2025 Spring Championship top 16 finisher, top Sunny deck

I've been a big fan of Sunny since day 1. I had a really neat deck with her using Chatterjee University that I thought should have worked better than it ever actually did. So one of the first things I did on coming into Reboot was update my Sunny list and take it into a constructed league, where it did predictably badly.

There are probably two reasons for this. One is likely because Sunny is not an "S-tier ID"; the other reason might have something to do with my inability to repeatedly play the same deck over and over, tuning it and refining it in order to make it the absolutely best it can be.

Well, I suppose a third reason is because I'm not good at playing Netrunner, failing to take into account various options, playing too fast, trying to cut corners in weird ways. This especially happens when I'm running, where I'll turtle up against somebody like Weyland, build a pile of money, get my whole rig out, then run with only three cards in hand and die to Scorch.

Anyway. When the opportunity arose for me to play in a seasonal Worlds (or whatever it is we're calling these tournaments) for the first time, I started seriously considering Hayley, because we recently added Breaker Bay into the 2.1 cardpool and I've been playing a lot with her. And then I remembered Sunny, and the decision was made.

So I spent the next several weeks diligently practicing with Sunny, viciously ripping out of the deck what wasn't working, agonizing over every precious card slot.

Ha ha ha! Just kidding.

In actuality, I pulled up the deck about four days ago, looked it over, and thought, "Yeah, this seems mostly good." I apparently had previously thought that one copy of each breaker would be sufficient, but that now seemed crazy to me with no recursion, so I put in two of each. I did actually run some card draw simulations (for the first time ever) to get a sense of how quickly it could set up, and it seemed okay.

Then I took a look at a couple of Sunny lists on NRDB -- especially one called Sunny Lock Down -- compared and contrasted, saw nobody else was running Rabbit Hole and pulled it out, made some tweaks. I swapped in Career Fair for The Supplier, for example, and the NACH and Same Old Thing and Modded came from that list. I didn't include Clone Chip due to influence costs or Kati Jones, because everybody keeps telling me she's bad.

Then I thought to look and see whether there were any Sunny lists posted on RetekiDB. There was! One, anyway, from Meryu a couple years ago. There was quite a lot of overlap between our lists, though I suppose that's somewhat unavoidable with Sunny. Still, her list confirmed that I wanted Build Script, Process Automation, and Cloudburst, plus Data Folding and Underworld Contact.

Multitasking is too new for Meryu's list, but that seemed really obvious to me with all the resources; it's kind of like a miniature double Career Fair. (Well, in theory. On the day, four times I hit an agenda with it, and three of those times were NAPD, NAPD, and a Sol-infused Predictive Algorithm. Each time, having to pay for the agenda dropped me below the credits I needed to both steal the agenda and install the resources. Basically I didn't really remember that it's not a replacement effect, and I didn't plan accordingly. I suppose this is the sort of thing that would have become more obvious had I, y'know, actually played the deck before trying to compete with it.)

I left Vamp in despite the fact that I have never quite gotten the hang of using it (read: have never successfully managed to accomplish anything constructive with it) because the NRDB list had it and Meryu said it was the wincon. I figured between that and Legwork and the two Same Old Thing I would be fine. Well, TBB said that 2 Same Old Thing was 2 many, and I had 51 cards at the time anyway, so I cut it. I didn't use it in any of my games.

The only real questionable choices left, I think, are: Why Rabbit Hole? And why not Daily Casts? Especially with both Modded and Multitasking giving me 5 shots at installing the first Rabbit Hole, I figured this way: reduce the install cost of the first one to zero, install the other two for four, and it's kind of like you actually only had a 48-card Sunny deck, which seems good. More importantly, though, having all three Rabbit Holes installed with Security Nexus gives you 6 link, which makes that trace 5 probably not worth boosting for the Corp. Compared to having to pay 2 credits to break the trace every time without them, and they pay for themselves in just two uses. I don't regret the include: the one time I successfully got the package up and running, it was pretty great.

As for why I left Daily Casts out ... well, I figured that though a click for 5 credits is really rather good (and a click for 8 credits is even better), since that's dripping out over the course of multiple turns, I wanted things that could be quicker. I thought Sure Gamble and Build Script and Process Automation would be sufficient. This was probably the wrong decision (something that, say, testing the deck ahead of time would probably have ferreted out), but I don't think it was dramatically bad -- just suboptimal. As for what to ditch for the Daily Casts: NACH, Same Old Thing, and poor Jak seem like the best choices.

A quick summary of the tournament:

Round 1 was against eventual-champ zailey and was actually probably the closest I came to winning all day. (That would have really screwed up her chances to win the whole thing, eh?) She was on Iris, which I've never seen in action before (a recurring theme throughout the day thanks to all my time spent playing in the limited 2.1 game group cardpool). She left R&D and HQ wide open and tried to rush the win. I mean, she successfully rushed the win, of course. I managed to pluck 2 NAPDs and a GFI off of single R&D accesses and made it somewhat competitive, and of course, she was exceptionally gracious and complementary in victory.

Round 2 was against newcomer Cousin Louis, who was running (corping? stonewalling? how about "piloting"?) PE. Not much to say about this one. I ran his first facedown install on turn 1 and hit Snare. Not great, especially because if I remember right there were a couple of Cloudbursts in my hand. The correct play would have been to let the potential 3-advance agenda go and search up Shrike and be safe. This was not the play I chose. I drew a bit; he installed a card in the remote with an upgrade; I ran it. The ice was Neural Katana -- I still hadn't found Shrike -- the upgrade was Hokusai, the agenda was Fetal ... and the game was over (on turn 6).

Round 3 was against DefiantToaster/CorneredCircle, who was on EtF. I admit that my memory of this game and the next one (against Gob Lynn Mode on Sol) is a bit hazy, and I may be conflating details. (If you want to see a blow by blow of my game with GLM, it was on his stream here. I haven't gone back to watch it since I've been sitting at my computer for six hours now, and my wife may be beginning to fear for my return.)

I got 2 agendas against GLM, which seemed respectable, even though I really felt behind for a lot of the game because everything was coming out in the wrong order. But it was the game with Toaster where I got most of my rig out and working mostly properly (after having had to ditch a couple of the drip cards early due to Reteki really not liking me much today). I used Globalsec a couple times -- or once, anyway -- and I was able to use Jak with Security Nexus to get some ice rezzed and not have to worry about it. But he got three ice up on the remote, and I was just a little too poor to get in and contest it. (Or so I felt.) This was the only time that I was really missing the Security Chips that I cut early on in the process; I also drew through my whole deck in this game.

So, not a good showing, but that's not really surprising and was completely expected. I wanted to play in the tournament, and I wanted to play as Sunny, and I wanted to do well. As Meat Loaf might have said, "two out of three ain't bad."