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.

I didn't really have any idea what to expect from Startup runners. All I really knew was there wasn't going to be Ms. Bones and so assets would be a bit stronger than they are in standard. PD is just PD and just goes fast. So hopefully that continues to be true in startup. Just seemed to me to be a good safe bet to hopfully get enough wins for the alt arts.

I ended up going 4 - 0 with PD on the day, having never played the deck or the format ever before.

Round 1 - played against Plural playing Loup

Didn’t get ICE on HQ. Lost seamless to imp. Scored with a wage workers, picked up seamless. Lost seamless to imp. scored again. picked up seamless. Lost seamless to imp. Lost seamless to imp. Was able to score out - with wage workers staying uncontested. Loup was putting on some great pressure, but I was just able to survive through it to get the score out without actually having my seamlesses.

Round 3 - played Brian Tam playing Zahya

Wasn’t able to get centrals super protected. But was able to build up enough of a remote (actually just Bran is enough of a remote in startup, haha). Pulled him through the Bran, paying for manegarm, and accessing things such as nicos or wageworkers or an intentionally given away Send a Message when he wasn’t able to pay to trash the manegarm afterwards, giving me good scoring windows on the following turns. Runner econ kind of just fizzled out from those forced runs leaving me with freedom to score.

Round 6 - played stephen l playing Mercury

I didn’t get a lot of ICE early. I actually started with ablative on RD and naked install a Luminal in a new remote just to get it out of my hand. And I don’t want to insult my opponent by pointing this out, but I do want to point how lucky I was taking this play. He puts Physerum on my unrezzed ablative, plays Trick Shot, I rez ablative, he bounces. Places trick shot in the heap. And moves on to his next click. If he would have taken the run on the remote I probably wouldn’t have been able to win the game, but instead I was able to - I think - seamless advance the luminal, and take another 4 clicks afterwards to try to shore up my position.

Round 8 - played CyberShark playing Arissana

I DREW INTO NO ICE AND 2 AGENDAS. I was horrified. But I was hoping my opponent would just have no idea what PD in startup might be doing. So I install powers that be, install nico campaign, install project vitruvious and just hope. He does the no ice punish play of click for credit, install muse / conduit, run, run. I score out my agenda and just hope RD holds. I think I ended up not losing anything out of the RD push which was kind of miraculous and was able to start actually drawing ICE and building up a board state. I was eventually able to get a federal fundraising rolling and a big server he had a hard time getting in to and was able to slowly churn out agendas until I get the 4 2 pointers I needed to win the game.

All of my games were uniquely tense in a way that I haven’t really felt in standard. Assets seem to actually be able to live for a while since the runner has to save their economy for ICE. But they also seem to have a relatively neat little toolbox of ways to get into servers for cheaper than you would expect. I enjoyed the day much more than I had expected. I actually look forward in maybe trying to try out some new startup decks in the near future. And especially excited to see how it looks after Dawn.

Copied shamelessly from https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/aa896268-c79e-400e-be5a-c77606480aa7/-startup-it-s-basically-sensie-1st-emea-