I entered an ID draft tournament in Netrunner hosted in Örebro and this is a brief overview of what happened. Disclaimer: My memory is a little bit fuzzy and the events may or may not correspond to what actually happened.

The draft

The idea was to randomly sort all entrants and in turn each chooses an ID which nobody else can choose. When everyone has chosen an ID the procedure continues in reverse order. This means you can choose either corp or runner early and leave the other until later.

I got the 5th spot and Geist, Nasir, RP and NEH was chosen before me. If the goal was to do well I should probably have chosen a strong corp like Blue Sun, HB or possibly PE but I had just started playing Noise and I was loving every second of it so that was my choice. It was a little bit boring perhaps as it wasn’t a new ID I had to come up, but I had no idea of what I actually wanted to play with as corp so I simply delayed that decision. When it was my turn again most actually good corps had gone and I could choose between Titan, Harmony Medtech, Argus and Biotech (and some others…). Recently some popular Titan lists had popped up on netrunnerdb so I took that one.

This is the drafting result:

Frida unfortunately did not attend the actual draft and she had to pick both runner and corp last.

With Wayland and Jinteki being relatively popular I was thinking of adding I’ve had worse to Noise… But in the end I decided to be ballsy and skip all that. And no plascretes. But I thought with some careful play and Imp/Utopia shard I could manage. Instead I went with the no frills 3 Aesop/3 Cache low economy approach which I’ve found is perfectly fine. I slotted 2 Hacktivist meeting as the local playgroup in Linköping insisted on running Cerebral static and Manhunt and maybe others would do weird stuff with currents as well? This is the Noise deck.

The Titan build is basically the popular Atlas Shrugged with Beanstalk replacing Subliminal messaging and an extra Crisium Grid for the relative increase of criminal. In testing the corp deck performed okay… But never amazing. Noise performed consistently whenever I didn’t just die against Jinteki due to… Jinteki stuff.

The matches

When we arrived at Örebro the basement already full of Magic gamers is already hot and things would only get worse. I didn’t get enough sleep and I’m already tired but still pumped to play some Netrunner! The tournament features five rounds of swiss without a cut.

Match 1: Yoshi, Reina/Blue Sun

vs Reina

Hedge fund, beanstalk, install ice over HQ. Runner installs things, runs on R&D and misses. I sea source-scorch second turn as he has 2 (or 3?) cards and I feel a bit bad about it. Unfortunately silly wins and losses like these happens sometimes.

vs Blue Sun

He gets a great start with ice and money. I’m having trouble setting up and I can’t find D4v1d before he can retrieve his oversighted Curtain Wall. I’m too scared/incapable of stealing his agendas as he’s rushing them out. When I finally get my Imp going on HQ he already has a scored atlas with two tokens and he scores out a hostile in a flash. I made a mistake of not installing a clone chip as I had a clot in my heap and I maybe should have been more aggressive but overall Yoshi outplayed me.

2 points, 1-1

Match 2: Dan, TWIY/Whizzard

vs TWIY

Dan is from Linköping, same as me, but I haven’t actually played him but I knew his was a variation of the Midseasons/Psychographics rush deck. I play very carefully and builds up while he takes money. He gets a bunch more money and I continue milling and building. I’m waiting for him to start scoring out and I go through a Tollbooth and imps away an NAPD contract, but he never gets the astro train going while I sit back milling with clot ready. The game basically end when he never scores out and I get a mill victory.

vs Whizzard

He trashes my sansans but I get some points scored. The game goes a bit long and we’re almost going to time. I think I could have won by rezzing an Archer against his faust when he doesn’t have enough cards to continue the game, but I stress out and for some reason I don’t rez it. Later he finds a 3-pointer for the win from HQ. I guess I took the risk as he could have just as easily hit a Snare and loose.

4 points, 2-2

Match 3: Johannes, Harmony Medtech/Geist

vs Geist

I’ve played against Johannes a lot so I know his deck and he knows mine. I get an excellent start with 3(!) Quandary protecting HQ, R&D and my remote. I manage to tax out his breaking and entering breakers as I score out with the help of sansan. Annoyingly Forger prevented me from scorching him more than once but in the end I manage to score out behind 2x barriers and a Quandary as he had basically exhausted his breakers and clone chips.

vs Harmony Medtech

I got set up with Noise fast and controlled the game from the start. He scored out a Nisei but I was never really worried. I made a stupid move of running archives when I had just trashed a Cyberdex and later I ran it again! But in the end my start was just too good and I won by pounding HQ with Lamprey, Imp and parasites.

8 points, 4-2

Match 4: Magnus, Nisei Division/Valencia

vs Nisei Division

I’ve never played Magnus but I know he’s a very good player so I’m really nervous to play him. He installs over R&D and remote and does a hedge fund. I install a lamprey and imp and run HQ… Just to hit a Snare. Sigh. I thought about it but I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal, but it was. I don’t shake the tag as I don’t have any resource installed and he scorches me. Huge misplay from me and now I’m trying not to tilt too hard.

vs Valencia

I have a fairly bad starting hand which I keep… For some unknown reason. He’s very aggressive and he gets a medium dig going but misses. I don’t care about it too much and continue trying to score/finding my pieces. He does another big medium dig through a Grim, paying 3 + 1 cards for it and another ice, and hits a Snare on his last click, with two cards left in hand. I have a jackson out so I click to draw two cards and find the scorch for the win.

Funny how both games ends in basically the same way. I’m still a bit upset about the way I lost but it feels a little bit better that I could pull out a win against such a good player, even if it was a lucky one.

10 points, 5-3

Match 5: Frida, Argus/Silhouette

vs Argus

I know Frida loves meat damage so I play very carefully. I get a good start and I imp a bunch of things from R&D while milling a healthy amount. She scores out a couple of 1-pointers but I’m milling very fast and she’s not threatening me yet. When she goes up to 5 points I have as much money as she has so I make a run on archives (I also have an installed Utopia Shard) and take the win.

vs Silhouette

Again I get a good start and I get a Crisium grid on HQ to stop siphon. She doesn’t find her breakers and I get a hostile scored followed by the atlas train.

14 points, 7-3

Final results

I won 7 matches, 4 with Titan and 3 with Noise. Surprisingly my corp faired better than my runner which can partly be explained by the two lucky flatlines I got. But overall it felt a lot better than during testing. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never played a rush deck before and the style takes a little getting used to? Then I got the silly scorched loss with Noise which really shouldn’t happen if you play as you should. But mistakes happen. I’m quite glad I managed to avoid tilting though.

Generally with Noise I feel if the corp doesn’t push scoring windows hard you’re always in control of the game. Even then it’s difficult without a secondary win condition like scorch or midseasons. This is what Yoshi did with Blue Sun so very well where I really felt behind the whole game, but perhaps I was being too cautious.

Overall I’m quite pleased with my result all things considered. This is the final results after the five rounds of swiss:

There were quite a lot of prizes available and after the three victors took theirs this is what took home as my 4th place:

I wanted to have a full playset of aesop’s, especially as I really love Noise, but the mat feels a little more special. I still want the alt-arts though, hopefully I can get them from somewhere else.