Onto part two of this rundown of the Australian Nationals. Last week I broke down my deck building process and the overall feel I got over the tournament. This week I’m going to do a game by game of my play through, a debrief and a breakdown of what I learned from the experience

Just a reminder, I played Whizzard and HB: Stronger Together, you can read about the decks in last week’s article.

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MATCH ONE

Game 1: Vs Cerebral Imaging ( Flatline loss)

I started off playing runner, up against Cerebral Imaging. Not the best start, given CI makes Whizzard essentially a completely blank ID. On the upside, I felt my deck was perfectly suited to laying a trap against CI.

We spent most of the game setting up, I probed a little here and there, particularly on R&D, mostly in order to exploit points where the corp looked like they were pushing their hand size high given their credit pool. None of these few accesses eventuated in points, however. Eventually the CI bank started to get to the point where I couldn’t run or risk a SEA source double Scorched Earth since most of my credits remained on a Kati Jones, but if you included that money I was easily outpacing his pool.

Finally he pulled the trigger and double Biotic Laboured into an efficiency committee. This was what I had been waiting for, the twelve credits this cost meant I felt confident I could hit the Vamp that had been sitting in hand all game. I dropped my Overmind with a bunch of counters and E3 Feedback Implants on the table, took money off kati and went in to drain him to zero. At this point I made the worst play of my whole tournament

The first ice I encountered was Eli 1.0. Fearing something nasty behind it, I decided to spend my remaining click and use E3 Feedback Implants to break it, rather than the 4 credits to break it with the Corroder I had out. It turned out that the remaining ice on HQ was junk and so I had plenty of credits left to Vamp him to zero, but no clicks left and only three cards in hand. He then fired off a Subliminal Messaging he’d forgotten to use (he could have also used efficiency committee clicks), clicked for credits and Scorched Earth‘ed for the win. I deserved this loss, given I could easily have afforded to just break the Eli normally rather than trying to be clever. My opponent let me know after the game that he top decked the Scorched Earth that turn, which rubbed salt in the very definitely self-inflicted wound.

Game 2: Vs Chaos Theory (timed win)

This was the ‘all event’ deck that runs off Oracle May and three breakers. I got off to a reasonable start and managed to keep his attention focused on a scoring remote, forcing him to spend money to trash assets and click through bioroids, also sneaking out an NAPD Contract that he managed to access but had just too little money to steal. He did get a couple of agendas through random accesses, but Eventually I got The Root running to get my servers going very deep to keep him out while looking for a Sansan City Grid, eventually found it, protected it with Ash 2X3ZB9CY and scored two more agendas off it. This was partly due to an unfortunate Oracle May call that trashed his Garrotte when he needed both the money and the program most, forcing him to spend time to test run it back, then redraw it and reinstall it. Unfortunately, given both games went pretty long even though we both played fast, time was called and I got a timed win rather than a full one, despite being certain to win the next turn.

I was annoyed with myself since I felt I could have come out of this match with 4 points, but I was also quite confident with my decks after their performance in these two games.

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MATCH TWO

Game 1: Vs Chaos Theory (loss)

Corp first this time and up against another variant of CT, this one running big breaker style. I flooded heavily early, even with the assistance of a Jackson Howard flushing three agendas I had another couple in hand and lost a couple off R&D early in the game to scouting runs.

Luckily I managed to keep my opponent focused on finding a way into R&D to do the standard Shaper indexing attack and keep their money down with a porous but taxing remote in which I installed various assets and upgrades to bluff scoring. I finally got a Sansan City Grid booted up in my remote and began scoring agendas out of hand. I cleared out some, managing to get to six points, but ultimately she simply ran HQ and random accessed with a good chance of winning and did so. At this point I actually felt really positive about my deck. It had presented me with a nightmare draw and some pretty terrible luck on random accesses and if probability had been a touch more on my side I might still have come back and won.

However, my opponent was still fairly new to the game, I feel they could probably have sealed the game faster had they played more aggressively given the level to which I flooded out. An unfortunate side effect of this was that the game took around 35 minutes to play as they took quite some time each turn mathing out runs and considering plays, leaving only 20 minutes for the next game

Game 2: Vs Engineering the Future (timed loss)

This was one of the new-breed HB fast advance decks running a mix of NEXT ICE and premier bioroids/imported ICE alongside straight up Biotic Labour recursion with Domestic Sleepers to get that last point. Notably, once again, this deck featured only Jackson Howard in terms of trashable cards.

