2nd at 2024 Worlds Startup Event

How to wake up, decide to play Startup for the very first time, and get 0.01 SoS below First Place at Worlds.

1. Sleep in a bit, and go to breakfast
2. Message your friends to confirm you are in fact going to be playing in the Startup event today.
3. Go to NetrunnerDB, and just search for some random high placing decks.
4. Win Games.
5. Break one of the hotel's chairs falling out of it and briefly disrupting the main stream
6. Win Games
7. Find out you barely lost out on first on Strength of Schedule.
8. Still be hyped AF because you never expected to do this well.

The only expectations I had going in was that there would probably be corps trying to kill me. I didn’t even really know how, other than the fact that I was pretty sure Clearinghouse was a thing. Maybe there’s still Punitive? Who knows what else might be going on. I’m just hoping I have fun installing connections off of tags.

I ended up going 3 - 1 with Seb on the day, having never played the deck or the format ever before.

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Round 2 - played against Ksodiya playing BtL

As I said. I knew clearinghouse was a thing. But I didn’t know what /I/ should be doing to try to stop it. My start ended up being a bit awkward though. I wasn’t finding breakers or economy or card draw really. So I was being really slow. He was able to put together a Holo Man Clearing house remote - and I took a chance with run R&D with Bahia Bands, hoping to find exactly Hermes and hit an agenda to bound the clearinghouse. I found the agenda, but no Hermes. I was able to do some tricks to get an access on HQ and a shuffle on R&D and new two accesses from Eru, but wasn’t able to find the points I needed. Stuck only on 4 and died to clearinghouse.

Round 4 - played against jyguyo playing Architects of Tomorrow

Was kind of just a hard counter game. The best way to deal with bioroids is to just never pass them. I was able to draw into econ and earthrises and my crews and was able to deal with everything he put down. That did mean I had to play a bit conservatively to make sure I never gave him a foothold, but I was able to keep him down and steal enough points for the win.

Round 5 - played against ddark playing PD

Another real good start with the econ and card draw I needed. He was on a biotic type build and was pushing out 3/2s pretty quickly - so it was just a bit of a race. But I had a fast enough start I was able to keep up with the race. Really either of us could have won this game just based on who got luckier during the flow of the game to get to seven first. It was real exciting and felt like a pretty pure game of net runner.

Round 7 - played BoxShopedHeart playing BtL

Playing BtL again. I’m about to get my house cleared. Again. My start definitely is better this time though. Econ and Earthrise in my opening again. But he was able to turn 1 push an eminent archer - and was able to slowly build up a remote where he would be pushing for his clearinghouse play. I was able to keep pressure up this time though and he wasn’t able to just straight up push it like Ksodiya was in Round 2. I was able to find Hermes and some crews and was able to keep up for a bit. But finally the clearinghouse was sitting in the remote and I was getting real close to dying but I was never going to get past the archer. So I do a pretty tricky play where I’m able to trash a crisium on archives; use praxis to get eru and hannah installed and clear the tag; run with eru installing Manuel and get a 3 deep dig on archives that was able to get me the last few points I needed to clear out the game.

Playing Seb was a ton of fun. But playing as runner really made we wonder if there’s just not a whole lot that the runner can do to interact with clearinghouse with the current economy engines they have available to them. Similarly with Charolette. It just seems really hard to consistently contest a remote, especially as quickly as they are able to get a clearinghouse on board. Pinhole is a piece I really feel is missing, but maybe I just need to explore the meta some more to figure out what the actual answers are.

Copied shamelessly from https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/20e0c68c-a34b-4dd1-b963-56a782b8848a/hooligans-on-the-floor-1st-naarm-startup-co- with Creatives swapped to Telework to make it legal