who would win: one bee or a complex combo deck

01 Mar, 2024

(This post was originally posted on Cohost.)

Taking a day off today after a paper deadline yesterday, so please enjoy the story of my hubris with a combo deck.

Last weekend, I played some very casual Netrunner in a newly-created (and very unofficial) format called Holy Sh*t, in which every identity was legal but with errata to make it more powerful. On Runner side, I played a World Tree Professor deck, which was a little brainburn-y but I'd played loads of Professor before so was generally fine with it (even if I didn't win a single game because the format seems... very Corp-sided). This post isn't about that deck though, it's about my Corp.

Let's talk about my history with Cerebral Imaging.

We're going to step back in time a bit to the week before Worlds 2023, where this story begins. I'd just got COVID, so was desperately hoping to get well in time to fly so I could judge at Worlds. Fern (@AceEmpress) had not got COVID yet, so I was hoping that they wouldn't and they could at least go.

They were also planning to play Eternal in the Crown of Servers event, and needed some practice games. So, we booted up Jinteki.net, she played her decks and I loaded up some of the example Eternal decks going around for this exact purpose. I looked through them and thought, "I can play a combo deck, yeah", picking the Cerebral Imaging kill deck. I have a history of playing fairly complex decks - The Professor as mentioned, but also Ob and Mirrormorph - so it should be fine right?

Reader, I could not play a combo deck.

For those of you unaware as to how Cerebral Imaging tends to be played, the simple idea is that you play a bunch of clearance operations like Violet Level Clearance to draw loads of cards and gain enough money to keep them all in your hand because of your identity. Once you have assembled the trifecta (or I guess manyfecta) of cards that make your combo, you play them in a very specific way¹ and win! Hooray! The game is mostly a race - the combo is usually operation-based so many runners can't trash the combo pieces for hand and resort to trying to steal everything first.

So, we start playing. I have a piece of paper nearby to plan out the combo turn, decklist handy so I could remember what the lines were. I did the easy part of drawing cards and making money. I skimmed my hand throughout to look for the obvious cards needed for the combo: Biotics, the agendas, Wage Workers, all that stuff. I thought I was ready to combo.

Then, Fern installed Plascrete Carapace, which makes that particular combo much harder. Cue me sitting there for five minutes trying to work out combo lines. COVID meant my brain was not functioning on all cylinders, and I needed it to so that I could find the combo lines.

I conceded on the spot, my brain twisted into indiscernible shapes, and vowed to never play Cerebral Imaging again.

Anyway, let's fast forward to this weekend, where I played Cerebral Imaging!

You might be thinking "uh didn't you just say you weren't going to play it" or "you lie?? jail for bee, jail for ten thousand years" but I thought it'd be fine, I had COVID when I last played it and I could play a combo deck more resistant to single tech cards and if I made the deck then I'd know the lines better right?

And this is where my genius struck. I'm bad at combo, right? So why don't I play a combo deck that rewards me for failing to combo? We've seen this before with The Oscars, an incredible Jinteki deck that requires you to pretend you're going to combo out by trashing your entire deck, "messing up", and watching the Runner run Archives and die. We can do something similar here: begin to combo out, install the ambush Urtica Cipher, advance it a few times, and then realise that I've messed up and leave it on board without scoring it because "I'm a click short of scoring". There's lots of ways to mess up - stuff like "oh I misread one of my cards in my 20-card hand" and "oh if I do this I'll have to discard too many cards because I'll go broke" are easy outs.

I sleeved up a relatively simple combo deck with the aim of scoring five points in one turn and two points in another. I kept the spice as secret as I could, telling Fern but feeding everyone else stuff about Trick of Light combos. I even chose a few cards that couldn't be undone (Architect Deployment Test to install a Bass or the second agenda from R&D) deliberately so that if someone was kind enough to offer a takeback, I couldn't take one. I knew I'd only have one chance - not many people were playing so news about a spicy Urtica splash would travel extremely quickly and thus ruin my chance to surprise people with it.

Anyway, it turns out working out if you're going to fail to combo and install the Urtica is similarly difficult to actually succeeding the combo.

In game 1, the Runner quickly got to six points and saw the Urtica on an early access. I saw the point differential and thought I had to combo out there and then. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough actual combo pieces so panicked and "failed to combo" with a triple-advanced Urtica, to which the Runner drew up and accessed the Urtica safely. Later in that game I tried to genuinely combo and got my maths wrong, effectively conceding. The news travelled as fast as expected, and the rest of the tournament I was playing with a sufficiently weakened combo deck.

I won the rest of the games by slow comboing out, scoring only two or three points rather than five on each combo turn. They didn't feel like wins, they felt like I was failing the deck.

So, reader, if you ever think of playing Cerebral Imaging combo without a responsible adult present, think back to this story and think "do I want that to happen to my brain". Consider this my second attempt (and a much more public one) at my vow to never play it again.

That being said, a Neurospike Cerebral Imaging deck could be really coo- (this user was smited for this comment)

#from-cohost #netrunner