Tempo Ob Lives

It's my Tempo Crimes Ob from the last MN CTK with some tweaks.

Our second Sandstone and the Manegarm became Hafrún + 3rd Mav for rigshooting blowouts. The line, in case you're unfamiliar, is to fetch Hafrún from a Mav or by eating a 3-coster with Stavka and bricking their killer so Stavka, Biawak, or Winch in a pinch, can gobble up their rig and keep our gear-checks online. This is especially good vs all the Sables that seemed poised to be popular, and showed up to full effect in the losers' finals vs NotAgain.

Hedges became Wall to Wall and AAP. Hedges were unnecessary, and the W2W gave valuable draw, credits from bouncing on Tranq, and still bluffs people who overlook it can advance non-advanceable ice. Advancing our Syailendra never matters.

AAP has been justified well by J0N4LD, whose Ob lists I've always admired. RIP Thimblerig.

My runner was Reg Sable with some tech against anticipated Nebula Kill (that I never faced). I'd never played Sable on paper before the event.

Tournament Musings

When you reach one of your goals, set a new goal.

This was my 4th ever Netrunner tournament and first time at an event with enough players to warrant a top-cut. Having only played standard for ~8 months, my goals coming into OTG were (1) have a good time, (2) not make any game-errors, (3) not make any obvious blunders, (4) meet cool folks in the community, and (5, aspirationally) make top cut.

While I did make a game-error and blunder (on camera, no less) vs enkoder in the top cut, it was limited to that instance and didn't ultimately matter (I forgot my Boomerang shuffle and Hermes bounce after a steal), I had a great time and met so many folks I recognized from World's streams and tournament reports.

When I made the top cut I had to set a new goal: Win at least a single game. The problem was that I was paired vs a former world champ, Paranoid31, on Whiteblade's asset Ob in the first round of top cut. They were also on Sable, but I was sure they'd opt to play their Ob because it was a bad matchup for me. I was correct. Thanks to reassurance from friends and teammates, and bad corp draws, I clutched it before the corp's oppression spiraled out of control. That gave me the confidence to set a new goal: See how far I could go.

I'm thrilled to have met so many cool members of the Netrunner community and performed well.

Coda

Congrats to Wenjong on 1st place!

Thanks to:

• My wife for letting me leave her with the kids for an entire weekend to jam some Netrunner with awesome folks.
• Orbital Tangent for TO'ing. Your welcome speech was poignant and both timely and timeless.
• Cranked, Stwyde, Plural, and ctz for judging.
• NotAgain for tips, insights, and being a great teammate.
• SCRUBS for being a great testing team.
• TXPete for carpooling to the tournament both days.
• Fransy for the confidence that I could actually win vs top players.
• All the friends from the MN scene.
• All the new friends I met for the first time.