Chaconne in DD Minor - 18th, Undefeated @ EMEA 24

Prelude

With EMEA (and holidays) on the horizon, I asked myself the same question as always: What should I play? After the last Banlist update, my KANEHL and René were both, to put it mildly, weaker than before. In general, playing Runner is a lot harder for me and the usual process of just switching decks when things aren't going well wasn't going to be the solution this time. So I asked around for tips and, besides numerous useful habits, the one common denominator was: practice runner alot (!), many players said they play 5-10x as many runner games as corp games.

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Finding the right Key

But which faction and ID? I decided early on in favour of Criminals, as I had played them the least and I thought HB would be over-represented. After numerous test games, I really liked Bankhar Steve and the results were good, but the asset matchup was a bit too dicey for me. So I tested Rotom´s List and the List that krysdreavus had played at ACC. But neither list clicked for me, which is definitely down to my experience, and I looked a bit left and right. Aumakua in particular was doing the heavy lifting in most games, even though the build-up after a Purge was very slow. So I tried some more bypassing, leech and Tunnel Vision, heavily orientated on Cahuita's list from Worlds and quickly found myself liking the redundancy of the deck: Lots of burst econ cards, a good amount of bypassing, and a very elegant Breaker Solution. Especially the latter had two advantages for me, firstly I had to invest less time and credits for Breaker and secondly I could run more aggressively in some matchups. After purges, Tunnel Vision and Leech were helpful to get back online faster and i liked Deep Dive as a finisher right now.

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Variations

2x Pinhole Threading and 2x Miss Bones should make it possible to better contest the remote and the board. Swift is a great card, but I felt more comfortable with Hermes, which slows the game down a bit and forces the corp to interact more with the runner. To compensate for the lost Click, I decided to go with Alarm Clock.

But I wasn't really sure about the deck, but anyway, it was too late and in a week I was flying to Bergamo, where I knew I wouldn't get many practice games, dang, time runs to fast. I hoped that my general experiments with Sable and Crims had created a good basis and that I could now just play a few more games.

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Tournament

Unfortunately I didn't take any notes and the weather and the excitement affected my memory a bit.

I won against 2 Issuaq, Outfit, PD, Asa and drew against BtL, 2 games were 2:1 and the last round ID. Unfortunately my SOS was a bit too bad to get into the top cut, but I had a nice chat with Kikai about Criminals, so I have no regrets!

The deck felt very good as every draw got me further, however I only installed Tunnel Vision in 2 games and used it in one, but having the loyal dogs with me generally made me play more aggressively!

I'm really looking forward to the next tournaments and the confidence I've found in playing Runner.

Thanks for the great experience at EMEA and best regards to everyone I met <3