Democracy Manifest (4th APAC 2023)

What is the charge? Trashing a card? A succulent Brazilian card?

The Deck

Practice your judo skills on the top of your deck, put the runner in a fine headlock while the journos film, and if your sheer manpower isn't enough you can always go for the more... sensitive areas.

During spoiler season there were 3 cards that stood out to me as potentially massive value engines: Wage Workers, Federal Fundraising, and the Epiphany ID. Extra clicks to install more threats? The ability to control the top of R&D while drawing more cards? Rebuilding your board quickly after the runner has spent time and resources dealing with it? Sounded like value to me.

ARES is absolutely the lynchpin of this deck. Giving you an Epiphany counter is a deterrent to the runner, but with and ARES scored the runner will be agonising over every trash. This lets you set up your bladderworts to threaten to grind down the runner, or start scoring off a SSCG.

If I were to run it again I would try to find the slot for the 3rd FF as that card was absolutely an all star, possibly cutting an Oppo; HHN it is not. With this deck often wanting to be at low credit counts landing 4 tags with it was a rare occurence.

The Other Stuff

When I found out about how the timing of the set release lined up with continentals I was a bit depressed. With only 4 days to explore the new meta before APAC and not having many people to test with, my hopes for my performance were not high. Fortunately, during the week the Micro Brewers invited me to test with them which helped me get some good practice under my belt before the event and I'm sure I wouldn't have done as well without them.

Finishing this well means a lot to me: I'd played Netrunner a handful of times over the last decade and knew it was a special game, but I'd always had trouble finding people to play it with. About a year ago I decided to look to look back in to see if anything had come of the nascent fan-continuation project that was still just an idea when I last played in 2018. I was glad to find a passionate community still existed both online as well as a small in-person community here in Adelaide, Australia. It's been great getting in to the game properly over the past year.

Huge shoutout to everyone in the APAC community who played or participated in the event, including the casters, kror for running such a huge event at some points single-handedly, the members of Micro Brewers who helped me test and provided encouragement for each other between rounds, and SpaceIce for keeping the game alive in-person in Adelaide, without which I may not have reached this point.