Ode to Megacity

I played a single game of Netrunner over the two day Vancouver Megacity event. It was with this deck, on stream, with my good friend @Solomir, and I did nab the win.

Not too much on this deck, except it's partly reminiscent of Ele "Smoke" Scovak: Cynosure of the Net decks I used to play, using Mantle or Net Mercur credits to get power counters on The Twinning during the Corp's turn, vastly accelerating it as a win condition.

But now, onto the ode. And I apologise in advance; it's long.

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Hello all. I'm Sindarin, and I've been the primary tournament organiser for Vancouver for some 6 years now (and I don't intend to stop anytime soon).

This is me sharing my Megacity journey.

Part 1: Venue

I was awarded the Megacity on February 2nd, and I immediately began searching for a venue. Sadly, the room I'd used for Districts wasn't big enough; I wanted space for 40+ people (players and staff), so that was out. Their bigger room was already booked for every summer weekend, and their hall was out of my price range. Speaking of....

I don't know if it's a common threshold, or unique to my city, but as soon as I searched for private venues with capacity of 30+, hourly prices shot up. I'm talking $100 CAD/hour being a deal. I was planning (hoping?) for a two day event, each day being at least 8 hours, so this was looking like it was really going to cost me. Given that I'm the sole income provider for a family of three, this was becoming difficult.

I had tried looking at our local community centres. Sadly, almost none were suitable, as they have a policy against any monetary exchange involved. So, many affordable, conveniently located venues were automatically out.

I reached out to about 20 venues in total, and heard back from maybe 15 (not a terrible conversion rate). Sadly, nearly all were out of price range, or were close to it but the location wasn't ideal.

I then got a recommendation from a kind Redditer about The Beaumont Studios. They're a non-profit (great!), excellently located (Great!), and the hall looked amazing and had the capacity I was after, as well as being accessible (GREAT!). The price was slightly on the high side, but workable. So I reached out and went for a tour.

I had struck gold. Because I would work around hours of other groups using the hall, and end up with different start/end times on the Saturday/Sunday, I was offered a lower, very workable hourly rate.

Done, agreement signed, deposit paid, huge sigh of relief. And the effort was worth it; people only had good things to say about the venue. I plan to use it again in the future, for sure.

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Part 2: Prizes

I wanted to entice people to come to this event. Not just locals, but from across Canada and the Western US. Travel is expensive, border politics make it less attractive, etc. So I went all in with ideas.

A good friend and fellow TO, @Jamer recommended we ask Jesse "Jouste" Turner (who remembers the Terminal 7 podcast?), also a good friend, and excellent artist, if he'd do an alt art for us. He offered to do not one, but two.

I also got lucky with timing. My friend, Amora (of Miniboss, and Celeste fame) offered to do an alt art for me as well, as her schedule was unusually clear. Oh my goodness, yes please.

This is what we ended up with (right click on the image and "Open Image in New Tab" for larger versions)

Hot. Damn.

And then NSG gave us all the idea to offer early bird ticket incentives with a foil card. Genius. We offered Shred as the foil. And it worked: 88% of tickets sold were early bird. This was a huge relief, as it gave me peace of mind that I was going to be able to afford the venue.

Now that was sorted, I could focus on other prizes.

Next up, @Aruzan mentioned getting some Netrunner faction mugs. So naturally I asked for a set too, as added top of faction prizes! And they came out great! So a big thanks to Alex for donating those; people were happy with them.

My good friend @hams (HAMS!) recently bought a 3D printer. So we worked together on putting together custom click trackers with Vancouver landmarks on them. It's important to note that Ryan is a die hard Esâ player, which explains why there's 7 of them.

For those who are unfamiliar, these are the landmarks, from left to right.
1. Science World
2. The Harbour Centre
3. Lions Gate Bridge
4. The Convention Centre
5. Gastown Steam Clock
6. The Drop
7. East Van Sign

It took a good amount of back and forth to get things nicely aligned and sized, but I was super happy with the final results. Perhaps we'll do something similar for Worlds...?

All of this combined with donated prizes from James and Joe to hand out, the NANPC Charlotte (dice to come in future), and a trade table, prizes were in a really good spot.

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Part 3: And then, the rest

What remains was a variety of separate scrambles to close out the weekend experience!

3.1: The Stream

I've helped set up streams before, and recorded tournaments, but never been sole operator. And as TO, I didn't want to be. Happily, @hams and I had a fortuitous discovery of a gaming club in New Westminster, called Phantom Alley. We visited, hoping to find a second weekly Netrunner meetup location, and we were successful.

This happened late in 2024, and both sides worked at cultivating a relationship. This worked out spectacularly when Herman and Dante from Phantom Alley offered to spend their weekend providing a rig and running the stream. Phew. One fewer thing to worry about.

3.2: Tables

The only drawback of the venue is they had limited tables. At this point, I chose to delegate both figuring out how many extras we needed, along with finding a company to rent from. Big thanks to @Solomir for handling that; it was seamless.

3.3: Commentary

We had stream sorted, but no dedicated comms team. Early on I asked both Jesse and Nels (who used to play up until FFG lost the license) if they'd be interested in doing it together, for a sort of commentary version of a Terminal 7 reunion.

Sadly Nels couldn't make it work, but Jesse was on board. I asked my community and any attendees if they'd be interested. Phil aka @0thmxma offered, and his modern card knowledge and energy mixed with Jesse's presence and energy made for a wonderful combination.

Day 2 was easier to figure out; I had decided to ask people who didn't make the top cut if they wanted to do comms. And whilst it was a shame one of my "who to watch" picks didn't make day 2, having the team of @hams and @CTZ was a very fun time.

Wrapping up

All in all, I had 40 tickets sold for the event, including some who only came on day 2. This was incredible, and lined us up to be the biggest Netrunner tournament Vancouver ever had. Sadly, only 31 were there on the day; due to various reasons, some people had to cancel coming (doing my best to get prizes out!).

But despite that, the event was incredible, people only had glowing reviews to give me. This made me incredibly happy.

So a huge thank you to everybody who came, everyone who supported us, everyone who lent me their time; it made it all worth it. And finally, a huge congratulations to @Paillu for winning the day.

Until next time.