Best Girl - 7th @ Summer Showdown 2025🌞🦋

This is the list I brought to the amazing Summer Showdown event where it finished the event going 3W-2L.

If you check my ABR claims, it’s no secret that I enjoy reg boomerang hosh. I and many others have already detailed how the deck works with the basic premise of bankhar & boomerang + companions + leech & breakers giving you enough tools to combat any corp from assets, rush, to glacier.

I was actually questioning if hosh was the correct pick a few weeks before the tournament as everyone was playing reg / deep dive criminal and finding great success with it. However, whenever I played these decks, things just didn’t click. That’s when not_yeti posted their hosh deck and it honestly shook me a bit that a UK-based player took anarch instead of criminal to a tournament.

After a few back-and-forth messages with them, I swapped bahia (card I don’t like) for pinhole (card I do like), and ran 2x leech / 2x fermenter because I think fermenter is cracked and 2x leech is enough.

With that said, I really don’t have much more to say about the deck. You can take this with a grain of salt, but even the games I lost didn’t feel out of reach if I simply played better / relied on my instincts more.

Fuck it We Ball or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Game

Since this deck is so boring, I wanted to take this opportunity to open up a bit about my experience getting back into Netrunner after taking a long break from the game post Worlds 2018.

For about 95% of my time playing Netrunner, I would say I have been a “fine” player. I could give good / great players a decent game, and if a deck was broken enough, I could autopilot it and win an event. But when it came to putting up consistent results, I wasn’t doing as well as I wanted to.

I have struggled with anxiety for my entire life, and part of that anxiety causes me to take things (losses) too personally which can lead to me spiraling and rejecting things I enjoy doing because I don’t think it’s worth it / I don’t deserve it. And that’s exactly what happened after CBI 2024 where I almost quit the game again because I performed so poorly vs my expectations and I took that anger out on myself.

Instead of quitting, I reached out to my teammates for help and made a promise to myself that I would focus on small improvements in my game rather than unrealistic goals like “win every event I attend”. I didn’t attend a ton of tournaments that year (finishing a Ph.D. takes a lot of time, who would have guessed?), but I was noticing my play improving and was actually happy about my record / performance despite the fact I was bubbling out of top cuts.

Flash forward to this tournament and at the end of round 3 I had a record of 2W-1L, however, I wasn’t feeling good about it. I was making good plays, but most of my energy was spent worrying about every little thing that could go wrong rather than staying focused on the things that mattered. Taking a small break to eat and journal, I realized it was my anxiety creeping back in telling me that I was going to ruin this record and I couldn’t pilot my decks correctly.

I knew in that instant that the only way I would disappoint myself was if I gave into the fear that I was going to mess things up. So I kept telling myself “don’t let the fear of a play going wrong prevent you from making a good play” to myself in between rounds. Ultimately, that little mantra gave me so much clarity and I ended day 1 IDing twice into the top cut.

I think the moment that sticks out the most during this tournament was during my final cut game vs davz131. They played extremely well, and I could sense early on that they were going to win that game and knock me out of the tournament. Instead of having this sense of dread that I was about to be eliminated, I was proud of myself for what I accomplished and how I played.

Netrunner is a funny little game that makes you realize so much about yourself and I’m very appreciative I get to play it every day. If you’re someone who is trying to improve their skills at this game, just remember to be kind to yourself.

I want to wrap this up by thanking everyone who was involved in running this spectacular event. Thank you MitM, OF15-15, Ysengrin, xdg, and all the other volunteers who pitched in to help when Aesop’s and the Jinteki.net mirror were doing their best to tear the whole thing down.

As always, huge shoutout to The Future Perfect, The King, the Baltimore Meta, and not_yeti for all their help in getting me prepared for this tournament. If you have any questions please feel free to comment or hit me up on Discord :D