I focused on R&D, exploiting a good matchup between their NEXT heavy draw and my parasite and recursion tool heavy one. An early E3 Feedback Implants also let me keep on pressure through Eli 1.0 when it popped up. I stole four agendas during this stage, unfortunately these were a Gila Hands Arcology, two Domestic Sleepers and an NAPD Contract while I was unable to prevent them scoring out two of their own 3 for 2s

They recurred a biotic labour using archived memories, triggering me to pop the Kati Jones I had been building up all game, Legwork them, access three out of four cards and miss the agenda that they scored next turn. Luckily this put them very low on credits while I still had a sizeable bank to play with. I installed a Medium and began hammering R&D hard as we neared time, having used parasites to repeatedly get it entirely clear of ICE. Over the three final turns I accessed fourteen cards deep into RnD, hitting only one agenda (a 3/2 this time thankfully) and missing the remaining five which were in the last ten-twelve cards of the deck. With a final score of six points to five, they got the timed win.

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MATCH THREE

Game 1: vs Noise (win)

I had played against this opponent before and had a similar result to my previous games in this one. He made a huge error in trying to play aggressively early on without securing a good economic footing and as a result was forced to constantly Aesops Pawnshop cards like Datasucker and Imp without getting full use of them to respond to my plays. He managed a decent amount of mills over the course of the game but hit only a single agenda, slightly below what he should have averaged (I think it was something like 7 or 8 cards).

Meanwhile I was flooding again. The difference was this time I had a relatively secure HQ and remote in which I first managed to first harvest a full Adonis Campaign and then score an NAPD contract straight up. Finally I installed a SanSan City Grid and fast advanced my way to the win while he struggled to find the credits to trash it, having been spending big to pay through bioroids with a Knight to access my centrals.

*As a random note, this deck has gone undefeated against Noise in the four games I’ve played versus him and I don’t feel like any of them were close, even the ones where he hit several agendas.

Game 2: vs Engineering The Future (win)

This is where I really started feeling a little off. I got a near perfect draw, having my full Overmind combo up within a few turns and buckets of money besides. Meanwhile my opponent was totally flooded, plus what ICE they hit was at the high end of their suite. As a result I got a lot of free accesses which resulted in several stolen agendas and I managed to easily penetrate the desperation remote he created to try and clear some of his hand.

While I won this game handily, I felt bad about handing a regular opponent their third straight match loss in such a frustrating manner for them so by this point my spirits were pretty low. I rallied by focusing on the upcoming games- I now had a solid win under my belt and was only a little under par with four matches still to play.

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MATCH FOUR

Game 1: vs Kate (loss)

A variant of the typical Prepaid Voicepad based Kate that felt more parasite-oriented than usual. I can’t remember precisely why, perhaps that was just the tool they chose to use that game. In any case, I mulled from a hand of three agendas and no ice into a hand of two agendas and one ice with no economy. People aggressively run open HQ’s for information in our meta and while I didn’t expect an Account Siphon out of Kate, I did expect Legworks and I wanted to play it safe at this stage, so I ICEd HQ. He plays Desperado click one and then Indexing followed by two runs to get four points, both valuable 3/2s.

I quickly secured R&D to prevent a Same Old Thing indexing he was trying to set up. Meanwhile he gets out Datasucker and builds it up, then probes HQ, kills the ICE and hits one of the agendas in hand off his one random access. I then drew into Jackson Howard and used him to draw into some more agendas, then clear my hand of them. I drew into a Project Vitruvius the next turn and since I was a little stretched at this point decided to take the risk and try and bluff an empty HQ by not ICEing it, trying to refocus his attention on R&D. He probes HQ for a credit/sucker token, and hits the Vitruvius first try. I believe in this game he actually accessed five cards to hit four agendas (admittedly two of these were indexed).

Game 2: vs Engineering The Future (loss)

Another new-school fast advance deck, this one focused on rapid draw and tempo plays. Over the course of the game I drew through half of my deck and saw a single Knight and a single Parasite, plus a Clone Chip and a Deja Vu. I used these to chip away at the NEXT ice over R&D and keep an intermittent lock but saw no agendas, He saw plenty of ice however, enough to secure both his centrals and a scoring remote where he scored out two agendas without even needing fast advance tools, then simply power drew while I spent four or so whole turns drawing (minus the odd click here and there for a sure gamble or combo piece) to find any breakers or breaker recursion and scored out.

