It’s something else, it’s Netrunner Worlds!

It’s my own dreamland (On Holo Man)

This is probably the question you’re here for: what is the Holo Man doing in this Ag deck? There are two main reasons: it’s a pet card of mine, and a surprise include. The more I get into competitive Netrunner, the more I believe that surprising includes, which can bait misplays, are more powerful than running a theoretical optimal deck (whatever that even means). I’m not sure if Holo Man is the perfect pick for that here, but it in the Swiss rounds I was able to bait it as a Anoetic Void/Crisium Grid delaying a Deep Dive, when on my turn I reveal it as a Holo Man and make a surprise score instead. It can also be used to simply score out agendas faster than someone might be expecting from an Ag deck.

Holo Man as a card allows you to do a lot of other theoretical tricks, like advancing the Tree Lines. Though usually I found myself too poor to do that, and The Holo Man often doesn’t stick around long enough either. There’s possibly some other cheeky things you could do like including some 3/2s to start threatening FA scores with Holo Man as well. But I’m not sure yet which of those should stay in dreamland vs. which are actually good.

Did the Holo Man actually win me games, compared to what I could have used the influence for otherwise, though? That I’m not entirely sure, and is the most difficult part of evaluating these kinds of includes. My takeaway here is that there is a lot more freedom to explore influence and card slots than you might think when basing yourself off of others’ successful lists. This is something I had been scared of doing and previously often wanted to stick to ‘the right’ list, usually an exact card copy from a high placing published list, and practice that a lot without deviating from the card choices.

I will hold you in the tallest of my trees (On Tree Line)

Besides the Holo Man, the deck was taken from Augustus’ refinement on top of typical Glacier Ag lists, which has Tree Line as a main factor. The Tree Line is there mostly serving as an annoyance to both Propeller rigs (which hate large barriers) and Crew decks (which don’t like to be locked out by 3+ str ice). Some ppl might have the misconception that expending the Tree Line is what you want to do against Crew, but I don't think that's the right move. You want to use it as an ice, not as an operationa gainst Crew decks. Always expending the second Tree Line is something I still bait myself into even when it's not the correct play.

Having the ice suite revealed definitely makes a bit of a dent in the scariness of facechecking and somewhat reducing the power of the Ag Boop. So there is definitely some banking on people expecting regular Ag, while having a powerful trick of an advanced Tree Line up your sleeve. But, if you’re not careful, you can still die from a bad run, just like in regular Ag decks.

It’s walking through the veil of a memory (On Worlds)

I had been having a bit of a busy time before Worlds, which also meant that I wasn’t able to practice as much as I had hoped leading up to it. On top of that I really had no clue what I wanted to play on the Corp side, every deck I tried to play just got completely destroyed and any new attempts to bring something new immediately lead to me scrapping it. I was mostly considering either this AgInfusion mostly made by Augustus or something similar to Jai’s Asa. In the end I decided to go with this AgInfusion list.

Going into the event I had something that I would now maybe label as ‘Testing Team Negativity’, where you are so used to taking many losses due to testing amongst so many good players, you really start to doubt yourself. (The opposite of ‘100% winrate JNet Positivity’) My internal goal was to reach a higher place than last year (66th), but was somehow very convinced I would end up doing worse. Nevertheless, it’s no use going into the tournament with a mentality like that. I sleeve up the decks and mentally prepare myself to play my best in several days of some of the toughest Netrunner…

On day 1 I went 2-3 with the Corp list, partially due to some rough draws as well since I simply wasn’t able to get much Charlottes or Rashidas going. The games I won were vs analyzechris on Deep Dive Sable and syd7 on Lat, where the additional tricks in the deck did help out. The losses were: Vs Tzeentchling on Lat, where I leaked too many agendas before being able to set up. Vs Tony on Esa, where a rough draw caused me to flood up a bit while not being able to set up proper servers vs Laamb/Begemot. Vs Tak on Aesops Lat, where I am too slow to keep up with the value engine and scary rig.

On day 2 I needed to win 2 corp games to make the cut, with the record that I had so far, it wasn’t the best feeling going into the day. I ended up playing blurbie’s Hosh, which was on an absolutely scary rig (including Odore and Ice Carver), however I did manage to barely get by and ended up winning on time due to the drawn out game. The game against CyberShark’s Akiko deck was shown on stream where the knowledge of playing against 2 Akiko decks in EMEA paid off. The last game I had to get through was Whiteblade’s AgInfusion as Swift Lat, where the practice that I had playing as and against AgInfusion paid off to navigate the matchup properly.

And that was it, I made the top cut! I really couldn’t believe it, both with the feeling of limited practice and the performance of my corp on day 1, I really didn’t think this was in the cards for me. The feeling of making the top cut overwhelmed me, this is the first time I had made a top cut of a big international event and it was at worlds no less. The nerves kinda got to me and in hindsight resulted in me playing a lot sloppier afterwards. In my top cut game against RotomAppliance I miscalculated credits needed to steal Ikawah after a 2nd Dive after trashing a Manegarm from R&D, which I shouldn’t have. But I end up topdecking it in the last turn of the game after that. That is as far as my luck would carry me, though. My game against Santa on stream I opened up with a rough hand with no ice, finding a Saisentan off Spin Doctor. I do manage to score 2 Niseis while Santa is setting up. Having to resolve the Bacterials under time pressure, I miss finding a way to set up the lockout score of the winning Bacterial and Santa finds the agendas instead. Then, my last game in the cut I have to face against Jai, a rough teamkill match after Jai already had to knock out SebK. I kept a hand with Paricia, aiming to work on controlling the board. But in the end I was locked out by code gates because of not drawing enough to find an SMC, which led to Jai scoring out faster than I could deal with.

Overall, I am of course very happy with my result. I had decided at the start of the year to start planning for attending an American worlds and get as much practice in as I could, attending as many tournaments as I could to prepare for it. I wasn’t able to practice quite as much as I had envisioned, but it was nice to see the practice that I did have pay off in an event like this.

Thanks

I know I’m not the best at showing excitement irl. But I really appreciated meeting everyone at the event! Thanks for everyone that I was able to hang out with, play games against or meet otherwise. And if we didn’t meet, I hope we’ll get an opportunity in the future to do so! It continues to amaze me how nice the Netrunner community is and it’s wonderful to be able to be part of it.

Great thanks goes out to all the effort that went into organizing the Worlds event itself. It is always such a joy to be part of them, and this one was run amazingly well!

The titles are a reference to a song called Cerrien, which is on one of the albums I had available offline and listened to on repeat while cruising through the Death Valley desert (since there is limited cell coverage there I only had my offline library to listen to) on my road trip the week after worlds.