FoodCoats - 2016 Arizona Regional Winner (37 players)

This is the ETF deck I took to the Arizona Regionals and finished 1st with. I really like Crisium, Biotic, and the ice suite, so I used the deck that Toby Forman won Cambridge with -> http://stimhack.com/regional-cambridge-ma-53-players/. It went 4-0 on the day, 2-0 in Swiss (due to a bye and 2 IDs) and 2-0 in elimination.

Swiss Round 2:

Here I played against a really nice guy named Nick from my local store who was running a solid Maxx deck. I was 1-1 against this deck and was able to gather that it was a full on medium dig deck (at least that’s how he played it even though he had the breakers to get into remotes). I basically got my campaigns up and just threw everything at R&D. I was also able to fire and ABT with Jackson in play, so that added fuel to the fire. Eventually he started focusing on my remote and made it pretty brittle, but I had biotic in hand and was able to FA from 5 points for the win.

Swiss Round 3:

Don’t remember the guy’s name here, but he was running Apex, so the strategy was to sit back forever, make a bazillion dollars, turning centrals, crisium centrals, and eventually score out once he ran out of steam. I did make one mistake where I had Vitruvius and Ash in the remote and he ran. He was on something like 5 credits, and I thought I’d be cute and leave the Ash trace at 4 (feigning an NAPD). He went ahead and paid the trace and stole. Thinking back, there was no reason not to bump it a couple and make him run again since he would have trashed Ash anyways. Didn’t really matter though since he only got to 4 points the whole game and scoring out was cake once Apex ran out of food.

Winner’s Bracket Round 1:

Here I played a guy named Greg (not sure if the spelling is right there) from California. Really great guy and a good player, but unfortunately he too was playing Apex (still impressive to top 8 with Apex though, kudos to him on that) and I got to pick which side I wanted to play first. Easiest decision all day. This was the corporate scandal/blackmail deck, and luckily, I didn’t learn that the hard way. I got turing and crisium on HQ pretty quickly, so I wasn’t worried about apoc, but I was just worried about being able to score out. I was able to sneak one agenda out when he used up his blackmails before his levy, and then he started regularly running the remote which allowed me to rez and make blackmail a non-issue. Eventually he ran out of steam and I scored out. I think the final score was 7-2, so it really wasn’t close. I just had to make sure not step on any landmines.

Winner’s Bracket Final:

Here I played Jon D who I was warned was a top 16 World’s player, Regional Champion, the whole bit, so I knew I would have to play well and probably get lucky to beat him. He was running Noise which is always an interesting matchup against HB, but one that I like as CVS in the remote/archived memories/Vitruvius to bring it back helps a ton. Here’s kind of what happened. I got 2 Hedge Funds off and ice on R&D, HQ, and a remote, and I shoved a breaker bay in the remote to bait him/maybe get a top deck campaign going if he didn’t run. He got Faust out and trashed the breaker bay, so now I needed a better plan. I had biotic, ABT, Jackson, and ash in hand, so the plan in my mind was stick the Jackson, fire the ABT. So Jackson and Ash go into the remote and I take a credit. He lays off the remote for a turn, opting to set up instead. I fire the ABT, and this was the second best ABT I’ve ever fired. It came up Turing, Turing, Architect (my best one I ever had was Tollbooth, Tollbooth, Ichi 1.0), and I knew how big this was. I threw double Turing on the remote and put Architect in front of an unrezzed Ichi 1.0 on R&D. Now it was time to win quick and Jon knew it. He spent a couple of clicks getting medium and something else out and ran R&D on click 3 with 4 cards in hand. He suckered the architect and broke with Faust, and so I rezzed Ichi with him on 2 cards and a click. The funny thing was I didn’t even look at our credits where I had 6 and he had 5, but he figured it out and verbally acknowledged that he couldn’t let the trace fire or he’d be dead. Good thing he said that, because we were joking around after, and I told him if he didn’t say anything, I would have just let the trace fire at 1 out of habit. Lesson learned the easy way. Anyway, so faust got killed and I just slammed GFI in the remote and bioticed out a Vitruvius for the win. Probably one of the luckiest games of netrunner I’ve played, and it couldn’t have happened against a stronger opponent/bigger moment. This win put me into the Grand Finals which I would eventually take to win my first Regional Championship. Jon was a really great sport about it all and kept telling everyone about the ABT that took him down. It was a really fun tournament, and I’m glad the Cali guys were able to come out, it was a good time.

The only reason I brought this deck was because I played IG at one game night and hated playing it. So much shuffling and tedious stuff that I just didn’t want to do in a tournament setting. Funny thing is I saw 2 IG players (including Jon) lose to time, and this really showed me that IG in tournaments is super dicey. Obviously HB isn’t as good as it once was with Caprice, but I knew I was a decent glacier player, and it ended up paying off….plus having ABT in faction won the game against Jon, so I’ll take it.