The Steven Bradbury effect or how to come 2nd at nationals.

disclaimer its better to be lucky than good any day. Steven Bradbury is an Australian Olympic skater that like me, rode in on a technicality to fame and glory!

This Adam deck and my Aginfusion deck took me to 9th place in the swiss at Australian Nationals 2019. Fortunately for me 7th place (thanks mike!) had to drop day two to return home, moving me into 8th in the cut on a technicality.

During deck checks it was discovered that 1st place in the cut had a list that was different to the deck presented, giving Adam an automatic win in first round of day 2 (thankyou to the rules gods for technicalities!!).

I then went on to win my next two games, both playing Adam going into the final from the winner’s bracket, before eventually dropping both games to my opponent Ryan for a well-deserved crown! Ryan is quite famous in the Syndey meta for being 2nd in many things.

I did beat Ryan’s CTM in the cut, but ultimately, he was able to put down the goods in the final. Given the ‘dorm room computer incident’ of Aus Nationals in 2018 and my sneaky win against his CTM a few hours before, if I was going to come second to anyone I’m glad it was Ryan. Congrats on the well-deserved win and for finally not being 2nd at something!

I have had a good season with Adam, going through numerous iterations of the deck. I did play a crowdfunding Adam deck which was really good, but went back to liberated accounts when it was banned. Adam and I have had a productive year with 2nd at store champs, 3rd at regionals and 2nd place at numerous GNKs, so it was the obvious choice for me when going to nationals.

I think RNG key is very much an auto include in Adam as it encourages value runs and makes FTT that little bit better. I found that when I tested without it that it didn’t suit my play style very well.

Im not that into the rezeki builds as I feel its too reliant on getting brainchip and some agendas for the memory or other shenanigans to cover the mem cost of them and breakers.

Card choices:

I played some builds without turtle in them and was fairly happy with it, I figured that there would be a lot of turtle hate and that playing without it would be a better option, especially if facing lots of IP block.

1 copy of Turtle did eventually come back into the list because of the 3c cost when I added Khusyuk. Khusyuk (and then one SOT) was a late include in the deck and definitely won me 2-3 games. It’s possibly a flex slot, that could change the build if you don’t include. I chose data folding over pad taps due to the 3c cost after using the inf on this card. Between casts, folding, multi-threader and turtle its not hard to hit 5-6 cards on a dig. 2c also works with Whistleblower, brainchip, Kati and Corroder. This was my plan for getting around silly Jinteki trap decks, which turned out not to be an issue.

Whistleblower replaces film critic due to unicorn being spent on Engolo.

Engolo now replaces turtle as primary breaker due to hate cards

Clone chip is to deal with SDS drone deployment.

3 currents to deal with the dreaded scarcity scourge. Interdiction to stop NGOs or other Ash/Bio silliness. I did eventually go from 3 interdiction to 2/1 split with freedom to help close out games with decks that run all 2pt agendas and/or global foods. I did test a 2/2 split at one stage, but it seemed a bit over the top.

Before going into the event, I did think that my Corp deck was the superior deck, but by the end I wasn’t so sure.

Swiss

Round 1 – split with Adam losing against Ben’s sportsmetal. Both our runners had fairly one-sided games where we couldn’t really contest ice. I also saw an early punitive counterstrike and no brain chip, so really had to play around not stealing more than one agenda per turn, he eventually scored out. Ben went on to 3rd place at the event.

Round 2 – Sweep against local from my meta ☹. This is the second time I have pinched a win out of HQ against Gareth early game. Stole one Nisei off the top of R&D 2nd or 3rd turn with Find the Truth and then 5 points from HQ one or two turns later.

Round 3 – ID with Opponent, we ended up playing for funsies and it was a split.

Round 4 – Split, Adam beating Next design without having to deal with gross surveyors.

Round 5 – Split, Adam beating CTM. I stayed ahead on the money game, didn’t contest the assets, used early misdirection install to deal with HHN and focused on locking R&D and HQ for maximum accesses. FFT really helps with high value runs against CTM.

Cut

Round 1 – Auto win

Round 2 – Adam. Played ben’s sportsmetal again. Saw early brain chip and engolo and was able to keep HQ & R&D locked.

Round 3 – Due to the joys of randomisation played as Adam again against Ryan’s CTM deck. Had a fantastic start with economy. Had 3 lib accounts on board and all ticked down to 1 counter left each by about turn 4-5. Plan was to get kyshuyk and use them for this, but ended up needing the economy during the game. Stole and early AR and trashed the single boom. Ryan built a big remote and used lady liberty to get to 6 points. On his last turn he HNN me after installing face down card in remote. I figured it was tag me at this point, ran HQ twice, seeing SSL on R&D. ran and stole it, then the remote last click with 3 credits and logic bomb. Used logic bomb to get past the hydra, ALL THE credits to break the IP block and then snaked the SSL out of the remote for the win. Fantastic game.

Final – Kept an opening hand of sure gamble and data folding, never managed to see enough economy to really contest the game, Ryan used SIU at 20 credits or something to tag and closed accounts me. didn’t really recover from this and eventually conceded after being well tagged up and seeing consulting visit in hand.

Big shout out to the other Adam player at the day for being a true believer.

Big thanks to Luke for hosting the event and being an all-around fantastic human being

Thank you to the Aus Netrunner community for all being generally all around good people and to the Sydney crew for being such a fun and welcoming community.

Lastly, congratulations Ryan on your win! Enjoy the plastic crown, the fame and glory of being Australia’s king of dead card games

Aginfusion decklist - https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/57952/technically-making-the-cut-is-still-making-the-cut-2nd-aus