Love in the Time of Regionals (8th Sheffield Regional)

I was kind of dreading playing at the regional to be honest. The meta changes every week and all the corps feel pretty bad and running against those same corps also feels pretty bad.

When I went to Sheffield I'd just come back from a holiday, so I brought what I'd taken to the local Liverpool meetup two weeks before. On the corp side I brought the deck I'd lost to round one at the Nottingham regional in august, with the cohort swapped for a YDL like the writeup recommends. When I got home from my holiday I was too tired to think about changing any cards in my deck, so I didn't even open my deckbox until I was on the train to Sheffield.

I found this pretty freeing. I spend a lot of mental energy trying to quadruple guess my decklist choices and trying to make a 12D chess call on the meta in the run up to a tournament. However, since I'm not a testing group and I don't really have the time to play a load of games for each iteration of a given deck, this usually does more harm than good. Having my decks locked way in advance meant I could spend my time thinking about how to play the decks I had instead of worrying how they should be different.

Anyway, about the deck itself. This is about as villanous a deck as you can find in the current meta that's scoring 7 points and not scoring a Sisyphus Protocol. You basically want to scam your way to a win by rushing early points and then using Active Policing to close out the final agenda. A lot of times I'll chuck down multiple agendas on the board on the active policing turn and force the runner to find the one that's in the open and get the one in the scoring remote in two clicks.

I really liked this deck, I ended up going 3-2 in swiss but it felt like I was just a hair away from winning in the games I lost, which isn't often how I feel about corp decks. Loved all the assets, they're super powerful, high trash cost and low investment, so I always felt like I had the runner on the back foot if I could get a handful to throw down. Loved the rototurret, it's briefly good again (until people start playing turtle and/or crew). If I was going to tweak the deck, I'd like to make room for another manegarm maybe, there was a few moments on the day where I wanted to see it sooner than I did.

Thanks to MCG and the Regional Team for a lovely tournament and thanks to the Liverpool crew and anyone I've ever played netrunner against, you're the best!