Pictures from the April Minecraft session. First, some wandering around; some of these were actually oddities Miranda noticed and showed me:

A random sunset picture

A water glitch

A strange strip of snow

A decently large floating island

Turns out that there were lots of animals on top of the floating island

Lava in a grotto

Miranda found a desert village, and decided to work on it:

The desert village

Another view

A ring of lights at night

Meanwhile, Patrick decided to extend the fort he’d built the previous month:

A bridge crossing the water, and walls on the other side

House number one

Working on house number two

I wandered around nearby, and found this strangely round large cave opening

Then I went back to Miranda’s village; there was one villager who was very persistent about walking in a circle.

A villager walking in a circle

He’s still at it

Other villagers have gathered to watch him

Here’s the whole village at daytime

A sudden desert/grass boundary nearby

Dan, as he has been for over a year now, is continuing to build a path in a line; he hit a mountain at about this point and started digging through it.

Dan digging through a mountain

And then Miranda decided to join forces with Patrick.

Patrick had built a third house

Miranda building a dock

Making one of the house entrances look nice

The second version of my Valencia deck actually ended up doing a lot worse than the first version. I’m not entirely sure why: the reasoning behind most of the additions seemed sound, so my current guess is that I got a little luck with the earlier version. It’s always been a slow deck; sometimes I can get away with that, sometimes I can’t, and recently “can’t” has happened a lot. And it’s not that the new cards didn’t come up: actually, I got pretty lucky with Paige and Symmetrical Visage coming up early, so that should have helped my draw, but either my analysis is wrong or it didn’t help enough.

So I went to speed it up. I noticed that I was spending too much time on Day Job, so I got rid of one of those (my version 0 of the deck, which I don’t have a record of, actually only contained two copies, probably adding a third was a mistake) and put back in one copy of Dirty Laundry. I also got rid of the two copies of Clot that I’d added: they did help me in one game, but only because I wasn’t finding my breakers, so I figured I should just thin out my deck to make it easier to get the breakers. That still left me with 57 cards, so I started getting rid of more events: my second copy of Forked (cutlery has served me well, but I only had one copy of the other two), my Frame Job (I’ve got enough sources of bad publicity), one copy of Deja Vu, and one copy of I’ve Had Worse.

That last one may have been a mistake: I went 2-3 with the deck today, and two of the losses were flatlines. I think I’m not entirely ready to give up on the deck: I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks seeing how I like my Nasir deck but with Study Guide swapped in, but it still feels like I should try to get the deck down to 50 cards.

I’m actually a little tempted to give up on Rachel Beckman (though it is amusing to see my coworkers all playing her now); I’d have to think about what I’d do with the extra influence. (Maybe upgrade ZU.13 to Gordian Blade and add a second Clone Chip? Now that I think of it, Clone Chip works better with bad pub than Deja Vu does, and I don’t have enough viruses that the “two virus” ability matters.) I might add back the third I’ve Had Worse; maybe get rid of one copy of Vigil, too, and swap a second Day Job for Dirty Laundry, or even just get rid of Day Job entirely? (Kati Jones is coming up enough that my econ is okay, especially with Symmetrical Visage helping.) I think the quantity of icebreakers is about right (it feels a little low, but I want to solve that by making the deck more efficient), and the non-icebreaker programs I have all frequently help me win games, so I think they’re pulling their weight now that Clot is gone.

Anyways, here are the changes:

• -1 Deja Vu
• -1 Forked
• -1 Frame Job
• -1 I’ve Had Worse
• -1 Day Job
• -2 Clot
• +1 Dirty Laundry

And here’s the full deck:

Valencia (53 cards)

Valencia Estevez: The Angel of Cayambe

Event (15)

• 2 Day Job
• 1 Deja Vu
• 1 Dirty Laundry
• 1 Forked
• 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 (16)

• 3 Investigative Journalism
• 2 Kati Jones
• 3 Paige Piper
• 2 Personal Workshop **** ****
• 3 Rachel Beckman * * *
• 3 Symmetrical Visage

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’m planning to focus on new decks here, but I enjoyed my Nasir deck enough that I still haven’t taken it apart. So here it is, as of the last version I played with it:

Nasir (45 cards)

Nasir Meidan: Cyber Explorer

Event (9)

• 1 Diesel
• 2 Net Celebrity
• 2 Quality Time
• 2 Sure Gamble
• 2 Test Run

Hardware (13)

• 3 Clone Chip
• 3 Cyberfeeder * * *
• 3 Dyson Mem Chip
• 2 Plascrete Carapace
• 2 The Toolbox

Resource (13)

