Waffle Val (1st Place Belgian Nationals)

Okay so this is a pretty normal reg Val list, except it’s not. After quite quickly settling on a 45 card skeleton for the list (everything except Turntable, d4v1d, 2x Hippo and Archivist) team UK spent a very long time trying to work out what we should do with the remaining 5 slots, we all wanted an Archivist because it’s insane if you get it against CtM turn 1 since it triggers on all of their agendas except Project Beale and 15 mins, importantly if they score an ARES you’ll most likely end up with a bad pub which can help to offset any extra tags you’ll be taking, also having a link makes tracing through IP Blocks and resistors a lot more palatable. The other reason to run archivist and probably what pushed us over the edge was that it also does a lot of work against Mti, since Nisei Mk.2, Philotic Entanglement, Global Food Initiative, Future Perfect that is all of their most common agendas except Obokata, while you won’t often get a bad pub against mti, you will force them to spend credits and the key to the mti matchup seems to be getting as much value out of runs as you can while the corp is poor.

However, there was no standard list from team UK since other people took slight variations on the 5 ‘flex slots’ but at the end of the day we pretty much agreed on 1 hippo, 1 turntable, 1 archivist and 1 d4v1d with the final card to be decided.

Some people say reg val is ‘dull’ or ‘boring’ and I couldn’t disagree more, it’s netrunner distilled down to it’s basic essence and the bad pub really enables a form of aggression, a good example of this is in the finals game against mti where I’m able to apply pressure to centrals, trashing rashidas/NGOs/battys without losing any real tempo. This match was streamed on Trace Five.

In the tournament the deck went 6-1, losing it’s first game to punitive Azmari (after accidentally stealing 6 points in one turn) but then winning against Argus, Mti, Titan and Mti in swiss, followed by Argus and Mti in the cut

I am extremely grateful to all the UK players who came to Belgian nats and/or helped me to test games and refine the decks, especially to team AirBnB where we did a lot of discussion about lines against mti and Argus which I was able to apply directly in the cut the next day.

Thanks to @clusterfox for organising and running the whole event as well as convincing me to make the trip over for the weekend. Thanks to the runner up @michiel.questier who is an exceptional player who two years ago beat me in the finals at Belgian nationals when our places in the winners/losers bracket were reversed. Finally thanks to all the people on slack who sent me messages of support over the weekend!