Canadian Val (3rd Place SMC w/ Report)

This is the runner I (Ve Herrmann) played at the 2016 ANRPC SMC finals. I basically watched the Canadian nationals and really enjoyed Alex Bradley’s (@lopert) decks. I took the CTM deck he posted a week before the tournament with the suggested edits (-1 magnet, +1 SSCG, -1 tarma, +1enigma). He hadn’t posted his Val deck until the day after the tournament but I put together my best guess of what it was and I ended up two cards off. Definitely go check out his write ups below if you want to learn more about how the decks work specifically. If you want to see the decks in action you can check out dodgepong’s twitch channel recording of the event around 7 hours and 50 mins. Going to include a small tournament report as well for those interested.

Runner: https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/37880/the-holy-trinity-1st-canadian-nationals-

Corp: https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/37755/come-closer-1st-canadian-nationals-2016-

Twitch Video (might go away eventually): https://www.twitch.tv/dodgepong/v/90064067

Swiss Round 1: Gordie Murphy (ETF/Whizzard) Well jeez. Game 1 against the previous SMC champion but no easy games in an ANRPC final I suppose. We exchange some jokes about the idea of being picky about mulligans as I keep my average starting CTM hand and Gordie decided to mulligan his Whizzard hand. Unfortunately, Gordie got bit by his draw and CTM was able to do the CTM thing and snow ball to a win when not heavily pressured.

We switch and Gordie uses TarMa first turn to name Blackmail. I try to surprise him and run his first card behind an ice with Faust instead of feeding the Tarma and using my blackmails to break his eli. Unfortunately it’s just a Jackson and I am unable to trash. This allows him to fire a safe beta test with biotic and gets a turing on his remote. From here, he scores 4 points behind turing eli because I wouldn’t believe he would score twice knowing I could get in (data suckers+faust+2 cards+3clicks). Woops. Then he biotics out the last agenda. Afterwards he mentioned he forgot to consider the data suckers when doing the math about if I could get in or not.

Score 1-1

Swiss Round 2: David Weeks (49 IG/Whizzard) David was one of the most fun people to play against this weekend! Playing against His IG was one of the craziest games I had in the entire tournament. I was able to keep his assets clear for a good while but eventually started running out of money as archives acquired 3 shocks and I couldn’t find a d4v1d to deal with the crick on it. My focus shifted from trying to score 7 points and making it so he couldn’t kill me before decking. The lock starting to get established but I found my rumor mill as well which put a lot of pressure on him disallowing him to use his last Jackson to refill his dwindling deck. He surprised me with a philotic scored off the table but I was able to recur rumor mill. Eventually he scored another agenda and I didn’t have a good way to get rumor mill back so he popped his Jackson. Eventually I just draw up and trash the must trash cards the best I can. It comes down to him having a single card in his deck but a fully advanced ronin and two untrashable bioethics. I get the crazy idea to rebirth into Noise and install a parasite to make the corp deck with enough cards in hand to tank bioethics damage.

The next game started pretty well for me. David is playing damon fork with an early wild cakes opening however I hit him with hard hitting news and use that to trash his wyld side. He makes some strong plays though and rips through my rnd with cutlerly and gets rid of all the etr ice leaving only archangel. We are both at game point me needed to draw either breaking news or exchange for a win and him on 5 points with a global food. Things are getting really tense and near time and he scores another agenda off my rnd and we he gets really excited and congratulates me on a good game and we clean up our cards. Unfortunately, it was pointed out that he scored breaking news which only means he had 6 pts. He forgot about global food only counting for 2 pts. It’s an awkward spot but David is very nice and agrees to concede because it’s impossible to reconstruct the game state now.

Score 3-1

Swiss Round 3: Oosh Bakhtiari (NEH/Kate) Oosh was such a pleasure to play against and a super nice guy! Near Earth Hub is kind of a niche identity at this point. I expect it’s assembly lines going into the match though an early breaking news score for no obvious benefit tips me off that It’s a kill deck. A weird thing happens where I hit a psychic field and it hits an I’ve had Worse which draws plascrete from my deck and net damages it out so I am super vurnable to dying.

A few turns go by I am fairly sure my opponent has assembled his combo and I can’t find another I’ve had worse. From my earlier RND accesses I am pretty sure the RND ice is data raven so I decide to dig as hard as I can with medium through it and on my last click and last access with too many tags to count I get my 7th point. Super tight game!

