 2 neutrons. In the 14th century, farmers used to plant silver shavings in their fields believing them to grow victory points. This practice formed the inspiration for Uwe Rosenberg’s award winning Agricola.

Silver bullets famously slay werewolves in 17th century literature; in Netrunner they just piss people off. But it takes more than a bullet made of silver to kill a CTM deck — it takes 3 rabbit holes, Mopus, Salsette Slum, a couple Employee Strikes, and a smug sense of self confidence.

Before You Sleeve Up

Actually don’t play this deck. You know what costs 6 influence that isn’t 2 nexuses? 3 copies of Temujin Contracts. It’s amazing how non-threatening hard-hitting news becomes when you can gain 12 credits while accessing R&D and proccing dirty laundries.

If you are committed to playing this deck, please swap out the snowball and slums for Ladies. Lucky Find in an opus deck is pretty non-sensical as well, just play a stimhack, then take your extra influence point down to the corner store and buy yourself something pretty.

Conclusions

The concept of a silver bullet is still useful in card gaming terms. Silver is expensive, it takes preparedness and effort to forge a counter-strategy. In the case of this janky pile, only Vikz93 knows what in the name of Zachary Xylophone some of them are there for.

Elsewhere, at the U.S. nationals Kenny Deakins and Dan D’argenio succeeded in a field rich with DLR hate because they had the one silver bullet that every Netrunner needs in their revolver: a full and complete breakfast.

The average netrunner player will encounter difficult matchups while testing, most of us will react to these challenges by changing our deck list the night before and drinking a lot of coffee — the TRUE winners overcome adversity by starting their day off right with a glass of orange juice, milk, 2 eggs, and a fiberful bowl of Netrunner cereal:

Vikz93 had a risky plan, survive the swiss on coffee and chocolate hoping to make it into the cut so that he could revitalize himself during a proper food break. He gambled and won big, proving that in the new meta, there are multiple viable breakfast and hydration strategies.

#mobydicksout4bblum,

Chill84