Well, to begin this preamble I’ll say that this article will be an interesting one to write. Nationals was an amazing experience, but not wholly a positive one for me. I’m going to devote a fair bit of time to talking about that. I hope it does not come across as whiney or what have-you, but I think there are lessons that can be learned from my experience and I’d like to share them.

We had an amazing turnout, eighty players all told, several of whom had traveled from Brisbane or Perth, four-five hour flights, just for the event. Apparently this is the biggest LCG event that has been held in Australia so far. Of that field of eighty, I placed seventy-first, which is I suppose where the bad news starts.

I’m not the sort of guy who gets angry about losing, and I enjoy playing a ‘good game’ regardless of who wins. My frustration derived from two things: firstly, the field I played was not representative of either the meta I expected or the meta that was present and consequently the decks I brought were having to struggle constantly in difficult matchups- for a simple example, I played Whizzard, expecting NEH and RP to be major threats, but I played only one of each on the day and saw perhaps 15 credits worth of trashable cards in the whole seven games I played, not counting Jacksons that got used- almost all of those in the RP game, the NEH deck was assetless.

For the record, the overall statistics were thus

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Runners

Shaper: 37 Overall Kate – 23 CT – 9 Kit – 4 Nasir – 1

Crim: 31 Overall Ken – 5 Andy – 19 Silhouette – 2 Gabe – 4 Ian – 1

Anarch: 12 Overall Noise – 9 Whizzard – 2 Reina – 1

Corporations

Jinteki: 18 Overall PE – 9 RP – 6 Medtech – 1 Tennin – 2

NBN: 36 Overall NEH – 30 TWIY – 2 MN – 4

HB: 19 Overall ETF – 14 ST – 3 CI – 2

Weyland: 7 Overall BaBW – 4 GRNDL – 3

My matchups were:

(Corp: 1 CI, 3 ETF, 1 NEH, 1 RP, 1 GRNDL)

(Runner: 3 CT, 2 Kate, 1 Andy, 1 Noise)

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The second was that I suffered from perhaps the worst luck I’ve ever suffered during any card tournament I’ve played in. I had started taking notes just to reassure myself that I wasn’t tilting and exaggerating by midway through the tournament. In five of my corp games I had drawn seven of my ten agendas by the time I had seen 20 of my 49 cards- often the situation was significantly worse. In one game I had them by turn five, in another I had a hand of four agendas and drew into Jackson Howard, used him twice and drew into another three agendas, this with an open HQ and my opponent with a stacked Nerve Agent on the board. He’d already scored three agendas, meaning I’d drawn every one of my agendas in the first 20 or so cards.

My Whizzard deck fared better, but still had some pretty frustrating situations, including a 10 deep Medium dig that failed to see the single agenda I needed to either tie the game up or win it- the remaining five agendas were piled in the ten or so cards left in the deck I didn’t see. I also blanked on breakers more often than I would have liked, but I think that was well within the realms of normal variance, and the largest fail that occurred while I was running was definitely my fault and not that of the cards. I also went to time in several games where I felt I was in a strong position to win, despite being down a single agenda, receiving a timed loss.

The result was simply that I never felt I got to ‘play’ the decks I brought on the day. Through either bad luck or slow games I never got a ‘good game’ of netrunner, win or loss. Part of what attracts me to long, grueling tourneys like this one is that the variance tends to even out more, which only makes it worse when it doesn’t… I’ll go into the woes in detail come part 2, but for now let’s just look at the process of preparing and developing the tournament decks. Let’s start with the corp deck I took:

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The NEXT stronger together 2.0

Cards: 49 / 45

Agenda points: 20 / 20

Influence: 15 / 15

Agenda (10)

3x Accelerated Beta Test

1x Efficiency Committee

3x NAPD Contract

3x Project Vitruvius

Asset (10)

3x Adonis Campaign

3x Jackson Howard ●●●

2x Private Contracts

2x The Root ●●●●●●

Ice (17)

3x Eli 1.0

1x Ichi 1.0

1x Ichi 2.0

1x Mother Goddess

3x NEXT Bronze

3x NEXT Silver

1x Rototurret

2x Viktor 1.0

2x Viktor 2.0

Operation (8)

3x Hedge Fund

3x Interns

1x Reclamation Order

1x Subliminal Messaging

Upgrade (4)

2x Ash 2X3ZB9CY

2x SanSan City Grid ●●●●●●

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Stronger Together, I’m sure, will disgust a lot of the more traditionalist players as a choice to take to nationals, but I’ve been watching the corp for a while now. ETF is very strong, but in a world where people are honing their decks to be able to deal with key pieces of ice at their regular strengths, Stronger Together throws a surprising number of wrenches into the mental mathematics. I set about trying to exploit the exceptional power of the lower cost bioroids while shoring up their various weaknesses.

