panic ctm (7th, American Continentals)

Had been testing on and off with janktivist and hutch60 leading up to American Continentals; we were mostly playing with various flavors of Asa and Leela, but when it came down to the wire we didn't feel confident with pretty much any of them (well, hutch ended up on Leela, I think) and so I picked new decks the night before the event. In this case, I stumbled across Cologning the Message at about midnight, loaded it up, made a couple tweaks, goldfished like 30 hands, said "good enough," and went to sleep. Mostly I was relying on the fact that I had played tempo NEH a long time ago and it couldn't be that different, could it?

Spoilers: it was not.

In the Swiss, I ended up in a bunch of nailbiter matches, mostly due to facing almost exclusively decks that I considered this deck's worst matchups. Went up against a MaxX (stuck a HHN, then landed a Market Forces, then psycho'd to a win), 419 (mostly fast advance, I think?), a Leela (mostly slow advance), two Freedoms (stuck tags in both cases), and a Sunny (made some weird decisions about when to max out traces that left us both on low credits - but this deck's designed to operate at low credits, tbh). ID'd the last round.

In the cut, I ran game 1, won game 2 vs. sokka's Leela by locking down each central and scoring a big beale behind ice (worth one extra unnecessary point, tbh; I had the cali testing and a remastered token to burn), ran game 3, and then lost game 4 to NetDad's Val in a real nailbiter that mostly came down to "can he turn up an agenda before I turn up a psychographics" (the answer was yes).

I don't regret cutting a Cali Testing for CSR, but you could change it back if you want. Endless EULA did catch some people off guard but in most matches it's gonna be too expensive to rez. I don't know what else goes in that spot. IP Block? Change it back to an Enigma? You be the judge.

Shout outs to:

• Nisei OP for running an amazing event
• Jnet and Cobra for staying up and running despite an incessant stream of f5s and matches
• The streamers, for their hype commentary (what I got to see of it between rounds anyway)
• Dunkin Donuts
• #louisville, home of the greater Cindylou (Cincinnati-Indianapolis-Louisville) meta
• #uk, hopefully they won't revoke my honorary membership for not winning the AC
• Club Tiny, the Quarantine Game Night gang, and my wife, for being my non-Netrunner cheering section
• movableObject, for dodging me all day. We're gonna have to have that grudge match.

This has been my best performance by far in an event of this size and I wouldn't be here without all of the people behind me.