This is the sort of situation that I expected my deck to occasionally create- it is a weakness of Anarchs. Still, I tend to check to see just how badly the variance played out and my notes for this one say I saw 4 of 13 ICE breaking tools/recursion (1 of 6 breakers) in 28 of 45 cards. Under normal circumstances this would not have bothered me, since this is legitimately one of those things that will just happen, especially in Anarch, but in the context of my previous games I was very much feeling the pain.

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MATCH FIVE

Game 1: vs Replicating Perfection (win)

This brightened my mood. RP was one of the decks I was expecting to see played. I got an early E3 Feedback Implants and Overmind, along with plenty of money and a Clone Chip to recur the Overmind despite having trouble finding a Deep Red, so I was able to run safely and trash the economy assets he tried to establish as well as pinging someJacksons and an Ash 2X3ZB9CY out of his centrals, while using my intermittent probing to go after a couple of Encryption Protocols he’d rezzed early on and trash them as efficiently as possible. Not feeling much pressure despite the fact he was loading up a remote with four unadvanced cards (I hit a snare early so I was wary of that), I waited for him to commit to an install-advance play. When he did I popped Kati, ran RnD and saw a Future Perfect which I scored, then ran into the deep iced scoring remote. I paid my way in, found an Ash 2X3ZB9CY paid the ash trace and three (!) Red Herrings protecting an NAPD contract. Frighteningly enough I could have actually afforded to steal it at this stage, but instead I just paid the trace and trashed all the upgrades. All the rezzing had cost him enough that he went down to 2 credits and couldn’t score it next turn.

That remote became the focus point of the game for the next few turns. I was ok with him scoring it because I felt like I was in an excellent position at this stage and knew he would feel he had to prevent me going up to 5 points, so I hammered his other servers. This turned out to be the wrong play as I didn’t get much done, but eventually a legwork onto HQ while he was at 0 credits after scoring the NAPD scored me a Fetal AI. That play turned out to be very risky, since one of the other cards I accessed was a Shock! and that left me with only one card in hand- had I hit a second Fetal AI I could have flatlined. Luckily for me, it wasn’t.

We played it out for a little while longer and I eventually spotted but failed to score a Future Perfect. A HQ run made to get me access to remotes saw it again though and this time I won the psi game (0 credit next level bidding for the win). I had a plan to set up a Vamp– Legwork turn on HQ to get him to zero to guarantee the psi game win, but in the end didn’t need it.

Game 2: vs Chaos Theory (loss)

Another one? This time it was pretty straight up and down turbo-rig midrange breaker (Femme Fatale, Corroder, Gordian Blade, Magnum Opus) CT. This is the sort of deck mine excels against. I missed most of this game in my notes, only having that I was flooded early on again, it mustn’t have been too spectacularly bad. I remember being pretty ICE light and getting a lot of economy and utility assets this game, so I wasn’t hurting for money, but money is no good to you without ice to spend it on and generating early defenses you can use to get things scored to put pressure back on against a rig building deck is essential.

Even so the taxing aspect of the deck eventually began to work well, since rather than sitting back and waiting for me to make the first move he kept probing R&D and HQ through my more concentrated defenses, but I couldn’t quite manage to leverage a scoring window (I’m pretty sure I didn’t draw into one of my SanSan City Grids this game and so I had to try and get a secure scoring remote. Light on ICE draws and against a turbo rig deck this didn’t really eventuate). I think I managed to score an NAPD contract when he went deep into R&D to get me to rez ice so he could scout for indexing (that it turned out he could in no way afford), but ultimately I couldn’t prevent random accesses on a relatively agenda dense HQ and he took a couple off R&D over the course of the game as well for the win. I think the final points may have come from an indexing that he just brute forced through, I do remember him spending over 20 credits in one turn on runs…

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MATCH SIX

Game 1: vs Kate (loss)

This was a very virus heavy Kate, with Grimoire and Nerve Agent, both of which were used to good effect. There was some interesting dueling at the start of the game, with me recurring NEXT ice to tax his Parasite recursion, but once again around turn five or six I began drawing into agenda after agenda (four of them in a row, though one got stolen). With parasites already taxing my ice count, I ended up relying on a single Mother Goddess over HQ with four agendas banked up. He installed a Nerve Agent, blew up the Mother Goddess and saw two cards, scoring one agenda. He then ran again, scored another agenda and saw an NAPD contract he couldn’t afford by a single credit.

