For the Love of the Game (6th Louisville Regionals)

I write this late at night, having just played what could be my last game of Android: Netrunner. I will not live in this city again for some time. And will I seek out new faces, a new meta, at this long hour of the night?

I had a dream, for the longest time, of becoming a great competitive player. My personal goal was to make the Top 8 Cut in a Regionals, and get one of the special playmats to prove it. If Netrunner had passed away before I managed to do it, I would have kept on having that dream. Like that one guy from Field of Dreams.

But I made it! Sportsmetal is good. This is a very 'regular Netrunner' deck, seeking to arbitrage sick value out of feeding the Runner small agendas. Generally you ruse out a pair of 2-pointers and close with a fast-advanced GFI. I only lost one game with this deck in the whole Kentucky regional, and that was to my carpool-mate, because he knew the exact lines of play against it.

I had some memorable moments. My last opponent in Swiss dropped a Shadow Net on turn 1, giving me a very self-satisfied smile as he said, "I included that just for this matchup!" I nodded, very seriously, letting him savor the moment as he appeared to think his victory was certain. "Click 1...Best Defense."

My runner deck was a tag-me Liza build, which I like to call "Indian Outlaw". It's a fascinating ID. You trade your Anarch membership card for speed. Liza can make copious money, draw copious cards, and accumulate tags at twice the rate of anyone else. But you give up a 3rd copy of Counter-Surveillance and all of the Anarch tech that might mean you don't straight-up lose to High Profile target. I didn't think people would be playing it, and I exploded in Kentucky. Twice. To my credit, those were the only Runner games I lost in Swiss. Tag-Me is my favorite archetype, for which I will not apologize.

I don't want to fill this up with goodbyes or thank-yous or any such boilerplate tear-jerkers. Others have already written all that. Besides, I'm not that sad anymore. Netrunner is part of a long and increasingly proud tradition of game design, and its DNA is already being woven into the next generation of games.

I will leave one, unique token of thanks, which came from me in one last burst of cyberpunk imagination:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VHW9Pspb4FhfGVRS8-MJC7yLEaSZTWep/view?usp=sharing