Meticulous Mezzanine

Netrunner: Esa is my favourite

Play Eternal. Love Eternal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw3PQEw6O4U

I was gutted to not be able to make it to netrunner worlds this year. I was equally pleased to hear the champion of my deck, sobeK, made it to third place in the eternal side tournament, going toe to toe with strong players whilst representing Esa.

Thank you to my wonderful wife, who is always at my side.

Thank you to everyone who listened to me and gave a small format a shot.

Thank you to everyone who stuck with the game and fell in love a little more.

Thank you to everyone who is my friend.

Sorry to everyone who I disappointed with my cancellation for worlds.

Eternal points spent:

Clan Vengeance: 3

Rumour Mill: 4

This deck is extremely fast and brutal, competing with Kabonesa Wu: Netspace Thrillseeker (in my opinion) for the best runner deck. If you want a familiar gameplan from standard and you’re coming into the format, I recommend you try this deck out. It’s exhilarating.

HOW TO PLAY THIS DECK

The core of this deck is understanding when and where you have to omit installing cards you would otherwise believe are key installables. Is this the game for Endurance? Is this the game where I have to get down Ribs? Do I over-install Ribs this game to get another CV trigger? In Mulligan, think about your opponent and what threats you are expecting, and look for your disruption pieces accordingly. Do I need CV asap, or will I be looking for Rumour Mill. You want both up eventually, but act to your priority. Ghosttongue is more important to get installed in most games, followed by Tsakhia "Bankhar" Gantulga and then Titanium Ribs. Titanium Ribs is a nice card to get installed but not necessary. After this, focus on controlling the board and blowing up the opponent’s hand when you have to. Sometimes it’s required to hold onto your CV to save your skin because of BOOM! or High-Profile Target other times, don’t be stingy and just destroy 5 or 6 cards from the corps HQ before they can install all of them.

CARD CHOICES:

The core cards:

Amped Up x6

Steelskin x6, Strike Fundx3, Sure Gamble x3 for raw cash

Levy to reshuffle

Same Old Thing for insurance

CV and Rumour Mill as your main threats

Bankhar, Brain Cage and Titanium Ribs: CV enablers

Ghosttongue as your economy piece

Rumour Mill and Clan vengeance.

Let’s be real, these are the absolute best 2 cards in Anarch. Rumour Mill single-handedly will win you many games as key cards are disabled. Rashida, Wage, Jeeves, Our Lord and Saviour, Jackson Howard, Caprice Nisei, Phat. Clan Vengeance similarly is brutal and is one of the tools that are strong and fast enough to rip through Cerebral Imaging’s HQ. Together, only Esa can afford to run both of those cards. Topan could in theory run both of these cards but there is a key different between these two IDs: Topan loses tempo and time spent on installing and taking meat damage, but Esa gains clicks and time and tempo and just absolutely accelerates xirself through xir deck. I would know, I tried for a long time to make Topan work.

Icebreakers are tech cards.

Paperclip is good enough that you can and should run 1 copy of it for an innermost annoying Ice Wall or an IP Block. People have raised a lot of eyebrows for Endurance but it’s a good card and the core of the deck does not use much influence. You could use the influence for anything else, as the memory is a little wasted, but there’s no other slot that solves hard, 2 ice deep servers than Endurance. Good old boat!

Moshing bad, Inject good.

Moshing is a win more card in this deck that doesn’t help when you are behind, and you need the raw power of draw 4. I run Paperclip because it’s Just Good and you don’t really care if Keyhole is trashed. Inject is perfect for games where you have yet to install Brain Cage and need 4 cards right now. Moshing in theory helps you smooth out your poor draws but the raw power of 6 click turns and Ghosttongue transforms your mediocre credit costing card draw cards into Diesel and Diesel plus.

Keyhole, Mad Dash, Raindrops Cut Stone

These are your flex slots, I used Keyhole because I think it is a very effective secondary threat packed into one card slot. If you’ve never seen Keyhole you might not recognise it, but it is Stargate except you can use it as many times as you want in a turn. Mad Dash is tech for 5/3 suites like CI and Ob Superheavy, letting you win off of 2 agendas in archives. Raindrops Cut Stone is just fairly efficient run event that draws cards. If you want to you could run Dirty Laundry but I like the card draw. I would start cutting these cards first if you wanted to try other slots.

Notable exclusions

Icebreakers are tech cards, all you need sometimes is to break a server twice.

We do not have enough installables for The Price.

You can win so fast you do not need either the extra hand-size with Marrow or the extra recursion with Labour Rights.

POSSIBLE CHOICES

Consider: Ritual? Parasite? Botulus?

Try -1 Levy, -1 Titanium Ribs, +2 Ritual +1 Ashen

If you find a good 1inf card to use, feel free to slot it in. As I was writing this, I realised DJ Steve is an available option if you want to use that (but I don’t think you ever slow down and just go fast). You could play Hades Shard to access cards in archives against ice heavy decks like Nebula or Mti (but that’s why I’m running Endurance). Pinhole is a good tech card, except Rumor Mill does its job but better. I think one less card is better than Deuces Wild but it’s up to preference. If you swap Ashen Epilogue instead of Levy there’s more options to you to play with. Even Endurance is a tech card, I encourage you to mess around with influence and play around. Esa has all of xir cards in Anarch, so the world is wide open for possible fun card inclusions

ASSORTED TIPS AND TRICKS:

Pop CV after interacting with Nebula’s board and prevent them from HHN you. Ask for them to wait on the 2nd click if you STARTED a run. Don’t be the fool who installed all their cards ran and died to turn 2 BOOM!

Pop CV if you see 2 advancements on a raw card in Mti. It will prevent Regenesis from going off.

Hard install Paperclip in match-ups where you suspect the corp might never rez a barrier for the recursion install, E.G., when you suspect there is a SDS.

Mad Dash can be used to suffer damage during a run for CV charging purposes.

Use your Same Old Things for Rumor Mill if you have to, but do save the second one for Levy.

You can install a second Ribs to take 2 more meat and trigger CV.