The boardstate was thus me with no ice in hand, around five credits, two agendas (both NAPD Contracts). He had a nerve agent with three counters on tap against an open HQ. I drew into a Jackson Howard, breathed a sigh of relief, installed and used him… to draw two more agendas. Then I used him again and found another agenda. That would be… all of them but two. five in hand and three stolen, this by somewhere around turn 12-15

I’m ashamed to admit at this point I tilted pretty hard. I looked at the hand for a second and then just said ‘and that’s game’ and dropped my cards on the table. As much as literally the only thing he had to do to guarantee a win was click for a credit and run HQ to find the NAPD he knew was there, I don’t really feel that was an acceptable way to go about giving up the game, even with the run I’d been having. Netrunner isn’t Magic, where conceding is routine, people get way more invested in each game and there’s a lot more chance for shenaningans. To rob someone of the chance to pull those last agendas is a lot more of a dick move that can mess with someone else’s fun. I’ll talk about this more in the debrief.

Game 2: vs Near Earth Hub (loss)

Finally, the deck I’d build my own to deal with. Unfortunately, it was a well crafted one that used, naturally, zero assets beyond Jackson Howard. Operation economy was the name of the game. My main lesson from this game is trap hands. I kept an opening hand of Kati Jones, Daily Casts, Vamp, Parasite and Legwork, which felt like a perfect hand of tricks to mess with his tempo, but unfortunately I then failed to draw anything bar a single Knight several turns later to make plays with, and he had plenty of ice to simply sacrifice to get it off the board forcing me to recur it with a Clone Chip and then a Deja Vu..Scoring an Astroscript triggered my Legwork and I pulled a Project Beale and an NAPD Contract out of hand, but I missed the next astroscript that came along and he managed to score it straight up in a remote.

From that point he just turbo drew, rezzed a Tollbooth to keep me out of R&D, then scored out in a few turns. It was a very well played game on his part, taking advantage of my weaknesses and protecting the right things at the right time. Hard to say if it was an amazing draw for him, but it certainly felt that beyond pulling one or both of his astros in the random accesses there wasn’t much I could have done better with the cards I got. The lesson learned is you really have to mull for breakers or R&D pressure against NEH. You have to be able to deal with their ice and get in consistently if you don’t have control cards, right away.

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MATCH SEVEN

Game 1: vs Andromeda (loss)

Last game of the day, off we go! This one illustrates I think the biggest weakness of my corp deck. I mulled a hand of no ice, two agendas and some assets into a hand of three NAPD contract, a SanSan City Grid and a Mother Goddess, then drew another SanSan.

At least running my HQ was going to be expensive, so like a fool I installed the goddess over R&D, more worried about losing my valuable 3/2s than my NAPD contracts, which would at least slow Andy down.

They got off to a good start with a first turn Sure Gamble – Desperado – Datasucker – Account Siphon, about as close to perfect as you can manage. I drew only one or two more ice over the next five or six turns, but somehow only gave up two agendas, one of the NAPDs in hand and an agenda off R&D. Unfortunately, by the time I began to stabilize, Andy had had plenty of time to build up a bucketload of Datasucker tokens and free credits off Desperado runs so she was in a ridiculously strong economic position.

The game began to swing back into my favour as the taxing power of my ice suite kicked in and I drained their huge bank, but unfortunately the damage was done. With half my hand taken up by cloggy agendas, (I drew my one efficiency committee as well), no Jackson in sight, Andy halfway there and with a huge tempo lead, it was a struggle just to hold on.

Nevertheless, I did hold on and managed to score several agendas of my own with the help of Ash and Sansan, but the shaky start meant I had to play exceptionally cautiously and ultimately meant I couldn’t quite push hard enough to power out my win before Andy finally managed to set up a successful Legwork and pinch the final points.

Game 2: vs Grndl (timed win)

Once again time reared its ugly head- my play against Grndl is similar to that against Cerebral Imaging- I can build an economic engine that can keep pace with Grndl. As they take a bit of bad publicity here and there and spend money rezzing ice to try and tax me or score agendas I pull ahead and can eventually either just run safely through their low-taxing ice suite or Vamp them to nothing.

However, this plan takes some time to set up and by the time I pulled the trigger I only had a few turns to make things happen. I allowed them to score a Hostile Takeover and Project Atlas with one counter, but fired off when they install and double advanced a card in their remote. This turned out to be a three pointer, and I pulled more agendas from HQ as time was called. Unfortunately I was not quite able to pull out the total win, ending on six points to their three. Apparently they had flooded out pretty badly in that game as well and I definitely had it in the bag had it continued on.

