[12th @ UK Nats 2024] A Variation on The Devil Wears Prāna

At the start of this year I had given myself the goal of 'making top half' in a tournament…

The deck is just @DeeR's Worlds PE with a Phoneutria and Hansei Review swapped in.

@lif3line preferred the second Wage Workers to the Tranquility Home Grid, but the Tranq was an MVP Card for me over the tournament. The influence slots are very much a preference thing here IMO. Sicko deck, hard to play. Flatlined many runners on the grind. Scored out a few times too!

Drawing the Fujii Asset Retrievals is a bit sad at times though, and is what ultimately knocked me out of the cut after some possibly misguided strategy on my part.

I had gotten back into the game last year, just before UK Nationals 2023.

In the later half of the year, a friend of mine brought her FFG collection up north from her parent's house so we could play in chronological order of set release, and talk about a game we both loved but never seemed to get too involved in competetively.

In previous years, I quit playing the card games I had played competetively after having bad experiences surrounding my status as a trans woman, struggling to make friends in each community, or just by being plain bad at the game I was playing. I was pretty shy to jump into another ‘lifestyle game’ and get hurt again.

Turns out I kind of wanted to play Netrunner a lot more regularly after seeing how cool the cards in TAI were, and after shooting @PaulyG an email asking if the Sheffield meta still had a meetup, I ordered every set I could - built myself @ExtraC's Worlds 2023 Ari List and that horrible KANEHL list (foreshadowing...) - and headed down to the next meetup I could make it to.

I bought myself a ticket to UK Nats 2023 and had such an unbelievably good time despite my shocking results and missing almost every trigger in the last round of swiss. I was hooked. My fears of being treated weirdly were instantly swept away. Everyone was welcoming, and a huge proportion of the player base were very queer. That’s cool!

Despite not doing great at tournaments I was still enjoying the game, but my results were making a dent in my already poor self esteem. I played competetive MTG for a long time and was the worst player on my testing team, often the target of jokes. For some reason that has stuck with me a lot, for something so insignificant that happened over a decade ago.

The UK has a lot of really good Netrunner players, and being beaten most of the time makes it hard to see that while ‘yes, you did lose the game’, I was probably slowly improving and learning the meta through experience.

I put in a lot of practice for EMEA, and this was an event I really wanted to at least make the top half for. I was the only one from my meta to fly out for the tournament. This would be my first trip abroad completely alone, and it was quite stressful as I also had the looming dread of possibly being laid off from my job over my head. I ran into @mcg in the airport as we were on the same flight and I felt much better about my travel decisions.

I didn't have a team for the Throwback Tournament, but with some help looking I played with @Klopstock and @Simili who made me feel so completely welcome.

That’s where the good bit sort of ends. I got an infection from a mosquito bite after a questionable decision to go for an evening hike up to Bergamo Città Alta after the Team Throwback Tournament to enjoy a fancy meal. I did not pack or buy insect repellant for my trip. Note for future trips: do that! I almost collapsed round 1 of Swiss. If it weren't for @Tanzzen being so caring, I think I would have dropped from the tournament and felt very down about the whole trip. But I carried on and met some great people! (I did get antibiotics once I landed back in the UK... It was a strange experience)

The first tournament back after EMEA I just bubbled out of the top half when paired last round against my metamate @lif3line. I was pretty beat up about it and decided that If I was to do any serious practice and improve at the game, I should employ the help of those better than myself.

EA Sports had inspired something in me after their surprise Azmari deck took EMEA by storm. My local meta was starting to take the shape of a loose testing group and it felt right to suggest the idea of formalising it. I asked lif3line, @Palmtree and a little later @Saurian if they wanted to be in a testing group together, tentatively named [Steel City Grid] (not realising there was also a SCG in Pittsburgh, USA. I guess we can both be cities of steel. Hit us up for a transatlantic team up if we are ever both at Worlds etc.).

Regionals season rolled round and this is where we really started putting a bit more work into our game. The vibe at our Thursday meet-up hadn’t changed much, but we were much more interested in critiquing our play and finding good decks for the upcoming events. I think I’ve enjoyed Netrunner more in the last 6 months or so thanks to those I get to play with every week, and I’m certainly enjoying it more than any other game I’ve played. @LesserScarlet also came down with System Gateway one Thursday, and by the end of the night she was playing Kill Ob (which lif3line and I planned to take to the Midlands Regional).

I finally made top half of an event when I played in @maninthemoon’s Worlds Showdown. I was practicing lif3line’s Kill R+ deck and the Lat I’d been playing the past few months for Sheffield Regionals. The pressure was off and I made the half-joke that next year my goal would be to top cut an event.

lif3line and I were scared of taking R+ Kill into such a heavilly teched meta for Nats that we hastilly switched onto @DeeR’s worlds PE, with only Palmtree keeping the R+ faith. Needing some last minute practice, we played in the November AMT and came 2nd and 3rd. I had really surprised myself. I was in a discord call with lif3line, @TorpedoTyrus and @Holzpubbnsubbe between rounds in the event and it was a lot of fun to see three of us playing in the cut together.

Later that night, we did also panic that @cablooshe’s MirrorMorph would show up at Nats, so we spent the next evening playing into it at my flat and picking it apart - trying to see if we could put up a confident game against it, or if we just had to switch over to the dark side with less than a week to go. Luckily we did not have to.

We did, however, end up slotting Phoneutria for the lat matchup, and to trash everyone’s rather important resourses. This was something we had tried in the SCG R+ deck (Swapping out the Pivot) that somehow floated its way accross the pond, was modified incredibly well, and made it to the Worlds Final.

Anyway, nats was great this year. It was filled with people that I see consistently at Netrunner events who I’d like to call my friends at this point.

My rematch against @Hello’s RH, my rematch with @Tanzzen after my EMEA disaster, and Cut Round 1 against @AugustusCeasar are some of the most ejoyable games of netrunner I’ve ever played. So, Thank you all.

Shout out to all the organisers and those who took my job of running classique when I accidentally made the cut. Much love to everyone I met or caught up with over the weekend, some of you being:

@Fⁱ @GermApple @harmonbee @AceEmpress @SeaRose @Zoehope @MattOhNo @Cobalt @Harper (l0velace) @Nicky3.0 @not_yeti @cobrabubbles @King Solomon @dreadmaw @Hideyoshi @eden_online @Atien @.Feathermark @Cornelius @Baserton @Bartimaeus @RoseKolodny @Goeshi @snoobz @BJA0CKX @TheRealLap @ChonkySeal (and in spirit with me the whole event @Ams, channeled through Catboy Lat)

Go read lif3line’s Quetzal writeup when it’s done. It shall be deck of the week. It must be deck of the week.

• May.