LouDeeRer (2nd at Worlds 2024)

Hello Again!

Forgive the delay, I just submitted my first postdoctoral grant this week, and am celebrating by recollecting on this wild wild deck! A variant of this deck placed very well too, as Frogs will tell you soon.

I had no idea what to play as corp. I never do. A big part of this is I find runner more fun to iterate, but another part is I am an exceedingly tactical player. I play one turn at a time and find my strategy as I go along. It’s higher variance, but if I trust in my strength as a tactical player, that psychological edge can push me over the top in key games. With runner, this strategy is great — as long as each turn the corp is getting further from their winning condition, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a plan. With corp, my style of play is risky; you can’t just play the cards you have as corp, you have to plan around the cards you draw later. Folks like Sokka, Brandon, and Patrick build these incredibly stable corps which hinge on reliability and pure min-maxxed power. I struggle playing those decks; in a long tournament, frankly, I get bored. But, I’d been testing as (and more importantly, against) Loud a TON with QtM, so I figured I might as well bring a deck I know and I know you don't know, you know?

On deckbuilding:

Pretty much every decision I made when deckbuilding came from practicing and seeing which cards I vibe with and which cards made me sad. Fortunately with PE I get to also make decisions on what cards make my opponent sad…

Loud is a scoring deck. I got a single flatline all tournament and I was a turn away from scoring out anyways. The power of Loud from my perspective is people do not like playing against PE, so they run less, play less aggressively than they would against PD or Ob, and so you score 7 agenda points. Holo Man and Moon Pool are your key scoring tools, and Prana is your key deterrence tool. You don’t really want to kill with Prana, as that usually means you aren’t scoring enough, you just want your opponent to know this is a problem they have to deal with. But those are just tools — you gotta figure out how to win with them and that necessitates the subtle art of reading your opponent, reading the board state, and getting lucky.

I deviated from the default Loud in a few key ways to taste. I like Anemone and find no one dies to Saisentan any more, so I swapped Saisentan for Anemone. I don’t like Fully Op, even in Asa tbqh, so I dropped that from the QtM deck. I like upgrade variance in open decklist formats, and I valued Crisium in this meta, so I split it into Crisium and Tranq Home Grid. It definitely was a fun combo, and as I noted on stream, having exactly one of each faction’s upgrades is cute. Superstition tells you something. Having each one play a role on stream in the final game definitely reassured me I made the right decision for this tournament and this context.

On playing the deck:

If my opponent is having a good time, I make them do something stupid. If they’re having a bad time, I just naked install a regenesis. Humorously, I played it very much like I played tableCarnage last year — spend the first few turns doing whatever bullshit triggers happy chemicals in my brain, get a read on the direction the game is going, and adapt from there. At the tournament, that playstyle did me well — it kept me adaptable, from playing against folks I’ve known all my life to playing against folks I’m meeting for the first time at the tournament. But every game was work — the runner almost always can beat you, you just need to figure out why they won’t. It was such an honor to play the deck on stream for its final game for 90 minutes; it was a very different “sort” of netrunner game from the last few worlds finals, which was really fun. Just haymaker after haymaker after haymaker. At some point I’ll do a deep dive into it. I watch back on it and see lines I could’ve done different, but I just tell myself: “would you have wanted the game to go any other way?” and nah, I wouldn’t. It was perfect in its scrappiness. I’ve gotten very sweet comments after the game, so thank you to those who got in touch; it means a lot to contribute to a community that gave me so much.

Final Thoughts:

See my Lat list for a non-exhaustive list of people who I love.

But, to wrap up my season on a slightly personal note: I've reached a point now where my netrunner career has not just met my wildest dreams but forced me to re-evaluate time and time again what my wildest dreams could even be. I'm proud to reach this point, to have a publicly available video of me having some of the most fun in my life, and to share this achievement with loved ones both in and out of the community. I cannot even begin to visualize what the rest of my netrunner career will look like, but I look forward to discovering it with you all.

Love you all DeeRly