Waterboarding Your Friends at Worlds 2024

i booked my flight to Worlds 2024 about 9 days before the event itself. i wasn't so sure that i was going to go. despite vowing in 2022 that i would never miss a north american worlds so long as they were being held, i couldn't quite bring myself to actually pull the trigger. it was being held in the most expensive city in the continent in a country that i do not especially like and the idea of spending so much time and money and effort on a children's card game.. it started to seem a bit silly to me. it wouldn't have been feasible to go at all had a friend in san francisco not offered to host me. even that wasn't really enough—she ended up insisting that i come and that i stay for a week to hang out and work and play DDR and so on. anyway, between her encouragement and the steadily-growing premonitory sense of fomo, eventually i bit the bullet (sorry for the mixed firearms metaphors).

my procrastination led to flights that were slightly more expensive than had been planned for and far more inconvenient than was necessary. so it goes. i booted up lorelei and the laser eyes for the first time on the flight from toronto to vancouver and played it voraciously for the next 5 hours (lotus eater goty list 2024 coming soon). i scrawled notes on vomit bags to the great (if polite) confusion of my seat-neighbour. eventually i arrived in vancouver for a 6-hour layover. naturally, i started jamming jnet. i hadn't really decided what decks i was bringing to the tournament yet—i had barely even decided that i was attending—so i was running facefirst into the humble horde of jnet randos to help finalize the decision. i played a terrifying and quasi-prescient game against Diogene's vicious R+ deck and we had a quick chat about my deck choices. he reminded me that it was the final worlds for both 419 and PE and so encouraged me to take both. this absolutely ended up influencing my decision. i also spoke to a girl in the airport who was on an even longer layover than me. she was on the way from korea to see my chemical romance in las vegas by herself. she didn't really influence any of my netrunner experiences over the weekend but she was very cool.

eventually i made it san francisco and on the morning of the crown of servers tournament, as i descended the hotel staircase into the underground hollow where they kept the nerds and undesirables, i was once again overcome by doubt. why am i here? it is entirely irrational to spend my very limited funds on a trip to an Admittedly-Paradisesque City in God's Most Foresaken Country so that i can play a children's card game. i had barely even practiced so i had no real notion that i would do well. it all felt very foolish and very silly and not in the good way. but, thanks to a wealth of professional expertise and personal experience, i can tell you: these doubts are stupid. there is basically nothing more valuable than community and interconnectedness and a sense of belonging. spending time with passionate like-minded others for the purpose of play with few (if any) ulterior motives... this is what the enlightened few call "The Good Shit." it is a balm to one's soul unlike any other. and, naturally, these doubts evaporated within minutes of entering the aforementioned Nerd Hollow.

herenow, i will briefly belay my saccharineposting, in favour of some good ol' fashioned Deck Talk. afterwards, i will briefly return to an overly-sentimental tone before closing with a non-sequitur and/or shoutout to my home meta. i haven't written any of that yet but it certainly feels correct.

my goal in crown of servers was to collect enough data to confidently finalize my deck choices for The Big Day. ultimately i was going to have to just say fuck it and choose a couple lists, but i knew i'd be a lot happier if i went into the tournament feeling more comfortable than feeling "fuck it." my considerations were as follows:

runner

• something like this hoshiko list, despite it having never quite felt good enough or fast enough

• @chouxflower's' 419 list, with which i had tested a little and had always felt extremely fun, if a little underpowered

• the q-loop arissana list that @mo0man had handed me and told me to play at worlds

corp

• my beloved nuvem that i have been honing for months but that is extremely susceptible to slow-play

• something like bridgeman's PE, which i knew would carve up swiss and then probably suffer in the cut

my teammates in crown of servers graciously allowed me to choose my decks in order to best inform these decisions and so i chose to play the aforementioned 419 (along with a few changes that i will note elsewhere) and the nuvem list (also with its own set of changes).¹ in the interest of brevity, let me briefly summarize my experiences: 419 was fun and punishing, if ill-favoured in the late game. nuvem was also fun and punishing but highly-favoured in the late game. the combination of massive ice, punitive threat, and trojan horse rigshooting did, however, often (and understandably) cause my opponents pause. games that were entirely winnable and heavily in my favour were tied (or lost) because of this. my opponents were not acting maliciously, of course. i have just never mastered the art of gently hurrying opponents and have a bad habit of playing decks that send the other player into The Tank for minutes at a time. i decided that playing nuvem, as attached as i was to it, was a liability. 419, on the other hand, despite feeling like a relatively weak meta call,² was extremely fun. i am a criminal player at heart and so it felt like i should just go with what i knew. one final ride for 419 and PE. saddle up.