Next game is CTM against Kate and I am pretty terrified guessing it’s a nexus kate which is basically the natural predator of CTM. I get some relief once it’s revealed to be a stealth deck knowing I have some good ice to tax stealth breakers (arch angel especially). However, my heart drops once he discards a clot with clone chip on the board. The deck just has no great answer to clone chip and clot unfortunately and I can’t win before getting rnd dug to death despite the runner being very tagged. Very well played by Oosh!

Score 4-2

Swiss Round 4: Intentional Draw Yep. I did the thing I hate because I am tired and I really want to make the cut and take a break. Not much else to say. #Ruined

Score 5-3

Elimination Game 1: Travis Yeo (Sol) Travis is an amazing player and caught me totally off guard with his deck. I had a very good start except for the fact that I played into Tarma to get my Contract online and Travis was bursting money hard. Eventually the game is 5-1 for me but I am running out of steam a bit and I get hit with a midseason for something like 20 tags which I did not consider at all. I was strictly playing around hard hitting news. This makes the resistor+resistor+data hound rnd super tough to deal with but I figure I have to win before psycho hits and I feed another Tarma with playing Medium and run RND accessing a psycho so I click for two hoping he doesn’t have beale. Travis has Beale and wins the game the next turn. After the game Travis pointed out I should have ran HQ after seeing psycho for a chance to steal Beale if he was holding and he was totally right.

Elimination Game 2: Francisco J Mehlhaff (Andromeda) Happy to finally meet Francisco! Also actually kind of happy to play against my first criminal of the day considering the CTM deck is tuned to fight criminals. Francisco had a strange start with a desperado and an RND interface against my open RND but I quickly hit him with hard hitting news and he gained money and cleared tags. And we kind of went back and forth for a while with me tagging him and him working through the tags. Though all this bought me enough time to get my game rolling and get my 7 points.

Elimination Game 3: Alexander (NEH) Had a very strong start with contracts and earth rise and basically everything except for breakers for the first few turns. Alexander scores out a first turn breaking news which tips me off immediately that it’s another kill deck. I spend a long time just checking every remote and trashing everything to keep my opponent poor and running hq a lot. Eventually, I rebirthed into Edward Kim and smash tons of combo cards from HQ. My opponent has discarded a large number of cards so I decide to dirty laundry the archives and get the agendas I need to win the game. Rough luck for my opponent I think.

Elimination Game 4: Sjohn Chambers (Valencia) Sjohn was probably the absolute nicest guy I met all weekend and gave such an awesome game. Unfortunately it was such a back and forth game that it went to time and I am not sure I would have won if it didn’t happen that way. Early into the game I was lucky enough to draw into my boot camp and prerez my remote server of archangel and data raven so I didn’t have to worry about blackmail. From there, I spent a lot of time shoving mumbad virtual tours and san san city grids into the remote and tagging and my opponent clearing tags. Eventually I was out of Jackson Howards and my hand was starting to get flooded when time was called. I discarded a food which left a beale and a breaking news in my hand with the game tied at 2-2. Sjohn has one last turn and checks my remote which isn’t an agenda then runs hq and unluckily misses any agendas which allows me to score breaking news to win on time at 3-2. Super tight game that I probably shouldn’t have won. Sjhon played flawlessly!

Elimination Game 5: Travis Yeo (Kate) It’s Travis again and I know by this point that he is only a link heavy Kate build. I know this is probably a nearly impossible matchup for me so I keep my aggressive starting hand that includes an enigma, the astroscript and a burst money card. I push out the astro and enigma first turn and play my money card which confuses Travis as it’s not a very CTM thing to do.

I am lucky enough to dodge SMC and get my astro but it isn’t enough. Travis gets his rig set up real quick and most of my ice becomes blank as I rely on more tracers than most CTM decks do so I can’t tax his rnd runs. I do draw him into my remote a few times with virtual tours etc but he plays it smart and mostly stays out of hard hitting news range. I do hit him with news once but with opus he bounces back pretty quickly and clot locks me in the end game turning off my out of breaking news + exchange plays. At one point I try to get sneaky when he sees a sensei in RND and I install breaking news naked and put a sensei in my remote but it doesn’t pay off and he gets my news. From here the clot lock and rnd lock is too much and he gets his 7th point.

Very well played by Travis and such a good meta call! Travis played in the last chance qualifier with CTM and Val like myself but switched to Kate and Sol for the finals. Congratulations to him as the eventual winner of the tournament!