Yellow Journalism, 2015 Store Championship Winner

Xie Belvoule 341

This is the corp deck that won the 2015 Event Horizon Games Store Championship.

For my 1st corp game, was against a brilliant physicist named Kevin who played Andy. I kept a rather sub par hand only because it had a a sweeps week and i was facing Andromeda, unfortunately it only had a grimm and another weak piece of ice that he was able to bypass rather quickly and through a clever use of forged and emergency he made me rez a grimm, take the bad pub and then derezzed my grimm. I was reeling from this blow and couldn't recover when the next flurry of blows landed. Netrunner is a lot like sword fighting in that their are a variety of guard positions and offensive moves and the cadence of the battle can be dictated by the moves of either player. What the Andromeda player had done was what Miyamoto Musashi called "Making Your Movements Stick" which can be described as striking with your sword, when your opponent parries your attack, you stick your sword to his and get in close to your opponent while maintaining this sticky quality. In this instance he dictated cadence, swung momentum in his favor very painfully and stuck in close to me effectively slowing my cadence enough for him to secure a win.

Round two I faced a Maxx deck. I feel that NEH is the only corp faster than Maxx and that fact kept me ahead of Maxx by one or two steps through out the course of the game. It was an exceptionally long game that involved a lot of artful dodging on my part. He account siphoned me a couple of times but both times i think I dodged them by using the money to rez pad campaigns and sansan city grids, thus denying him the money. The most pivotal moment of the game though was when he played a wanton destruction on his first click, i only had 4 cards in hand, 2 were agendas, and the other two were biotics. This play was potentially crippling for me as losing 3 of those 4 cards would defiantly cost me the game, however I had anticipated this and placed an Eli on HQ, forcing him to click through, thus i lost only a single biotic. I was able to then biotic out my first astro. The game lasted a while longer but i was able to score a beal and another astro and scored a breaking for the win if i remember correctly. We both agreed after the game that the wanton not going through was the turning point.

Round 3, I remember very little from this corp round, other than the fact that I astrotrained his runner rather quickly.

Round 4 I remember the game in excruciating detail, I was facing a Mac dog deck. It was an unbelievably long game that had so many twists and turns i cant list them all. He started the game off strong by installing lady and i knew the only way to beat him was going to be stacking barriers, which I proceeded to do by installing Eli and wrap around and the situation steadily got out of hand. The game ended with me having an 8 deep tower of ice on R&D made out of every piece of Ice I could get my hands on. It was a testament to his deck that he could even make so many successful runs on R&D. He ran my HQ many times and saw nothing because we were both waiting for the same thing, my deck to cough up an agenda. I played the long game like I've never played it before and several clutch Jacksons kept me in the game. I spent many turns clicking for money and loading my marked, I eventually was able to use a sansan to great effect to score agendas, since trashing my assets would mean he would never have enough money to run my tower of Ice and Doom and the game ended with me scoring a breaking news but it was a good close game.

In the Finals I faced my opponent from the first round. His Andromeda had a strong start but I had a sweeps week in hand so I was able to get out ahead on money. I started by installing two ice and sweeps. The next turn I installed a sansan and a pad campaign and he installed and clicked on kati jones. I had started with both my breaking news in my opening hand, I saw the opportunity to heavily damage his economy so I scored the breaking off the sansan and then trashed his kati jones, this was a huge economic set back. He then installed security testing and so I iced archives, sansan and my pad campaign. He got the right breaker and trashed my sansan, but i simply reinstalled. A couple of turns later he played out a daily casts. I of course then scored out the second breaking news and trashed the just installed daily. By this point I had drawn into a biotic and a fast track, and was able to use my sansan to score a fast tracked astro, and at that point the astrotrain left the station, securing my corp win for finals.

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