Spark Despotism - The Tools of Oppression

Despotism is a true NBN Glacier.

It has no fast advance.

It has no interest in killing the runner.

But it is by no means a "fair" deck.

And it is MWL Legal

Unlike other Glacier styles, Despotism is actively disruptive and oppressive.

It hates runner economies with the fury of a Soviet Regime, bankrupting cred-pools with chipping ads, assets, and tags, and with mighty burst assaults like Midseasons and Closed Accounts.

If FoodCoats is a slowly creeping mountain, Despotism is a masked polar bear looking for a wrestling match.

This is a decklist I've been tinkering with since Worlds and after many weeks of sucking it has finally cracked into a monster of a deck. This list is surprisingly hard to pilot correctly (somewhere near Reg Ass Max) but I've been able to pushing close to an 85% win rate on Jinteki.net with it and was able to take 6th at a recent SC with Timmy Wong, Noah Mckee, John Dee and several other top 32 Worlds and top 8 King of Servers players, Loosing only to a soon to rotate out Pre-Paid Kate, and an odd deck that used both Stealth Hardware and Magnum Opus.

Strategies and Card Choices

Scoring Big Agendas - This deck wins by putting lots of counters on cards until you flip them over and say "POINTS!". But as this is the last thing the runner wants you to do you have to do some very mean things to make them sit quietly in their seat while you score your super point Beales.

Oppress the Runner - Spark kills the runner's early tempo, the deck is built to consistently get rez-able ads in the opening hand, and depending on the matchup, they are worth mulligan for. Every time the runner is forced to click for credits is another click you can spend building your board state and money.

But the real strength of the deck is in its midgame threat diversity. The early pinging is rarely enough to keep runners down for long, and once they try to set up a longer term solution. You need to land a blow that will send the runner tumbling back into the early game.

Breaking News is your most consistent delivery method for pain; it lets you tag for Closed Accounts and Asset Trashing. But other strike options include:

-TGTBT,

-Midseason Replacements,

-Data Raven,

-Toll Booth,

-Ichi 1.0

and most deafening of all

-ARCHER.

The art of planning for and landing these attacks correctly is the hardest part of piloting Despotism, but once you master the angles of the deck, you will be hard pressed to find a runner capable of defending against all of them.

Scoring - In case you haven't noticed, this deck has no Astro Script.

yes you read that right, THIS DECK HAS NO ASTRO SCRIPT

This was a decision I came to before the announcement of the MWL. Because Astro Script made the deck worse.

Again you didn't miss read that, Astro Script made Despotism WORSE. this is because it requires quick chaining, early scoring, unadvanced Beales, and most key of all requires large amounts of card draw in order to score out consistently. All of these things run counter to Despotism's deliberate grinding game plan.

With the current agenda composition, The runner must score between 4-6/11 agendas to win the game, not counting 15 minutes disrupting effects. You only have to score 1-3 with one most flexible scoring patterns in all of Netrunner.

To facilitate your hard advance plan you get to build an equally hard-core server usually composed of some combination of Archer, Tollbooth, Ash, Red Herrings, Enigma, and Wraparound.

Do not be surprised to see 4, 5, 6, and even 7 point Beales roll out of your scoring servers. Just be sure to remind the runner that you did it,

FOR YOUR PEOPLE!