The Stolen Bench (3rd Italian National 23)

Since 2020, I've almost stopped playing Netrunner, but once or twice a year, some friends pull me out of the fridge to participate in a few events that I can't miss. This gives me the chance to reconnect with the wonderful group of people in the Italian Netrunner community.

Preparation was minimal, as I only played a handful of games (<10) on Jnet, and my awareness of the meta was even worse (more on this later). So, I decided to stick to my usual approach and go through some successful deck lists from recent big events. I shamelessly stole two that aligned with my preferred playstyle, knowing well that the creators of those lists have a much deeper understanding of the game and meta than I do.

Despite this, I typically make a few slot changes because, well, I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed but I cannot stop me from tweaking the list for what I know about the Italian player preferences and my own playstyle (to be honest, deck building was never my thing, even when I played more consistently). This time, I probably made a small correct adjustment on the Corp side but made a HUGE mistake on the Runner side.

As you can see the runner list is ronydoge 419 from Worlds, with the following changes:

-1 Pinhole Threading

-1 Career Fair

-1 The Class Act

+3 Aeneas Informant

The 3 Aeneas Informant did a lot of work in some games but in the cut I couldn't regret more the lack of the 3rd The Class Act as a kill protection.

The deck went 3 - 3 during the event (2 games, one W and one L, were friendly games played during the IDed rounds of the swiss), winning against R+, PD and Azmari and losing twice against AugustusCaesar AgInf (Bacterial punitive) and once against jan tuno Azmari (Neural Spike combo) in my last game.

A massive shoutout to:

• Darta, without whom I would never have joined this tournament. He kept me in the loop on all organizational aspects, found me a place to crash on Saturday night, poked me enough to keep me from bailing. He was also the other half of our testing group, arriving at the tournament after a solid sequence of 5 "testing sessions": 3 phone calls, an evening of 3 games on Jinteki, and a chat at the bar while having breakfast on the tournament morning.

• Jessica and Rebu for pulling off the fantastic organization. You guys are the heroes we need but don't deserve.

• The Italian community, the real reason why I decide to thaw out every year in the end.

• The international guests at the tournament: you undoubtedly made the two great days even better.

• Pinsel, The Process crew, rongydoge for publishing their lists and for the insights shared on playing them. I really think that this kind of contribution to the community is hugely valuable (and is also allowing people like me -without a testing group and with limited time for testing and developing on our own- to continue playing). This is to be extended to all of you publishing lists and commenting tournaments on nrdb.

One last thing, though I believe it's relevant: I participated in the tournament, joining an initiative born among Italian players, registering as #communityroundup(red). Even if I haven't been very involved in the events that made the approach to this tournament a bit hectic, I believe that a dialectical approach to how certain situations—fortunately infrequent but very delicate from a human perspective—are handled by us as a community is crucial.