I've not had a positive win rate with any corp since Worlds ended. People keep saying it's a corp meta, and while the runner-corp win rates at tournaments do indicate that, I had massive dissonance from that not aligning with my own experiences. Mawrie, my runner archetype of choice for the last few months, had been winning much more than losing, and I couldn't figure out a corp that could handle Mawrie, Mulch, Arissana, Lat, Esâ, and Sable.

This generated a lot of anxiety, which was compounded by the fact that I had basically no time to practice or test any decks in the month between Worlds and SG Nationals. My PhD work backlog had piled up in the time I'd been hyperfixated over this great game, and I had to force myself to stop playing nearly as much once back from Barcelona.

This meant that I still had no idea what corp to bring the night before SG Nats. I wasn't expecting to perform well, but it would still be really sad to do poorly on home turf. Jai, being the amazing friend that he is, came over to help me choose a panic corp, crashing at my place before the tournament the next day.

Scrolling through the massive number of decklist writeups that came out of UK Nats, I came across a line in the excellent RIDE OR DI(v)E:

Rush Ob - The worst matchup, in my opinion. It combines speed with a wide variety of threats in its ice suite and a number of ways to tax out our Simulchips.

This immediately confused me somewhat, having tried Calicana Zoo a few times after Worlds against Mulch, and getting demolished each time by SimulClot. If you can't FA, aren't you somewhat dead in the water?

Not quite, it seems. The ice suite can be tweaked somewhat to shore up your worst matchups. Mulch easily negates Sandstone and Ice Wall with Botulus, but deeply dislikes having to deal with Envelopment. And while having 1-cost ice is very important for the Slash and Burn Agriculture FA Azef Protocol to Ob fetch a Spin Doctor, 3 Ice Walls is a lot of slots for a piece of ice that very quickly gets negated by any fracter - 1 Ice Wall 1 Tithe is an OK amount that gives you more flexibility in what you Tucana for, depending on the board state.

What about SimulClot then? Even with a slightly more taxing ice suite, Mulch with Conduit and Deep Divers can easily stall you out with a clot, and then use the window to execute their win conditions. Here, I take inspiration from a Rush Ob variant that came out of UK Nats, including a single Crisium Grid. This card helps stop Deep Dives and Conduit charging, while also being useful against a whole host of other cards that require successful runs: Chastushka, Diversion of Funds, DJ Steve, WAKE Implant v2A-JRJ, and the list goes on.

5 to trash is an immense cost, especially with the speed at which games against this deck must go at. This method of slowing down the runner's win condition gives you ample time to find a Mavirus, or even purge manually, allowing you to eventually continue FA-ing to victory.

I sleeved this deck with changes cooked up in the short hours we had before sleeping, and played one game against Jai on our runner deck. I won convincingly as the corp for the first time in a long time. That would have to be enough. It was midnight, and time to sleep.

This deck proceeded to go 4-1 for me at Singapore Nats, after nearly no practice on it. It is incredibly intuitive and powerful, and has new tools to shore up your worst matchups. I somehow end up 3rd, after expecting to end in the bottom half.

Also I somehow won this (turn 1):

What an incredible end to my first ever competitive season. I am so proud of QtM (which has had an amazing showing for so many tournaments this season, like chordgang who placed 5th immediately after making top cut at UK Nats too), so proud of the Singaporean contingent (all 3 of whom ended up in the top cut: IonFox who came out of a 3 year retirement from the game to smash into 2nd, and Jai who I keep having to remind is an incredible player, mentor, and friend), so proud of Ying64 (who I had a brief conversation with on a random JNet game and they somehow recognized me and I think I convinced them to join their first ever tournament which they then won???), and so proud of myself (top cut at half the tournaments I've joined and a deck of the week after less than half a year of playing the game). Special shoutout to my partner, Tea - without her support I couldn't have gotten this far.

I love this game, and I love all of you.

Replays

R1 Win vs Lat

R2 Win vs Az

R3 Win vs Sable

Cut R1 Loss vs Less is Mawrie

Cut R4 Win vs Az

Breakfast before SG Nats

Post-tournament wine and cheese

Breakfast after SG Nats

There are board games other than Netrunner?