EMEA Sports presents Aussie Rules Football

At the risk of sounding like one of the sob stories that goes along with contestants in the first round of a TV talent show who you already know are going to be good, I'm nearly a year back into Netrunner after a roughly four year hiatus due to a whole bunch of things including losing a close friend and Netrunner sparring partner, some health stuff and massive amounts of procrastination.

I'm glad I'm back, I'm loving it and all the new people I've met since rejoining, and all the older nerds who continue to surprise me by remembering who I am.

While I was away CobraBubbles and Fridan had managed to recruit a wonderful new group of players in Norwich, joined forces with our old rivals in Cambridge and picked up a couple of strays from Ipswich and Paris to form the EA Sports testing team.

In the run-up to EMEA they were all excitedly playing this Azmari thing that looked ok, I guess, and I totally meant to get round to joining in on that practice. But I didn't, I tried the deck out twice and lost both times to KamiKami's highly tuned 45 card World Tree Arissana.

Meanwhile I'd had the thought of trying to make a homage to my late friend Maxey's Come on and Slam from 2018. Fast decks like this are great for long tournament days where they're easier on the brain than decks with complex multifaceted gameplans, and are usually quick enough to allow for some downtime between rounds.

After trying out a more direct update of the deck with Ariella, I happened upon nin's Holo-Sports deck that had had some success over in the upside-down. This fit the bill pretty perfectly and felt both like something I could pilot competently and also like something Maxey would be playing now. I futher confirmed that I had made the right decision for myself to play this when I read CobraBubbles early-morning 'Punitive Maths' doc and it looked indecipherable to me at the time.

A couple of minor changes and a bunch of practise later and this is what I took to EMEA. It went 4-1 on the day, against Ams' brave Nova, Aksu's Hoshiko, Angelbot5000's Esa and HaverOfFun's 66-card World Tree Arissana with added shufflecramp. The loss was to Quercia's Deep Dive Sable. Extra credit to Quercia for the extra skill required to do so well and make top 16 while playing with Makler!

So I make that an 80% winrate, and I'm told that it included a 100% winrate against a group that calls themselves the Tiebreakers or something like that.

So I felt the deck performed well, and was I was sitting quite well after round 4 with a hard-earned 5-3 record, the 4/4 Sports wins making up for the dismal 1/4 Hoshiko wins. Round 5 was me getting swept by Quercia, and round 6 and 7 were both 241s where I rolled runner and lost, leading to a 1/7 rate with runner (mostly involving absolutely buffoon misplays) and a suboptimal final placing.

I could do some technical advice for the deck, but nin covered the basics and it doesn't actually get a lot more complex than that. Holo Man is sick when it costs 4 to use and you can make more credits than that through Tranquility Home Grid, Greasing the Palm and your ID, all while scoring agendas from hand.

Thanks and shoutouts to the best company I could have hoped for; CobraBubbles, Fridan, not_yeti, KamiKami, AAshbo, CountZer0, Kikai, davz131, Tanzzen and Bartimeaus, to the EA Sports support team of Emily, Lizzard and Pige0n, and to the teammembers, Brindelmold, Ollie and Havvy, who couldn't make the trip but kept up the hype online.

Huge congratulations to Kikai, CobraBubbles and not_yeti for their exceptional performances and for proving that runner minimum decksize is objectively correct and non-negotiable.