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Deck breakdowns:

Runner: (2W, 2TW, 1TL, 2L, Overall 6 pts out of 14)

It’s very hard to say just how solid this deck is. I feel like the games I won I had good control over and those that went to time, both win and loss, were very much in my favor at that point. One of my losses was more due to terrible misplay when I was in a good position (match 1).

What I felt most impressed by was how well the deck performed against a field of decks that really weren’t what it was designed to deal with. It handled a NEXT heavy opposition very well- I definitely think Parasites are the key to dealing with NEXT strategies right now at any rate. The power of its economy and Vamp combined let me play a devastating and controlled game vs the more threatening decks like Cerebral imaging and Grndl, rather than having to trust fate and take risks.

Unfortunately, I didn’t really get to play against the most prevalent and powerful decks, so it’s very hard for me to talk about what sort of changes I’d make. I’ve had experiences in the past where I over-adjusted a deck based on getting some weird games. It’s very important to look back at your experience and consider whether what you got was actually a good basis on which to make changes and I don’t think this tournament was.

That said, there are definitely some things I can see doing in future- trading out Quality Time for Inject when it comes along, and perhaps my Prepaid Voicepads for more breaking tools (D4v1ds perhaps). Since the most critical parts of my deck are hardware, Inject is a good way of digging for them, and dumping Overminds in the trash is sometimes quite a good thing as it turns on Clone Chip to let me facecheck safely.

Importing the whole shamozzle into Quetzal when she comes out if it feels like the meta is shifting back towards operation heavy economies seems like a legitimate possibility. If NEH continues to be a thing and another asset using deck hits the spotlight though, I feel confident in sticking with the master of trashing.

Corp: (1W, 1 TW, 5L, Overall 3 pts out of 14)

If trying to figure out what to take from my Runner deck’s performance was hard, my corp is in a whole other level of difficulty. The level of bad luck I encountered throughout the tournament was just absurd. I’m not too cut up about it on one level, since on the day, ten people are going to have to fill the bottom ten slots just as ten people have to fill the top. I should also point out that in some senses ALL my bad luck got countered out by one 1/80 chance where I got the national championship backpack that was randomly given as a door prize, so as far as what I got in terms of prizes I essentially came second only to the winner, assuming you value prizes based on the number of each available.

Part of it is I committed to writing a tournament report and unfortunately the corp side of that report has pretty much had to be ‘I got flooded, had to struggle just to not lose immediately, then lost eventually’ for almost all my corp games. I don’t feel like I can talk about how my deck played and what its strengths and weaknesses were because when around 40% of the cards you draw over the course of the game are agendas, you don’t actually get a sense of how the deck plays and this happened to me in over half my games.

What I can say is that this deck really doesn’t deal well with flooding. It has difficulty creating an emergency scoring window or trading agendas constructively. Flooding generally means you are going to be starved for either ICE, money or sometimes both. It’s given me a fresh perspective on what makes NBN fast advance such a powerful choice because flooding is as often a positive as a problem, unlike HB which needs to score out slower and more methodically. While HB is more resilient, the sheer snowball effect of NBN is right now clearly the best choice and will continue to be so until runners either get more tools allowing them to exploit NBN’s more fragile defenses or more tools that can slow the game down and really force trades consistently rather than ceding tempo to the corp.

I’m thinking future builds of this deck will go up to 3 SanSan City Grid as that’s one way of dealing with flooding (though unfortunately not in that last game where I had three NAPD’s and both my sansans turn one…). Perhaps a third Ash and trade out Adonis Campaigns for more immediate money options like Restructure, though something that doesn’t require quite as strong an economy would be more ideal.

On the positive side, I feel like the deck is very, very strong against Anarchs and, while only got to play against one criminal and in that game I had probably my worst opening hand of the tournament (which is saying something…), I think it would do very well against criminal as well with a solid draw, though I do feel it would be very susceptible to being snowballed against in the case of a weak draw against a strong opening from the opponent. Every piece of ice feels solid and difficult to deal with, demanding a serious response

I’ve put the deck away for now more or less because I’m scarred but I do want to revisit it soon, especially if Anarch starts to become more of a popular way of dealing with NBN than Shaper.

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I hope you’ve enjoyed this tournament report. I might write a final section detailing some final thoughts about tournament play and how everything turned out, but it’s been a long grind even to get this out. See you soon with some more regularly scheduled jank :D.