Good Money after bad? (1-2 and 10th @ SW Regionals)

This is an update of my EMEA Thunderbolt list, the full changes (stolen from my changelog in QEH) are:

• -1 ZATO (too high variance as a 1x, 4 inf, and still needs some stars aligning to actually fire - was a crutch for matchups we can go tall and play "fairer" for)
• -1 Brasilia (we need the upgrade slots, and region is meaningful - it hurt a bit at the time but I think in current, Asheniko light meta, I didn't miss it as much as I thought I would, didn't use one all of this weekend so could be zero? Very meta dependent call IMO)
• +1 Ganked! (Card fucks and 3x makes R&D safer plus lets us bluff/protect remotes)
• 2 Greasing the Palm become 2 Hansei Review (so -1 operation total) (faster burst money is worth a lot, but it not costing 3 does sting a tiny bit. Wouldn't go back though, the basic action card is tag punishment)
• +1 Mavirus. Didn't use it all weekend, but it's physarum and leech tech. Would have liked to see it in a fair few games and I think it is game-winning when it matters, defo not cutting any time soon.
• -1 Vovo, I love you old man but your money is a little too conditional - I can definitely see a world where we slot him again as inf free money that also baits the remote
• +3 Tranquility Home Grid. This is the big one, and by far the piece the deck was missing. PD players know what's up, cash for jamming in the remote makes everything just flow so much smoother
• -2 Regolith, +2 Rashida - she's faster, triggers tranq, keeps cards flowing, what's not to like?
• -1 Corporate Troubleshooter - we need money for our ice and to go fast, and so don't have the cash spare to make a local trans programmer defect and shadow realm someone for the bit

TL:DR the PD players were right Tranquility is a wildly good card.

This deck went 1 and 2 at Regionals, and 3 and 5 over the entire weekend (including Exeter CO and an in person UK league match vs Ams), but I think that record hides the deck's true quality. Looking at those games in more detail:

• The two losses at Regionals were brutally unlucky - in total, if my notes at the time were correct, over the two games there were no cards accessed from remotes, 11 cards accessed from centrals, and 15 points stolen. (Including, in both games, 4 points off a triple on R&D). I'm blaming this at least in part on my own lack of shuffling after doing final checks before decklist submission Friday night, simply because the odds of it happening in two back to back games is less than 1% without that fact. This is not in any way to say I played perfectly in those games, or that my opponents didn't deserve the wins - they capitalised on it really well and did exactly what they should have, but I think it's hard to use those games as representative of the deck overall.
• The first loss on Sunday was into Persephone Hosh, and that was simply down to my play - icing R&D instead of Archives near the end of the game where I wasn't at risk of being completely milled to 0 cards - my aim was to stop Bhankar Tyr from enabling mill but in retrospect that mill means a lot less if she can't steal, which the second archives ice would have prevented. As it was, Egret on the archives Hagen, mill 6 and find the win, all while I was on 6 points with the Biotic in hand.
• The second was into Fi on Hypermantle Kit - this felt like revenge for our game on Saturday where it got Ganked into a Bloop it was one stealth credit short of breaking - this time it had the early pressure and didn't get thrown into a Ganked, so pulled out the win.
• The third loss on Sunday was an absolute nailbiter of a game against Chris Dyer on Lat, which came down to him trashing all his support programs on a credit-perfect remote run to steal the winner.

I have been accused of giving myself a sisyphean endeavour trying to make Thunderbolt work, and I do keep sticking with this ID despite consistently having a losing record with it at tournaments. There are a lot of reasons why:

• I keep iterating on it and bringing the list closer and closer to something that feels genuinely smooth to play and that has consistent economy and openings - I am not a perfect deckbuilder by any stretch but also no reference builds or other work really exists for Thunderbolt so it's been a lot of shots in the dark or being reminded that Reign and Reverie has good cards in, this has been a massive team effort, and it's a really cool feeling to be in a sense genuinely doing something nobody else (or at least very few other players) are doing - that sense of breaking new ground and feeling like the meta is small enough to be something I can engage with rather than something that's just being solved by pro players from on high and handed down to the rest of us in articles and decklists. (This is one of the coolest things about Netrunner, because of the smaller community and low barrier to entry/testing decks I can constantly fiddle with decks and explore new space.)
• All my recent losses especially have felt like pilot error rather than the state of the deck - the sort of thing that can genuinely just be solved with more practice and that even if I end up giving up will make me a better player. I definitely need to improve my meta knowledge and get a better sense of what my lines and outs look like against the field.
• I find Thunderbolt and value Stegodon genuinely just incredibly fun and satisfying to play. Couldn't tell you why, but something about making people pay 8 or even 10 credits for a 3 cost ice is deeply satisfying.
• There is no small degree of spite involved. A lot of people who, from the sounds of it, have never picked up Thunderbolt call it a bad ID. I almost don't care if they're right, but I do want them to show their work, because it seems like that claim is very much for lack of trying.

We'll see if I end up bringing it to Nottingham though, not as a surrender but because girls is in a really good place right now and I want to give Akiko the best chance possible to shine on what is very nearly home turf.