Netrunner deck; Rio de Janeiro City Grid

Netrunner is the one of most interesting CCG ever created in my opinion. This is one of the decks I still have built.

Rio de Janeiro City Grid
Cost: 1
Upgrade-Region-Random
Roll a die whenever Runner passes a piece of rezzed ice during a run on this fort. On a 1, end the run.

In most Corp decks RdJ City Grid isn't worthwhile, it's just too unreliable. To make RDJ work you need big forts. REALLY big forts. With the addition of 'payback' ice (that you get bits from when you rez them) in the Proteus expansion this became possible.

The deck (50 cards)

Agendas (6)
4 Corporate Downsizing
2 Political Overthrow

Upgrades (8)
6 Rio de Janeiro City Grid
4 Chester Mix
2 Rasmin Bridger
2 Obsfucated Fortress

Operations (3)
3 Off Site Backups

Nodes (1)
1 Bel Digmo Antibody

Ice - Code Gates (7)
3 Misleading Access Menu
3 Quandry
1 Mazer

Ice - Walls (10)
6 Snowbank
2 Data Wall 2.0
1 Walking Wall
1 Glacier

Ice - Sentry (9)
7 Washed Up Solo Construct
1 Fragmentation Storm
1 Data Naga

With this deck the plan is to build three really big forts; R&D, HQ and one subsidiary (this deck is weak against Shredder Uplink Protocol - it can't effectively defend a fourth fort).

Typically you begin by setting up as much defense as you can on R&D and HQ. Then once those are secure setup a sudsidiary fort and try to score a Corporate Downsizing.

When you do, shuffle all the Agendas in your hand back into R&D. With this deck you want the game to go as long as is possible (warning; games using this deck can much longer than normal games of Netrunner). You can't lose due to running out of cards as you have Bel-Digmo Antibody, with Off-Site Backups to return it from Archives should the Runner manage to trash it from R&D or HQ.

More typically Off-Site Backups is used to return Rasmin Bridger or Obsfucated Fortress as these are crucial to the decks long term strategy - to make the Runner pay for runs that will fail. (Obviously RdJ City Grid is also crucial but the deck plays so many of these and the trash cost is so high that it isn't normally productive to trash these).

To make the runner lose bits on each run, each fort needs to have some ice that will cost the runner bits to pass, and the earlier in the run the better. Walking Wall and Glacier are excellent for this with their ability to move themselves. Rasmin Bridger means every ice will cost at 1 additional bit to pass, and Obsfucated Fortress will mean every run will cost the runner in full, even if you roll a 1 after the first piece of Ice!

Data Naga and Fragmentation Storm are there to keep the runner honest, so that they can't assume that all of the Ice is harmless.

This deck has one major weakness - it isn't that good! Even with 9 pieces of ice on a fort RDJ will still fail to stop a Runner 20% of the time. You are relying on the time needed for the runner to regain the bits needed for each failure to score your agendas. This is okay for Corporate Downsizing, but it's much more difficult to score a Political Overthrow.

Given this weakness the deck is only realy suitable for casual play. But as it takes so long to play it isn't really suitable for that either! Still, it was fun to play occasionally and remains an interesting design.