Apocalypse is what originally drew me to the game of netrunner. The flavour, the interaction, the balance, the way you literally flip the table over and give NEH the finger, everything about it was beautiful.
Oh how the times have changed.
The deck did exactly as it should have over the day. Blew up 2 asa and a palana board (all of them experienced their first sadness within the first 3 turns), and misplayed an Mti game to go 3-1 with runner (he was hiding 6 points off a t1 Wanton Destruction and I tried to contest a scoring remote instead of checking archives). In top 8, runner won 1 game. All of cut. Between 8 people.
INSERT RANT ABOUT CURRENT META:
The best corp decks require very little skill to play. That is not to say that good decks don't require skill to pilot well, but in terms of power level, if the skill required to succeed as skorp is a 5 on an arbitrary metric, the skill for non-clanarch runners is much, much higher. I lost my t8 to a really cool, but cheesy AF Sportsball deck that aims to combo out in one turn. Apparently shapers with clot and heartbeat would have been a good play on the day, but I'm bad at the game so I didn't play it. I got to 6 points with 10 agendas, and he plays a Stock Buy-Back. I know the combo is coming the next turn, so I run HQ (4 cards) and R&D (Meridian), seeing nothing. My only line is to hammer HQ and hope to hit his Game Changer, and I whiff both of the next runs. Turns out he had a The Future is Now and a Game Changer in hand, one of which would win the game, and the other which would nullify his combo for a few more turns. Sadly, this did not happen and he was able to chain into a win. Well played on his part, but sad.
losers t4 was against the Mti player, and I won the coin flip (as runner lost every game) to play corp. CtM did as it should against janky combo ApocHayley (I don't know why). Next round was against the 2nd place player, and he was packing Adam against CtM, or a stupid aggressive kill deck against this apoc deck (not very useful, unfortunately). I lost the coin flip, and that immediately put me in the wrong headspace. I know the game, stay above 16 (!!!!!!!) credits. Trash Zealous Judge. Sadly, I wasn't able to keep up on the econ and was forced to run with 13 credits, falling to a Economic Warfare Economic Warfare HHN into Consulting Boom/HPT.
Consulting Visit should not exist in this game. With both HPT and BOOM!, it turns literally 20% of the corp deck into an instant win vs 99% of decks. One of the kill cards (preferably BOOM! as it's inelegant) and HHN should be restricted, to force the corp to play either lots of kill with honest tags, or better tagging but having the runner have interplay (keep 4 cards in hand) so they don't die to a single HPT. /rant. This is only 30% fueled by salt on the day, and the other 70% is just general unhappiness with how simplistic the corp side is, and how the meta is currently forcing non-interaction from the runner AND corp side. With a new MWL and R&R, I think that is 100% possible, but we really don't want to leave the game in the state it was during Mumbad and Flashpoint, do we?