Bhlitzzkrieg: Joint 6th place Leisure Games Winter GNK (4-1)

This is the Whizzard: Master Gamer list that helped me to joint 6th out of 26 at the Leisure Games early winter GNK in London on Sunday 15th November. It went 4-1 on the day, nearly snatching the 5th game at the last against Mike Wood's PE, sadly succumbing to the stabby stabby before I could find the last agenda point. The man knows how to play an unpleasant Jinteki.

Sadly my Cybernetics Xanatos Gambit let me down on the day, winning only 2 matches, meaning I didn't place as high as I might have otherwise.

I put this together at the last minute and I was really pleased with how it did.

MVP was Medium, surprisingly, as I played two spiky Jinteki decks (the aforementioned PE and one Biotech). I was really lucky not to hit anything nasty in the Biotech game as I was digging for 8 cards by the end. I also (somehow?!) won all 3 Psi Games I came up against in those matchups, which helped a lot. Deep medium digs won me all 4 games. Everyone seemed to be struggling to get out enough ICE to sufficiently protect R&D, myself included. Netrunner!

Other stars were the Aesop's Pawnshop fueled economy. Obviously Cache has better synergy with Noise: Hacker Extraordinaire, but there are plenty of extra targets in here as well, so it works well here too. I got purged a lot when I had a lot of tokens on Medium or Datasucker and an Imp out. so being able to flog them then Clone Chip/Déjà Vu them back to reinstall for the extra counter from Grimoire was a godsend. Daily Casts and spent D4v1ds were other useful targets.

Whizzard: Master Gamer himself is so good right now. I trashed Caprices, Corporate Towns, Jacksons aplenty and more during R&D digs, with extra help from the Imp. Undoubtedly made future accesses even more valuable and is a really strong ID for slowing down all of the asset/upgrade heavy decks out there right now.

D4v1d gave a huge assist to one game against Blue Sun. I had stolen 5 points. The corp had a scored PriReq when they installed Government Takeover in a 4 deep server with Caprice rezzed. "Fuck," I said, "that." Instead I ran R&D, through a Wendigo which shut off my Corroder, broke a second Wendigo with ZU.13 Key Master and then Clone Chipped out a D4v1d to break the Fire Wall to get in. Pulled a Hades Fragment with my final access for the win.

Yog.0 didn't see play all day. Obviously not a bad card with the amount of Enigma that's out there at the moment but the install cost proved to be too prohibitive and I just used ZU.13 Key Master all day instead. I'd cut it.

I think I maybe used Parasite once? This was partially down to it being trashed by Inject a couple of times and there being higher value targets for my recursion. Not necessarily a cut, but maybe down to a 1 of.

Plascrete Carapace only went down once all day, and honestly careful play, diligent tag clearing, a strong economy and holding on to I've Had Worses was more than enough to protect against any Scorch threat I faced.

Daily Casts did work, but ultimately I feel like there might be more efficient ways of making money, even with the extra credit back from the Aesop's Pawnshop sell. Perhaps as I was installing a lot of recurrable programs I'd swap these out for Scheherazade for the boost to Cache, Imp and D4v1d.

The strategy is run fast, early and often before the corp can get properly set up. Early ETR on R&D is obviously not great, but between Inject, Street Peddler and I've Had Worse (in games where you don't suspect Scorch/Snare!) you have enough draw to find any missing pieces that don't show up early. Hopefully you will build up enough Medium tokens to sneak some points and/or force a tempo-hitting purge. Fear not the purge. Either sell the Medium and recur it to get the counter back, or keep running. Standard wariness of running last click against decks where tags might be an issue applies.

It's fun to play. Every game was exciting and nerve wracking and it really felt like I was on top a lot, which is not something I've experienced with a runner at a tournament before. Going to keep tweaking it and maybe take it back to future events!

Edit: On reflection one of the Parasites was a Clot on the day. I didn't use that either, so drop that for something else.