Alright then. Rather than just some stupid memes, I guess I owe you a more serious writeup.

But first, obligatory decklist material:

Complementary meme:

Suggested listening material: De Evenmens by Amenra. I started out my Ob games in the top cut by listening to this. It really evokes the feeling of how these games generally play out. An explosive start of Bladderworts blasting the Runner’s face. The Runner scrambling back up trashing assets here and there. A period of quietness while the Corp is getting back on their feet preparing their money and ice, slowly ramping up the tension again. The Corp then attempts to set up a finale resulting in the game ending by:

1. The Runner dying to Measured Response contesting the scores.
2. The Corp scoring out.
3. The Runner toughing it out, playing around their different loss conditions and eventually finding the agendas to win.

Back to my roots

I have been intrigued with asset combo kill decks ever since the very first netrunner tournaments I played in. I brought IG to belgian nats and worlds in 2019. In 2023 I also started playing the asset ob with urban renewals and added Manegarm as a surprise install from Mavirus when the Runner attempts to contest a naked Urban Renewal, made even more obnoxious with Formicary. With the rules changes of Elevation I was excited to try Cybersand Harvester and the shenanigans it allows in Ob. This deck isn’t exactly the same thing as setting up an asset combo kill, but a lot of the playstyle at least evokes the same feeling for me, piecing together the pieces on how to set up the Runner in a lose-lose situation.

The day of the tournament I was on a call with several netrunner players. I was lamenting that I didn’t know what corp to play. In a series of socratic questions they were asking I realized I should just play what I enjoy playing and locked in this deck that I had been tweaking and iterating. Sometimes you chase ‘the best deck’, but if it doesn’t vibe with you then that alone might be too big a barrier to overcome to do well with it. You can accomplish so much more if the deck also gels with you.

Several people have also asked me about the Manegarm Skunkworks. I’m mostly still in a process of tweaking with the slots and influence in the deck and this is my current state. I like it as a throwback to the surprise fetch tech from my earlier experiments with asset Ob, but it mostly fits in the pivot to the fork to the scoring / measured response plan. I used to be very strict in sticking with the slots of published decks that I was inspired by in fear of making the deck worse. But the more I improve at Netrunner the more I see gaps in lists I and others are playing. Decklists are a lot more fluid and evolving for me than they were before. If what I changed doesn’t turn out to be working, I just take the losses and learn from it what didn’t work for the next tournaments.

Playing this deck

The cool thing about this deck is that there are so many different ways to play out different hands. I personally prefer to start out by exhausting the Runner’s resources forcing them to find answers for assets. Then, once they have set that up, start switching gears to a scoring remote gameplan. This requires you to think ahead of time where you will be placing what ice, to a much farther extent than a typical scoring corp.

There will be some initial incidental damage that potentially trashes certain key cards like breakers or stoneship/steelskin. This allows you to utilize that knowledge and prepare your remote taking that into account. You want to set up scores backed up by the implication of Measured Response being threatened afterwards, making the Runner wonder whether they should simply leave your score advances alone. Or if they do contest it, have the actual threat ready to back it up.

One thing that is a bit of a weak point in the current decklist imo is the lack of a strong sentry that needs to be respected. The Runner effectively doesn’t really need a sentry breaker, and that is the next thing that should be fixed for future iterations.

You can see two of my top cut games on stream here:

• vs icecreamcollege
• vs AugustusCaesar

Corp Doomerism

It probably shouldn’t be much of a surprise that a bunch of us are doomering about Corps. I have done some scientific research on the stance of a collection of different Netrunner players in the following graphic:

(Gee Bill! How come your mom lets you have two memes in your decklist?)

While I am personally still convinced that there are some Corps that have tools to put up a strong fight, and I am enjoying the current meta well enough, I do hope that we’ll be able to see some changes in the near future to help improve this situation. As a Runner I rarely feel the dread of the threats the Corp is able to put out, like they were in previous metas. While there might be some unicorn tricks that will be found still, on an overall level the balance does seem to be tipped a bit too much in a certain way than it should.

Where are you in the Corp Doomerism Scale (patent pending)? Are you a naive realist believing that jnet performance is a representative indication of the meta, or a relativist setting up lobbies with your custom banned card list? Do you prefer the more science-backed approach of structural realism or constructive empiricism? Do you think there should be a 3rd axis? Let us know in the decklist comments.