Chief amongst them I found, while I was testing, was the ability to click through without needing a breaker, the economy lost outside of ETF and, initially, the vulnerability of the deck to Atman–Datasucker combinations.

My original build featured Biotic Labour, Celebrity Gift, Archived Memories and a lot more destroyers. I flirted briefly with Swordsman as a possible counter to Atman, but found that it caused me to run into too many variance problems when I drew multiple Ichis/swordsmen early in the game, allowing run-all-day decks easy access without breakers.

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The NEXT stronger together 1.0

Cards: 49 / 45

Agenda points: 20 / 20

Influence: 15 / 15

Agenda (9)

3x Accelerated Beta Test

1x NAPD Contract

3x Project Vitruvius

2x Project Wotan

Asset (8)

3x Adonis Campaign

3x Jackson Howard ●●●

2x Private Contracts

Ice (18)

3x Eli 1.0

3x Ichi 1.0

2x Mother Goddess

3x NEXT Bronze

3x NEXT Silver

1x Rototurret

3x Viktor 1.0

Operation (11)

3x Archived Memories

2x Biotic Labor

3x Celebrity Gift ●●●●●●●●●

3x Hedge Fund

Upgrade (3)

2x Ash 2X3ZB9CY

1x SanSan City Grid ●●●

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I also found that while Celebrity Gift was a wonderful economy tool, far too often I would end up with a couple of agendas in hand (particularly a Project Wotan), no way of securing against a Legwork and one or more celebrity gifts on tap. Part of what makes this deck strong is that every run a runner makes is very taxing and consequently you want to make the process of choosing where to run as difficult and likely to whiff as possible.

While Project Wotan actually performed very well in testing and I scored it several times, I also lost it several times off RnD and that put me in a very awkward spot. I might actually consider going back to it now or perhaps Executive Retreat, as often I scored it quite early in the game behind something like an eli/viktor and Mother Goddess. In the end I opted for the more taxing set of three NAPD Contract and a single Efficiency Committee.

Ultimately I found the deck’s ability to threaten a really solid remote with a couple of pieces of ice made bulking up on SanSan City Grid and ditching my Biotic Labours make more sense. With Interns and Project Vitruvius counters on tap to recur Sansan. While thinking of what to replace my power influence spent on Celebrity Gift with, I stumbled on The Root, which turns out to be exactly what this deck wants. I have a lot of small to medium cost ice and my deck plays fairly slowly, so I need to set up some pretty deep servers, meaning I can leverage those recurring credits to really put the shields up.

I also discovered there’s a lot of other incidental benefits- one of the things runners tend to do when they see the root is just stop running for a bit so you can’t leverage those credits to rez ice. Building deep servers is one way of using them, but the best way I found is putting out naked Adonis Campaigns and Private Contracts. If the runner doesn’t run you that turn, you can use your recurring credits at end of turn to turn on your Adonis Campaign or contracts and turn those recurring credits into real ones. While I feel this economic engine still needs a little work, there’s a lot of promising synergy there I’d like to explore more in the future as a tool for glacier decks.

Since I no longer wanted to recur any operations, I switched my Archived Memories to Interns. This seems strange until you look back at the need to build deep servers. Interns waives your install costs so mid/late game it can often be the equivalent of gaining 4 credits, drawing a premier piece of ice (that had been parasited earlier in the game)

Finally, I reduced the count of non ETR ice in the deck to a mere 2, one Ichi 1.0 and one Ichi 2.0. While Ichi 2.0 is a clear target for Femme Fatale, Sharpshooter etc, it’s also devastating to the unprepared and can really mess up an incautious runner relying on datasucker mathematics to be able to blitz through an ichi 1.0. That extra pip of strength makes a lot of difference. Generally I’d want to wait until another piece of ice like an Eli 1.0 or Viktor 2.0 baits out the inevitable Femme then rez this guy, the cost of 11 for Femme to break it is monstrous.

