Worst Singaporean Netrunner any% Speedrun

(8th at Singapore Nationals, if anyone’s interested.)

My humble contribution to KANEHL+ theory at the tail end of the 2023 season.

3-0 in Swiss, beating Sable, Lat, Esa; much more disappointingly 0-2 in the cut, losing to @IonFox’s Audrey Loup and @KyraWNY’s Mawrie (which happened to be my runner deck on the day as well).

The Changes

1:1 Starlit Knight : Unsmiling Tsarevna is a little bit of a copout honestly; I really dislike Starlit but can definitely see the utility in endgame tagme scenarios. That being said if I had to run it back I’d probably play double Tsarevna and trust in Moon Knight to carry the late game post-Big Oppo. With the new old tech of Ablative Barrier backup!

Second Seamless Launch came in handy in many scenarios, and I often found myself wishing that I had one in hand, which speaks much for its justification in the deck. It remains to be seen whether Seamless+Ablative is a better influence spend than The Process’ Anoetic Void, and it probably comes down to your local meta. In practice I found that Anoetic became a very easy and obvious Pinhole Threading target, but your personal mileage may vary.

The Econ

I’m not the biggest fan of Regolith Mining License - in general I found that without a Wage Workers setup, clicking a Rego gives the runner too much breathing room to recover tempo for my taste - but in a deck as slot-starved as this I can begrudgingly accept the need for a high-credit density econ option. If I could magically conjure card slots out of nowhere I’d turn one Regolith into two YDLs, but alas that is not the world we live in. And let it not go unsaid that I found all 3 modes of Predictive Planogram extremely useful in the original version of the deck!

A little bit more on this. Over the course of my games with various versions of the deck I did find that the baseline econ spread (3 Planogram, 3 Marilyn) was extremely finely balanced - I often found myself planning out credit-perfect multi-turn lines that hung on a razor's edge. Conversely, the Regolith variants felt a lot more feast-or-famine; hitting an econ-light draw means that a rich runner can pivot to a 'kill all Marilyns on sight' plan and choke you out of the game, whereas a game with a Wage Workers Regolith popoff can see you sitting on close to 20c with no realistic way to spend it. Funnily enough, both these things can happen in the same game!

In general I'm a fan of YDL and being able to turn the R+ ID into 'gain 2c AND draw 2 cards', but the card is disruptive enough to Wage Workers play patterns that I'm leery of basing the entire econ plan around the card; YDL gets a lot worse when the fine print reads 'lose a click because you lost WW value this turn'. I don't know if there's a satisfactory answer to the econ problem, and definitely very eager to see future developments in this regard, if they even exist.

-you can stop here if you don’t want to read any of the sappy stuff-

The Sappy Stuff

Based purely on my tournament claims this season, I’m probably as yellowblooded as they come; but even so there’s still so much I can learn about the archetype. Especially in situations where I’m playing from behind, I still sometimes struggle with recovering unfavourable positions while having a low-percentile first 15 draws. With more thought and refinement, this is probably something that can be rectified with deck construction (another reason why I like Planograms!), but it’s very likely to be just be a skill issue. Maybe one of these days I’ll feel self-assured enough to not cringe a little when people call me a good NBN player!

Going 0-2 in the SG cut with my pet ID was a hugely disappointing way to cap the season, and it really sucks that I had to run into my fellow countrymen and women to end it, but I’m still so proud of what we’ve done both at this event and in this season. 100% local player cut conversion rate is immense, and to be the worst-placing among them is still something I’m not unhappy about. Love you both ❤️

It’s still too early to call what Lib2 and 2024 will bring; but I have every confidence that SG Netrunner will continue to grow, and I’m honoured and humbled to have been a part of it. We’ve made our mark both regionally and internationally, and maybe one of these days we’ll win our own damn events, yeah?

The Shoutouts

In no particular order~

TAI Breakers: we’ve come a long way, and there’s still so much more we can do!

jan tuno: you’ve always been my inspiration

Jinsei, the king: you know what you did

Fox, Kyra: Majulah

The End

Hydration check on the day: 2 bottles of water, 1 can of Peppermint Green Tea, 1/5 glass of red wine (after the thing ended, I'm not crazy). Obviously not enough, given how the whole thing went.

I swear this is gonna be the end of the season for me now - other than some of the asyncs, but that's another story

2024, get ready for us

ABR friendos

Jai out