What does a magical girl do when she has Zer0 Dreams?

With the banning of DreamNet, it seemed likely that Mawrie Kondo, the bigshiko that carried me before the latest banlist dropped, would be dead in the water. However, we found that Zer0 was a more than sufficient alternative, and was an obvious choice for a deck with this much redundancy - for a single click, you get to see two new cards from your deck, while making a credit!

However, the loss of tempo-positive runs from DreamNet meant that we needed a way to still apply early pressure to rush corps. Once again, the redundancy of the deck meant that Tsakhia "Bankhar" Gantulga was an obvious choice. Much testing was done against Haas-Bioroid: Precision Design as a baseline rush corp, and it was found that Bankhar allowed Mawrie to invalidate single iced servers in the early game, slowing down corp play patterns just enough for her to get the inevitable Takobi doom rig set up in about 5 turns.

These two changes informed the cut to be made for the Bankhars: Hippo, a staple in most Anarch decks. While Hippo and Bankhar differ in that they interact with the outermost ice and the first encountered ice respectively, either one working in combination with Takobi turns ice placement into a nightmare.

However, the general philosophy of the deck was crystalizing: we want install order to not matter. Because this is such a large deck, the order in which pieces of the rig are installed cannot be controlled very well. Even if the full rig can be assembled very quickly (and it can), you still want the fraction of the rig you have up in the first few turns to be useful for stealing points and slowing the corp's scoring as you create new real threats. Bankhar is immediately useful once installed - Hippo is not.

Thus, in this final version of the deck, every card is good by itself. Every install acts as a crucial piece to the final doomrig, and nearly every install provides you new capabilities even in the absence of other cards (except Takobi, K2CP Turbine, and The Twinning). Yes, everything works together in the endgame to be greater than the sum of their parts, but importantly in many matchups we are still able to contest servers even with a partial rig up due to the individual power and goodness of each card.

This approach to deckbuilding particularly shines through with Zer0 and Bankhar. Both are low-investment installs that immediately change the game state, giving Mawrie new capabilities. Additionally, only one copy of each is needed to be installed, unlike Hippo, meaning that extra redundant copies become easy Zer0, Bankhar, or Moshing targets. I've said this several times, but redundancy is the fuel of the deck.

A final major change is to swap from 2x Takobi to 1x Takobi and 1x K2CP Turbine. Both cards are interchangeable in most matchups, but each gives Mawrie far more game into specific matchups. For example, Takobi wrecks the big-small ice suite of most HB decks, while Turbine allows your breaker suite to more comfortably deal with The Outfit's 6-strength ice. If you somehow manage to assemble Exodia and have both Takobi and Turbine installed at the same time, then ice might as well cease to exist.

The deck comfortably handles most corps, but struggles specifically into corps that utilize fast advance as the main scoring strategy. These matchups are not impossible, but the low amount of multiaccess means that Weyland corps that can score over-advanced Atlas counters early can be hard to control.

The deck went 5-2 for me at Worlds, losing to a kill Ob and (barely) to a kill Near-Earth Hub during a 241 that would have pushed me to a potential top 32 placement (just check archives at game point next time Kyra). (This is discounting 2 losses due to my corp game taking 60 minutes to lose, then facing a corp that fast advanced a 2/1 just before time for the round was called). I eventually ended up 82nd at Worlds, while fellow QtMember Cobalt brought this (-1 Hannah "Wheels" Pilintra) and ended up 95th. I'm not entirely happy with my placing, but I think it's an alright placement for the first in-person tournament I have ever attended, after 5 months of playing the game.

(Feel free to ping me on #Standard in the GLC Discord server if you'd like me to send you some replays of the deck in action)

Attending Worlds and Feelings

I didn't think I was going to Worlds until 1 month before the event itself, when I got a notification that I was off the Eventbrite waitlist, and flight prices had inexplicably dropped 40% since the last time I checked. It was an incredible experience, but I have some regrets.

There is no financial incentive for playing Netrunner. There is no money in the game. However, we continue to be passionate about it, not because it's a source of income, but because of the communities we have formed around the game. If I had not joined Queering the Message, or QtM, just a measly 4 months ago, I would not have even considered spending so much money to fly out to play this "dead game". This global community of friends that I have come to care so deeply about is the main reason I dropped everything for a week to go to Barcelona.

So why did I get so caught up in trying to do well? Yes, that matters to me too, but I don't think that justifies spending so much time practicing before the tournament even after landing in Barcelona, when I had these amazing people right in front of me! In person! We did have many great moments together, especially after the tournament was over, but everything was over so soon, and I feel like I might have missed the main point of the trip.

Here's to next year, where I'll hopefully learn from my mistakes, and spend more time enjoying the company of my precious friends, rather than stressing out about my placing. Thanks QtM: I love you.

(I made QtM alt arts as a gift for everyone in QtM, each with their name (or lack of) in the title)

It's not just QtM I want to thank though. Closer to home, it has been so wonderful having Jai as a friend and mentor. How great is it that one of the best players in Singapore (and in APAC) is just such a great dude to be around? It was incredibly heartening to see Jai so invested in my performance and wellbeing, even though he himself was not headed to Worlds this year. In the month leading up to my flight, he not only tested my decks with me over multiple training sessions, but he also coached me on how to handle a complex board state for IRL play - that proved crucial for handling Mawrie start of turn triggers in a timely manner in my first ever in person tournament. Beyond just Netrunner, he was a constant source of emotional support and camaraderie, and has grown to become an very important person in my life.

(Jai's birthday was the day I flew off for Barcelona, so I gifted him an alt of Adam, using a portrait drawn by asphyxia, because Adam is his favorite runner)

(Thanks Jai for guiding me through this normal board state of a reasonable faction)

Putting faces to all the usernames I see on GLC and JNet was also so great. It was lovely meeting everyone. Thank you Council for gifting me your Hush playmat just because I mentioned I was sad that I missed out on one by a single placing at NZ Nats. For the person who gifted me their World Tree playmat because I mentioned I really wanted one, special shoutout to you as well (if you see this let me know if you'd like to be specifically mentioned). I love Netrunner, and I love the people who made this game what it is today.