The Failed Exchange - 1st Dallas Regionals

Runner Deck: https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/44293/ppvp-fundies-1st-dallas-regionals

Have you ever flubbed a clear win so badly you knew your friends watching would never let you live it down? If not, have a seat, we're going for a little ride.

First and foremost, this is the corp deck I piloted to win the day in the Common Ground Games Regional Championship in Dallas, TX. I was bad with it. Really bad with it. Thankfully my runner deck carried the day and had a lot more... interesting matches. Namely ones I didn't light myself on fire with idiocy during.

I didn't get much practice prior to the event, but a couple of card/influence choices to talk about are here:

Cyberdex + Ark Lockdown - I'd played a few games in testing different decks of this FA/build-a-remote style, and every time I seemed to get a good feeling about one I'd run into Lock Hayley and it would dump all over my day. I didn't want that to happen this time around, so I went with a relatively aggressive "Kill Clot" plan. Over the course of the day I never killed a Clot, but I did take out an MKUltra that gave me some wiggle room for a while against a Whizzard. Oddly enough that was the only game I ever drew a Lockdown. Cyberdex did good things against a double-medium in that same game.

1 MCA - This might be a better slot than the Cyberdex depending on the meta. There were a lot of Criminals about, so the other MCA would have been a better call for me.

Lotus Field - Fixed breaker gear check. Didn't really do anything for me as Net Ready Eyes was a thing.

The rest is pretty straight forward. It's hard to mull a hand with Scarcity, even if the rest is garbage. It does so much work.

Rounds:

Round 1 - Sweet, sweet bye. Used that lovely free win I grabbed with a triple-slums Temu/Faust Whizz (How much do you not miss those days?) and a big money SanSan EtF deck to sit around and play a game of Lotus with a friend. All zen'd up.

Round 2 - vs. Eddy Kim (Carl Huffman) Sometimes you play a Scarcity deck and don't draw one before they've played 2 off-campus apartments and a good dozen resources, and it makes you sad. While he was engine-building I managed to get a pretty good pile of money and defensive setup which eventually allowed me to stick him with a tag he couldn't clear and enough money left over to kill 2 fall guys and one of the apartments, which netted The Source, Kati, and a few others of lesser impact. The hit was pretty crippling and he couldn't recover before I closed out the game.

Round 3 - Whizzard (Colin Hanna) Found Scarcity on the 2nd or 3rd turn and an early Inject let me Ark an MKUltra which gave me some decent breathing room. He had a decent pool of cash available and for some God-forsaken reason I decided to install-advance a Global Food on a SanSan without the money to defend it. I realized I was being an idiot the moment I out that counter on it, but what's done is done and sometimes you herp away some points. I fell behind after that free gifting and couldn't recover.

Round 4 - ID. Who goes to tournaments to play Netrunner? Not me, obviously. (Though this ID round was super critical for my runner - see that deck for info)

Cut Round 1 & 2 - Runner Side, winners side

Cut Round 3 - Steve Cambridge (JD Bartee) Hoo boy, where do we begin. A turn 1 of Hedge, Scarcity, and News Hound on HQ put him on the back foot right away, and while he dug for answers I got 6 points on the board. Then the Keyhole party began. I developed tunnel-vision so bad Wile-E-Coyote would be impressed and knew - just KNEW - that his Aaron had to go. It was target #1. The only target. Nothing else mattered. So while I was getting siphoned and Keyholed I kept an eye on my credits, knowing soon I could get that sweet 4 and not have to worry about his easy tag removal any more.

Now during this time, he'd stolen a GFI from hand, and somewhere along this haze of illicit stupidity I managed to completely overlook the fact he'd ended his turn with a tag, a GFI, and I had EoI in hand. So I took 3 credits. Because it put me in the ready to MCA that Aaron next turn. Then I got Keyholed 3 more times and he scored the only other 3/2s in my deck and cleared everything with Aaron.

At this point the people I play with locally were having all they could do not to either throw me out of the building or point in my face and curl over laughing. I saw a clear path to the finals in the winner's bracket vanish before my eyes. It felt bad. Realbadman.

Then the gods of herp and derp looked upon our game and smiled. JD made a last click keyhole run that ended up getting him tagged and I EoI'd a win that none of us felt good about in the least.

Finals - Steve, again (JD, again) Opening hand was Sweeps, Hedge, IPO, Jackson, Beale. Sitting across from a blue ID I felt that wasn't the best call, so I mulled it and actually came out with a decent hand of 2 ice, SanSan, Jackson, and IPO. Jackson got trashed, and then I proceeded to find 7 of my 10 agendas in the top 16 cards of the deck, opening hand included. Things went poorly. It was a quick close out for JD, but led to one of the best games I've ever played in the final round.