My answer to Atman was, ultimately, that I had a spread of ice running through 0,1,(2-3 with NEXT Bronze), 4, 5 and 6. I felt that this would be sufficient to control Atman strategies on the day, but it turned out I didn’t have to face any (perhaps because I lost so fast the runner never needed to get them out)

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Leading up to nationals, I was messing around with Exile and Kate toolbox decks that leveraged Leprechaun and a toolbox of big, powerful 2MU programs like Sneakdoor Beta and Morningstar. Part of my testing was figuring out the best way of enabling a Magnum Opus dependent economy, ensuring you got it out early and could benefit from it all game safely.

Unfortunately, in my games vs RP and NEH I found that this kind of economy was simply too slow, not because it wasn’t powerful, but because these decks start building up turn one and unless you interact and trash some of their tools you’re going to end up way too far behind.

As a result, I decided to go with Whizzard, not because his trashing ability is powerful overall, but because it is there, guaranteed, from turn one and can slow down these asset based decks without having to compromise his own game plan.

I felt that Overknight- the Deep Red / E3 Feedback Implants / Knight / Overmind kit was ideally suited to putting pressure on the sort of decks I’d be up against, along with Parasite and recursion cards in Deja vu and Clone Chip that could either reactivate my breakers or my parasites. It performed pretty well in games against both HB and Weyland, particularly the latter and importantly gave me guaranteed access to assets behind some token ice to stop Sundews or Sansans snowballing out of control. I put in a couple of Rook since I’m running Deep Red and the ability to make the corp pay a bit more to rez could open up my early aggression window.

Phil Chan’s Noise deck taught me the importance of an incredibly solid economy in control decks, so I loaded up not only on Prepaid Voicepad and a full suite of economy events, but added Kati Jones, Daily Casts and Liberated Accounts as well. Liberated Accounts is a fantastic card if your economy is already strong and lets you really push the credits you have available.

With Medium as my primary weapon against RnD and Vamp to go after HQ, I felt pretty confident I could slow the corp down enough to be able to land some good hits and pull the win.

This is the first iteration of the deck:

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Prepaid- overknight Whizzard v1

Cards: 45 / 45

Influence: 15 / 15

Event (13)

2x Deja Vu

3x Dirty Laundry

2x Lucky Find ●●●●

1x Quality Time ●

3x Sure Gamble

2x Vamp

Hardware (11)

3x Clone Chip ●●●●●●

3x Deep Red

2x E3 Feedback Implants ●●●●

3x Prepaid VoicePAD

Program (13)

3x Knight

2x Medium

3x Overmind

3x Parasite

2x Rook

Resource (8)

3x Daily Casts

2x Kati Jones

3x Liberated Account

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I made some tweaks to this after playing some test games. I found the Rooks stuck in my hand more often than not. Early game, without Deep Red they were very click intensive and temporary measures. Ultimately I replaced them with a pair of Corroder to shore up my ability to get through wraparounds and save my AI breakers for non-barriers.

To enable me to dig faster and deeper to get my combo fully operational as quickly as possible, I switched out a single clone chip for a pair of Quality Time. With Prepaid Voicepad on tap and a very solid economy backing it up, Quality Time excelled in the deck. Finally, I realised I needed a little more high impact HQ attack and so switched out my two Lucky Find for Legwork. I had not found I had issues with economy during my test games and so I felt that the hit was justified.

This was the final deck I took to Nationals:

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Prepaid- overknight Whizzard v2

Cards: 45 / 45

Influence: 15 / 15

Event (15)

2x Deja Vu

3x Dirty Laundry

2x Legwork ●●●●

3x Quality Time ●●●

3x Sure Gamble

2x Vamp

Hardware (9)

2x Clone Chip ●●●●

3x Deep Red

2x E3 Feedback Implants ●●●●

2x Prepaid VoicePAD

Program (13)

2x Corroder

3x Knight

2x Medium

3x Overmind

3x Parasite

Resource (8)

3x Daily Casts

2x Kati Jones

3x Liberated Account

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Join me next time for a game by game breakdown, deck debrief and analysis. I’m also going to devote some time to talking about the psychological aspect of going to such a big tournament and hitting as frustrating a situation as I did, how to keep yourself on the level. Last, I’ll look at the top eight, the winners and what that says about how you might want to approach tournaments in the near future.

I’d also like to take the time to thank Tomas Daniel who acted as the primary TO and head judge. He provided me with the overall stats for this article and Games Laboratory who, as ever, provided a wonderful location and tremendous support.