i hadn't played many games with bridgeman's PE, but i knew it to be quite solid, and i am no stranger to the ways of shell games and net damage. i jammed a couple games with it after crown of servers, pondered it while listening to billy woods's aethiopes on the train back to my friend's apartment, pondered it even further when i realized that i had accidentally taken the wrong train and had to double back and spend an extra hour in transit, and then somewhere around 2am landed on a series of untested changes. in summary: i swapped chekist scion and end of the line clearinghouse and business as usual. the tag and bag strategy felt like it was out of the bag and was unlikely to often close out the game. instead, i opted for clearinghouse, which can both close out the game and, after being seen once by the runner, makes them more likely to run other advanced cards. i love mitosis but it never quite had the impact of a mushin-advance quadrupled-advanced threat. i added business as usual because of its combo potential³ and because i (correctly) suspected that presenting two new triple-advanced cards with a mitiosis-business as usual turn would be an absolute nightmare for the runner. i also messed around with the ice and agendas a bit. feel free to ask specific questions if you'd like me to justify these choices.

happily, these choices all seemed to work out for me. the deck dropped only two (one) games in swiss. the first loss was in round 1 to an uber that was stuck in traffic. did you know that san francisco streetcleans its financial district on saturday mornings? i didn't. i had misunderstood what time i needed to be at the venue but left with plenty of time to arrive (and had been up for hours already). sadly, the Anti-PE Cabal were successful in their sabotage of my first round. the deck went on to win every other game, however, until a final fateful match against the People's Champion, Timmy Wong. this was my final game of the day and its result would determine whether i made it to Day 2 of the tournament. timmy, on the other hand, had made it to Day 2 regardless—i had been paired up against one of netrunner's legendary players. needless to say, he utterly dismantled me. despite taking a baby's handful of brain damage within the first couple of turns, he proceeded to surgically remove every agenda needed to win, always perfectly avoiding lethal. it was a genuine pleasure to watch him play so methodically and perfectly and he was incredibly kind and gracious throughout. i was sad that i was not able to make Day 2 but there were far worse ways to go out. other than my round 1 loss and another-story-that-will-not-be-relayed-here, my losses were mine own, and the final deciding one had been against one of netrunner's folk heroes. i was pleased both with my deck choices and with the way that i'd played. for what else could i want on god's green earth?

over the course of those two days, i had played three different decks whose purposes all seemed markedly at odds with the sentiments outlined in the first few paragraphs of this write-up, however. community, fraternity, passion, unity—yeah, sure, whatever. i was there to squeeze and to manipulate and to control and intimidate. each of my decks were designed to make my opponents feel like they were drowning, even though they usually weren't. strangling the corp's economy and messing with its hand; punishing runners both for running and not running, under threat of violence or death; setting up ungodly kill or score combos with far more IAA turns than seem healthy. in every single game, i was trying to waterboard my opponent, and in all cases, my opponent handled it pleasantly and politely and jovially. whether i had landed a fifth brain damage or diverted funds-forged ice activation orders-and then sniped an agenda, my opponents were all cordial and collegial. they, like me, were just happy to be there playing netrunner. they, like me, had already received the greatest prize in gaming: the friends we made along the way (even if some of them do try to waterboard us).

so now, having completed our deck discussions, we come to the long-foretold pivot. i like to write these little deck write-ups as tournament reports because otherwise i might forget it all. my mind is like a steel trap, except for when it isn't, and so it is good for me to write these sorts of things down, i think. to remind myself what i played and why; to remind myself what it felt like to be at the tournament and how or why i lost; and, most importantly, to remind myself why it's worth putting so much effort and time and thought and money into this silly little children's card game. it's so that i can hang out with all the great people from my meta, cheering their wins and booing their losses (and making confused sympathetic sounds when they drop out of the top cut). it's so that i can meet new players from other countries who have completely novel perspectives on the game and are just as passionate and weird as i am. it's so that i can invest myself in silly little deck write-ups wherein i accidentally trap myself into using tripartite list parallel structure in the closing paragraph, despite finding it tedious and trite. and maybe, if i remember well enough, i can book my flights more than 9 days in advance.

see you all again soon, i hope.

-joshua (formerteen/oneiromancer/yaoibunga/i am sorry i used all these handles it's too late to change now we just have to live like this)

p.s. you can find my 419 write-up here.

¹ dropped drafter, added attitude adjustment. just gives you one more card (for a total of six!) that save you from agenda flood. also additionally beats ass in nuvem. added a second colossus to replace the missing sentry. swapped logjam out for pharos for reasons outlined here.

² the observation brings me no joy but the criminal card pool is just incredibly weak right now. i am glad that a criminal squeaked into the top 16 but there is no doubt that they feel utterly weak compared to shaper and anarch and have for quite a while. so it goes.

³ in a deck where advancing multiple cards is part of your kill combo (which is often the case in this deck), business as usual basically gives you an extra click (and 2). given this card's relative obscurity, this often takes your opponent by surprise. so, for example, if you have a double-advanced sting on the table and a triple-advanced fujii, you can click 1) business as usual; 2) advance fuji; 3) score both agendas, play neurospike. this does a minimum of 8 damage. i have done this specific combo at least twice. other combos might be a bit less splashy but can still get the job done. blood in the water is especially receptive to business as usual, since it can help you score it before playing neurospike for the kill, or just for the points alongside a sting or some such. it might be less powerful than other options but it has seemed good to me and i derive pleasure from playing obscure cards.