When your girlfriend sends you to nats (12-1 @ E/W US Nats)

Check out my Nationals debrief stream!

When your girlfriend won a nationals last year but is unable to attend that same tournament this year so she sends you to go defend her prized title, will you be allowed back home if you don’t win? Lucky for me, I don’t need to find out the answer to that question.

While this was the primary motivation to fly all the way out to Boston in the first place, it was the power of my nationals winstreak that pushed me on to win the west coast in Seattle the following weekend. Details of that can be found in my corp writeup.

This is a very fun and skill-testing deck. The econ is limited. The power counters on the breakers are limited. And multiaccess tools are limited. At the cost of all that, you get a lean and consistent set of cards that allow you to make powerful, but limited, runs. You can contest everything the corp requires of you, but make a few wrong runs and you’ll run out of resources. Mileage out of this deck requires constantly drawing cards. Weave in those Lat draws in an efficient way but don’t get carried away with it; make sure you always have one eye on what your opponent is up to.

Going to 2 Propellor 2 Revolver makes your setup a lot more consistent and I think turns the PD matchup from bad to good. The limited Propellor counters can be even harder to manage than Revolver but the positive implications of this change for the Bran matchups are massive. The only glaring issue that this creates is that this deck cannot break any barrier with more than 8 strength unless Pelangi is used or Stoneships charge Propellor. This is a real issue but, since Pressure Spike is the best icebreaker against such barriers, I view this as a meta call rather than a flaw. If barriers with strength greater than 8 start showing up then Pressure Spike will walk all over that. Such is the beautiful dance of deckbuilding in Netrunner.

Between Clot, Cupellation, and Fermenter, you get to choose 2 to play. Totally a meta call. I played Clot and Fermenter at Interconts, Cupellation and Fermenter in Boston, and Clot and Cupellation in Seattle.

This list is what I played at West Coast US Nats (Cascadia) this last weekend. At East Coast US Nats (Boston) I played Fermenter instead of Clot and the 3rd Overclock instead of the second Deep Dive.

I think second Dive is correct in this list instead of the 3rd Overclock because this deck has evolved to be faster and has less of a reliance on Overclock credits to install breakers like the original list did. In general I would say a single Deep Dive is all that is needed but the second one is needed against any corp that does damage (since 2x means it can be recurred with DJ Steve) and also the earlier Dive draw can be nice against rush decks like PD or Sports.

Finally, I want to give a big personal thank you to you, the community, for existing. I can name a number of things that had to go a certain way but, at the very core of it all, it is the existence of the Netrunner community that brought Wiki and I together and I can’t express my gratitude enough for that ❤️

Always be running.