As hinted in my corp writeup, we had a much harder time getting a runner sorted out than a corp. While R+ was a fairly obvious pick, it was a real stretch to figure out what the meta was going to look like on the day and quite what priority to put on beating R+ (which we considered to be the most powerful corp, and which a lot of people had confirmed they were going to be playing).
Wu and Freedom were the "obvious" starting points after their success at worlds but none of us were super confident in playing the Freedom matchups into R+, despite the strength of the deck against Sports (which we assumed would be deck #2), and Wu felt like it was middling against everything rather than crushing anything in particular. As we refined the R+ list and slowly moved the Freedom matchup further and further into the corp's favour we entered a collective period of mild hysteria and started throwing everything we could at the proverbial wall to see if any of it would stick. Almost any time someone took a win off of R+ that felt at all decisive the runner in question was picked over at length.
Somewhere in the middle of all that we ended up with a couple of different versions of 419 which seemed reasonably solid. One boat deck on stargate Mad Dash that Rotom had built following on from SamRS' world's list, and one Pennyshaver deck with Cezve + Twinning which I built from MotionBlur's. After some discussion we agreed that the Gate/Dash combo and the full set of Pinholes and NFLs from the boat list felt great for crushing R+, but most of us preferred how the econ felt in the reg list. The Pennyshavers also got trimmed for Paragons because in that matchup it felt impossible to bank up enough credits to actually be worthwhile, between the threat of HHN and Self Growth. I threw together (most of) this list while we were looking for a synthesis, and off we went to Sheffield.
Going into PoS we decided that the best way to decide between the pile of runner candidates we had (419, boat 419, apoc Hoshiko, Wu) was to split them up and play all of them. Surely one of us would love our runner and we could confidently play that.... Come midnight we were crowded round an airbnb kitching table, all bemoaning that we'd all had a bad day, none of them were actually good enough in the R+ mirror, we still didn't know how much R+ there would be vs Sports and everything was awful (apart from ChrisFerg who was trying to convince the rest of us to be sensible and not change everything).
Fortunately, about 5 minutes before we were going to give up and go to bed, Whiteblade arrived and told us that he thought the 419 was sick (having borrowed a deck to play after losing faith in tag me Zahya), the R+ matchup was easy, the Sports mu (assuming they'd all be on Sokka's midrange sports rather than an all in FA version) was easy, doof + inside job crushes every other deck and we were all being stupid. Bolstered by this newfound confidence, 4 of us (myself, nemamiah, whiteblade and chrisferg) locked in this version of 419 and we all made the cut. Unfortunately people who had been in the room who locked in on apoc Hoshiko and Wu instead also made the cut so the question of who was right remains completely unresolved, maybe we were all right...
WB was right though, the deck felt incredible on the day and once the initial hurdle is cleared the R+ matchup feels ridiculously one sided in 419's favour.