theprocess Hoshiko, a glacier defense [2nd @ Italian Nats]

I haven't felt very good at the game in the past weeks: Worlds was a lot emotionally and prep for it took a lot of energy from me, after a whole summer very dedicated to getting better at Netrunner. I've kind of run out of spoons to practice and improve, and probably need a short break now, but I still wanted to do what I could at Italian nats.

I felt especially bad runner side. I would have probably taken mulch or Princess Toadstool had I been in the right shape, but it felt too difficult for an in-person tournament at the moment. Mawrie feels powerful every time I test against it but somehow doesn't click for me. Esa and Kit could have been great choices for a simple deck to pilot, but I had no experience with either and no time to really learn them in a satisfying way. So I turned to Nemamiah, who had already iterated on my lists in ways I really liked, for something that worked for me and didn't require too much brainpower.

This is basically theprocess's list from UK nats with a couple changes, mostly meant to make it a little better against Punitive Jinteki, which I fully expected to face. The changes were good for their purpose, even though in the end I punted against the deck.

Ngl despite the intent being the opposite, this was extremely tiring. The tournament was full of glaciery decks that asked you to do a lot of math, and also presented a very real risk of going to time. The tiebreaker round against [cool dude]'s MCA Blool Azmari is probably the fastest I've ever played netrunner, with many many turns spent at a 6-6 score and a very real possibility of not getting into the cut because I had a lower seed.

Ultimately tihs went 3-5, which I don't feel that bad about considering my low expectations going in and how big of a Corp meta this seems to be. Sadly I really misplayed in the grand finals against AugustusCaesar, where despite reading the list and keeping it in front of me I completely forgot that Big Deal was in his deck and I just sat there passively trying to prevent him from building a remote. A single run on Archives would have secured the win, but top cut brain betrays you sometimes.

More thoughts on the tournament and this whole competitive season in my Corp writeup, but this was just a really fun event and despite the frustration I'm still really happy I got that far. <3