• 2 Armitage Codebusting
• 3 Order of Sol
• 3 Personal Workshop
• 3 Underworld Contact
• 2 Xanadu ** **

Icebreaker (6)

• 1 Battering Ram
• 1 Crypsis
• 1 Deus X
• 1 Femme Fatale *
• 1 Garrote ***
• 1 Gordian Blade

Program (4)

• 1 Cloak
• 2 Parasite ** **
• 1 Paricia

I’m a very traditional Netrunner player: honestly, my taste in icebreakers hasn’t really evolved since the core set. So I’m sure there are other people out there with Nasir decks that use all sorts of specialized icebreakers in fascinating ways. But I’m doing things in a much more straightforward way: I want to use Nasir’s powers to get out a strong suite of standard icebreakers, and I want enough recurring credits that I’ll actually be able to use those icebreakers even after potentially losing a bunch of money.

The key card here is Personal Workshop, of course: that gives me something useful to do with the credits that I would lose when encountering newly rezzed ice. In fact, those credits turned out to work so well that I bumped up the cost of programs (adding Garrote in particular, though I’m not 100% convinced that was a good idea): I’ve never gotten out my Toolbox so smoothly in any other deck. I’ll mulligan if I don’t have either a Personal Workshop or Diesel / Quality Time.

Order of Sol was the most surprisingly useful card in this deck: I go broke in this deck all the time, so that helps me bounce back. In fact, I ended up frequently trying to go broke on the corp turn as well, so so I could get twice as many credits: if I had more than a credit or two in my pool, that’s not worth it, but if I end my turn with a single credit, then I can spend it on the corp turn to take a counter off of something in Personal Workshop, and that’s free because Order of Sol replenishes it immediately.

I ended up using Dyson Mem Chip as my non-console memory: they’re cheap enough in this deck, and there are a decent range of corp decks where the link is useful. And that in turn suggested that I should use Underworld Contact as a source of money: Nasir starts with one link, so it triggers when I either have my console or a single mem chip.

Xanadu obviously synergizes with Nasir.

In earlier iterations, I had Self-Modifying Code in here as well, but I was had a small enough stash of money most of the time (and expensive enough programs!) that the two credit cost made a difference. So I decided to focus on card draw plus Test Run to get cards out of my deck, and Clone Chip to resurrect them from the trash if they were destroyed or if I drew too much. Having only one of each icebreaker is potentially dangerous, but in practice that’s been okay, and Crypsis / Femme Fatale / Deus X give me a bit of wiggle room as well.

Battering Ram is, obviously, not a very popular icebreaker; the reason why it’s here (other than the fact that it’s in faction) is that you can bump the strength before losing the credits. You can do that with Gordian Blade, too: otherwise, I’d be tempted to put in Torch.

And, obviously, there are tons of recurring credits. Mostly for icebreaker use, to give me a prayer of making it through even after losing lots of credits, but Net Celebrity can be used for anything (in particular, for Personal Workshop) and Paricia increases the chance that I’ll be able to trash stuff at the end of the run.

Parasite has an extra non-obvious use in this deck: the worst case for Nasir is hitting strength 0 ice, but if I’ve got a Parasite in the trash and a Clone Chip on the board (or on my Personal Workshop), then I can destroy a Popup Window before encountering it, which means that I don’t lose my credits.

This is probably the tightest deck I’ve ever built: I can point at basically every card in the deck and say “there’s a really good reason why this card belongs in this specific deck”, and it’s small enough and has enough draw that I actually get to play those cards. And it did reasonably well: it’s not a top-tier tournament deck, but none of my decks are ever top-tier tournament decks, I’m not good enough at building them! The main tournament downside is that it’s mentally absolutely exhausting to play: you have to do so many more calculations when playing this deck than when playing other decks. I did contest math when I was growing up, and playing a Netrunner tournament with this deck actually tires out my brain more than math contests did.

I’m actually thinking of resurrecting it: my Valencia deck has not been doing so well recently, so I’m thinking I’ll bring this deck to regionals, partly because I enjoy it, partly because it’s probably slightly better than my Valencia deck, and partly because, as one of the weaker players at regionals, I figure doing a weird deck is good, because it will increase the variance. (Whereas good players want to shrink the variance of their decks.) I’m planning to swap in Study Guide as the code gate breaker: I’ll gradually be able to bump up the strength using spare recurring credits (icebreaker-specific ones work fine there, I don’t need generic ones), so I’m hoping that, a few turns after it goes down, it will end up being stronger than Torch with me having spent many fewer credits that wouldn’t otherwise have been wasted in the process.