By quite a wide margin, the decks that have been most successful at winning Netrunner Plugged-In tournaments have been Andromeda and Weyland Tag and Bag – which as, you can tell from those links, we’ve already covered in Decks to Beat. The rest of the field is less susceptible to the Decks to Beat treatment, but today we’re going to give it a shot.

Just to go through the basics again, the purpose of Decks to Beat is to identify a common, successful decks in a meta-game and craft a generic version of that deck, thus providing a template for playtesting against. These are not intended to be “optimized” versions of the decks in general, much less ones optimized for your local meta. Rather, they are intended to be exemplars of the sort of deck that you’re probably going to have to go through in order to succeed at a decent-sized tournament.

For this environment (the Plugged-In Tour, which were all Opening Moves), the main decks to beat have, as noted above, already been covered. Three possible decks to cover remained – Gabe, HB: Engineering the Future, and NBN: Making News (I suppose that Weyland non-Tag and Bag would be another possibility, but last week was enough of examining Weyland … and, yes, I know that may seem silly since both of the Runner side Decks to Beat are Criminal). What about the other factions/identities? I don’t need to do a detailed breakdown to tell me that there isn’t a common ‘deck to beat’ in there. Jinteki was almost absent from the winner’s circle, and Anarch was pretty scarce (plus the handful of winning Anarch decks had some big differences). Shaper had a solid number of appearances (although underperforming their attendance), but they were spread across multiple identities, and a glance said they didn’t have enough in common to make this process work.

So, we’re left with Gabe, HB:ETF and NBN:MN. This article is going to cover Gabe. One will go up later today covering Making News (or, to be more precise, the strain of Making News decks that aren’t trying to win through Scorched or Psychographics, but instead focus on fast/never advance with things like SanSan, and limit tag punishment to Closed Accounts). HB? Well, they’re just left out in the cold. There just isn’t one particular ‘deck to beat’ to pull out of that – there are common strains running through them, but those strains are intertwined (some fast advance, some not) and the decks tend to mix and match them in a way that isn’t conducive to a “this is the thing you have to worry about” analysis.

But, enough of that, on to Gabe!

Identity: Gabe

Events (~23)

3x Account Siphon
3x Forged Activation Orders
3x Inside Job
3x Quality Time
3x Sure Gamble
2x Special Order
2x Emergency Shutdown
2x Dirty Laundry
2x Indexing

Well, that wasn’t hard. So, since there isn’t much to discuss about what Gabe is running for Events, let’s ask what he’s running for Events that’s different form Andy. Gabe runs about 3 more Events than Andy and, most distinctively, usually runs the Shaper Events Quality Time and Indexing (he also generally runs more copies of Inside Job and Forged Activation Orders). Andy, on the other hand, tends to run the third Special Order, and also copies of Infiltration and Easy Mark.

Resources (~6)

3x Same Old Thing
2x Armitage Codebusting
1x Bank Job

The Resources start off with extra copies of Account Siphon (or whatever Event floats your boat), so let’s just put that here after the Events. While the Events section of this deck is rock solid, the Resources (past Same Old Thing) are pretty fluid. Nobody’s actually running 2x Armitage (it’s either a 3x or a 1x) and a singleton Bank Job (which is a 2x or not at all). So you might keep a hybrid setup like this (because you may see either out of Gabe) or you might just go with 3x Armitage, which is the most common one you’ll run into. Let’s see how things shake out.

Hardware (~5/6)

3x Plascrete Carapace
2x Desperado
1x E3 Feedback Implants?

You can virtually ink in the Plascrete Carapace and Desperado on the Good Stuff Gabe decklist. Many decks stop there, but about half of them are sporting an E3 Feedback Implants as well.

Programs (~4)

3x Sneakdoor Beta
1x ???

The combination of decks produces something of a head fake here, although it’s an easily avoidable one. The typical Good Stuff Gabe runs at least two Sneakdoor, probably 3. Enough decks have some additional program to make the “average” deck run 4 programs, but there really isn’t any ‘typical’ program to put in that slot – one deck has Gorman Drips, one deck has Medium, one deck has Datasucker/Parasite, that sort of thing. So in the final gauntlet deck, this will almost certainly just end up with 3 programs.

Icebreakers (~6/7)

2x Corroder
1x Femme Fatale
1x Crypsis
1x Yog.0
1x Faerie
1x ???

The Icebreaker suite, on the other hand, presents presents an unclear picture – really the only serious ambiguity. All of these decks run Corroder, and about half run two of them. A single Yog.0 is almost universal, and at least one Femme is universal. After that it’s a bit muddled. Nobody runs Crypsis and Faerie, but a substantial minority run either a trio of Crypsis or a trio of Faerie as half of their breaker suite. And this slot is going to end up as a 7 in the final gauntlet deck, because of the Programs being limited to just Sneakdoor.

So, in the final deck below, I’ll stick with the single Faerie and the single Crypsis, and fill the final slot in with another Femme, just because it’s the most frequently encountered Icebreaker out of Gabe (after Corroder, anyway), even though it’s atypical for these decks to have 2x Femme. Other options might be to put Ninja in that final slot, or to turn these three slots into just 3x Faerie or 3x Crypsis.

I’ll just stick with the 2x Armitage and 1x Bank Job in Resources. Feel free to make the Bank Job a third Armitage.

Identity: Gabriel Santiago, Consummate Professional

Events (23)

3x Account Siphon
3x Forged Activation Orders
3x Inside Job
3x Quality Time *
3x Sure Gamble
2x Special Order
2x Emergency Shutdown
2x Dirty Laundry
2x Indexing ***

Resources (6)

3x Same Old Thing
2x Armitage Codebusting
1x Bank Job

Hardware (6)

3x Plascrete Carapace
2x Desperado
1x E3 Feedback Implants

Programs (3)

3x Sneakdoor Beta

Icebreakers (~6/7)

2x Corroder **
2x Femme Fatale
1x Crypsis
1x Yog.0 *
1x Faerie

As with prior Netrunner Decks to Beat, the influence for this deck happens to add up to the maximum allowable amount (here, 15). However, don’t feel constrained by that when testing against a deck.