Valencia, take one

I’ve decided to start taking notes about my Netrunner decks; I’ll lead off with the version of my Valencia deck as of a tournament a week and a half ago. So not quite the first iteration of this deck, but pretty close.

Valencia (54 cards)

Valencia Estevez: The Angel of Cayambe

Event (20)

• 3 Day Job
• 2 Deja Vu
• 2 Dirty Laundry
• 2 Forked
• 1 Frame Job
• 3 Itinerant Protesters
• 2 I’ve Had Worse
• 1 Knifed
• 1 Spooned
• 3 Sure Gamble

Hardware (8)

• 1 Clone Chip **
• 2 Cyberfeeder
• 2 MemStrips
• 3 Vigil

Resource (12)

• 3 Investigative Journalism
• 2 Kati Jones
• 2 Personal Workshop **** ****
• 3 Rachel Beckman * * *
• 2 Raymond Flint

Icebreaker (8)

• 1 Cerberus “Cuj.0” H3
• 2 Corroder
• 2 Eater
• 1 Mimic
• 1 Yog.0
• 1 ZU.13 Key Master **

Program (6)

• 2 Datasucker
• 2 Medium
• 2 Parasite

I’ll blog about my Nasir deck soon, but it got me enjoying having credits available in the middle of the run, so I figured I’d try that out with Valencia. Also, I figured the 50 card limit would work well with my complete inability to prune down decks! So, of course, it started at almost 60 cards; by this version, it was down to 54, which is a start…

I wanted a way to get something out of recurring credits in a run, and Personal Workshop had worked great for that with Nasir. I started with three of them, but I decided that I wanted a bit more influence to play with, so I ended up with two copies. And of course I threw in more bad publicity-related cards: Investigative Journalism and Frame Job to create more bad pub, Raymond Flint and Itinerant Protesters to help me use it, and Taille Perrault for both. Then I threw in a bunch of other half-backed ideas: Hades Shard, Rachel Beckmann, the cutlery suite, MemStrips plus a bunch of viruses plus Data Folding, Vigil as my console to combo with Itinerant Protesters, Day Job for money, Eater to reduce chances of disaster in runs.

Some of that went away in initial testing with friends. Data Folding ended up not really working for economy, so I ditched that and threw in Kati Jones. Taille Perrault also ended up not being very useful. And Hades Shard helped me seal wins in games that I was going to win anyways.

But sometimes the deck worked really well: if I could keep adding bad pub with Investigative Journalism and keep the pressure up with Itinerant Protesters, then the corp would be in a pretty bad shape, and while that was happening, Vigil would give me the ammo I needed to keep the pressure going. (And I wasn’t running into a lot of currents, either, so Itinerant Protesters had a decent chance of staying around for a while.) Also, I managed to land Rachel Beckmann surprisingly often, and having five clicks is a huge advantage. (The fact that it leaves you a click left after using Investigative Journalism or Day Job is the icing on the cake!)

It was also super interesting to watch how the deck works. It’s pretty slow, as you’d expect with Day Job and Investigative Journalism. Also, it’s got a somewhat low percentage of icebreakers, so I couldn’t run as much as I wanted anyways. But, because of Itinerant Protestors, the corp feels under pressure even if I’m not running a lot.

So what ended up happening surprisingly often is that we’d go along for a while, without either of us doing much; and then the pieces would come together and I’d suddenly take control. Sometimes it was because I’d gotten my full regular breaker suite out and I’d have, say, three bad pub credits that I could use on every run; sometimes I’d only have one or two breakers out but I’d use Parasite + Datasucker or cutlery to clear most of the way into one server so I could get in reliably; and sometimes I’d combine ice destruction with Medium to get in some brutal runs. And when I got into that sort of ice destruction scenario, Itinerant Protestors meant that the corp would have a hard time rebuilding, because they wouldn’t have ice sitting around in their hand.

This made it harder to prune down than I expected: too many of the random ideas worked! So yeah, I threw out Hades Shard, but I added a third Rachel Beckmann in (and a third Day Job to pay for her), and the cutlery was staying. I got it down to 54 cards, but it was still a little bloated; but in that state, it still went 3 for 4 at the tournament.

Admittedly most of those wins were against people who weren’t doing so well in the tournament; I still think the deck is too bloated and too slow. The one deck it lost against was a fast advance deck, I’m pretty sure I’m vulnerable against that. And I haven’t played against decks with tagging; I haven’t lost Rachel Beckmann yet, and that will hurt when it happens.

My basic idea of leaning on Personal Workshop actually hasn’t worked so well either: I only have two of them, and I don’t have that many programs / hardware, so a lot of the time Personal Workshop doesn’t get tons of use. It still makes a noticeable difference in maybe a third of the games, and I really don’t know what I’d do with all the influence I’d free up by getting rid of them, so they’re still in there, but it feels off.

Of the other random ideas: getting free accesses from Raymond Flint is useful, but I think not quite useful for him to be worth keeping in. I’m thinking I might want to use more Frame Job, though: in the corp deck I was playing at the time, using Archer to increase the pressure even at the cost of discarding a two-point agenda turns out to be worth it, and if I can do the same with Frame Job plus Itinerant Protesters to get the corp hand size down to two or even one, then my chances get a lot better all of a sudden. (Or down to zero, but once it gets there, I’ve effectively won.)

And then there’s all the new cards from The Valley to think about: that’ll show up in the next iteration of this deck…