Hotel Cambridge - Worlds Top Crim (7th overall)

This is the extremely, extremely vanilla Steve list that I played to 7th at worlds 2021. Throughout testing I was absolutely not sure that Steve was the capital C correct place to be, and the results I think bear that out with MaxX proving a solid chunk better, but we spent enough time dithering about corp that in the end just playing the fundamentally fine list that we'd had all along that I knew well seemed sensible enough.

In Swiss I lost to a Reeducation Neurospike rush Azmari after stumbling badly on economy, beat ACME, Restoring Humanity, Neurospike Palana, took an ID, lost to vault Azmari, then won a very scrappy 241 against PD.

In the cut I lost a knife edge game against Percomis on Gagarin then won another equally knife edge one against Pinsel on the same Gagarin before flipping corp a couple of times and ultimately landing in 7th place.

I think this list is, in the post-419 era, the absolute definition of Solid. The economy is pretty bonkers even without casts and it can just keep trucking for days in the late game with the Steve recursion, quite often happily making 200+ credits (then spending all of it because you can't trash any ice) in the longer glacier games, there are just enough tricks to keep your opponent on edge and just enough speed to keep up with most corps. I'm not going to claim that it's definitely the right runner to take if you want to crush any specific opponent but if you want to play some good, fundamental netrunner, make some complex decisions and just occasionally make your opponent incredibly miserable by playing 6 doofs and 6 pad taps, this is the place to be.

Big thanks to Nisei for running the event - as much as we all mither about online events, realistically we weren't getting an irl worlds this year and if this year and last year had been failures I think we'd be looking at a very small crappy affair next year, as it is I think The Return IRL Worlds is going to be absolutely sick and I cannot wait, to all my opponents for some great games, to the Process gang for giving me an outlet all year to talk about Netrunner after I moved to a new city and couldn't go to any irl events and for being generally cool and fun.

Huge congratulations to RotomAppliance, ever since I started playing competitively you've been at the very top of the game and I've always admired how consistently you do well through dozens of different metas, you're always a great person to play against and you massively deserve to pick up the worlds win here