Losecons - HB [Crown of Servers, Worlds 2024]

Three of the Colorado Netrunner minds of all time teamed up this year to prove that the competitive groupthink is wrong. To that end, we assembled three runner decks and three corp decks dedicated to winning with Jeitinho and Superdeep Borehole, respectively. Then we descended upon San Francisco as the Losecons and showed everyone how wrong they were.

My Crown of Servers runner deck

The game plan for this deck is extremely straightforward - try to make a hyper glacier that is too taxing to both get through and trash the Borehole while doing your best to hide the fact that HQ is mad flooded. This plan is foiled by such uncommon plays as Miss Bones, Pinhole Threading, and Devil Charm + Arruaceiras Crew. Unfortunately, those were pretty much exclusively what I encountered during the event.

I opted to spend the measly 2 spare influence I had after the mandatory Boreholes on Roughneck Repair Squad. During testing (yes, I actually tested this), I found that I needed more money both generally and to boost the Warroid Tracker traces. Additionally, the bad pub from Borehole is brutal, so these are an attempt at mitigating that. They actually ended up being useful in a couple of games (see below). This is why Distract the Masses and Sprint are my Spin Doctor-at-homes.

The Warroids mostly go in the Borehole remote. In a much slower Netrunner world, the idea would be that the runner trashes Borehole #1 but the Warroids make them pay dearly for it - enough to give you the room to set up Borehole #2 for the win. In practice, games don't really go long enough for this to play out. If possible, it's not a bad idea to try to protect the Roughneck with one Warroid. The Manegarm Skunkworks is tough - it's extremely tempting to put it in with the Borehole, though I ended up putting it on centrals much of the time to make agenda steals much more difficult. This did actually seem to work, at least.

Round 1 - vs. World's Worst Throuple. I was paired up against RotomAppliance. So, you know.

Round 2 - vs. Make MoM Proud. Sadly, I forgot to ask if they were all running Meeting of Minds, though I really hope they were. Another loss for the deck.

Round 3 - Bye! On the board with a win! Damn I'm good.

Round 4 - vs. Send the Run. Another loss for the deck. To this point the deck really hasn't been able to do much of anything. I tried pivoting to agenda scoring far too late.

Round 5 - vs. Alien Joke. We were down at the lowest table and I had a blast! These guys were extremely fun to talk to and play with. I had managed to score an agenda out earlier in the game and was slightly up on points by the time the Borehole went into the remote and started ticking. I also managed to get a Roughneck into an iced remote on the same turn, so I was able to actually keep up with the bad pub production. The runner had blown a bunch of resources to little effect on a previous turn and spent the next several turns doing nothing but moneying up to try to rush the Borehole before it depleted. They made one last massive run through 5 ice, spent the last of everything they had, and trashed the Borehole. However, time was called and I won on points. I'm calling this a Borehole win since it forced the runner to expend too many resources dealing with it. !!! BOREHOLE WIN !!!

This is everybody from the Alien Joke and Losecons teams. Yes, I'm holding my winning Superdeep Borehole and Roughneck Repair Squad.

Main takeaway: Superdeep Borehole is pretty strong and people just need to git gud.