Durham NC Regionals 1st Place

"Vote down my HoF nomination, will ya? I guess I’ll just have to dominate this regionals and show them all.” <-- Definitely not my actual thought process.

I was not expecting to do very well at this tournament since I’d been out of the game for a little while and made only token efforts to prepare. I only got a grand total of 1 game in with this deck before the tournament and it showed on day 1. Fortunately the deck was strong enough to carry its weight through the Swiss and was excellent on day 2 where I faced what felt like very favorable matchups. My runner deck was a Desperdo Whizz deck that I ended up playing with once in cut (I may post it later, but since I didn’t play it much on day 2, and definitely didn’t play it very well in the finals match this is the deck I’m more interested in talking about).

This deck list was given to me by Zach Cavis the night before so huge thank you to him. I made one change: -1 Philotic and +1 Corporate Sales Team. I'm not sure if it was the right call; I only scored the CST once and it was fine, but I can also see the value of a 3/2 that can pretend to be a Caprice for a turn and then gets scored.

The deck generates a lot of money with operations and then scores Agendas behind a Chiyashi, FC3, or whatever is handy. You can score early most of the time if you set up your remote with the Chiyashi/FC3 on the outside of a two ICE server with a secondary ICE on the inside. Put a Caprice in the remote for extra protection. Caprice is definitely not always necessary, especially if you don’t think they are on E-Strike (granted, that’s rarely something you can just assume these days). Early in the game, most runners will not have the resources to get past the Chiyashi/FC3 a second time after you bounce them out with either your ability or with Caprice if you are Striked. Once you score the first NM2 you are suddenly playing on easy mode since Strike doesn’t really get you anymore. If you score the Second Nisei without using the first token (and most of the time, even if you do use it), you’ve pretty much won the game as long as you can find the last 5/3.

The tournament was quite a bit smaller than the last couple years, which is a shame because Durham Regionals has been one of my favorite tournaments to attend every year. Atomic Empire who hosts it is one of the best stores I've ever been to and is worth the trip even if it's a 4+ hour drive for me. Hell, Jesse Vandover flew over from Hawaii to attend. But in the end it was 25ish players with 4 rounds, cut to top 8.

During the Swiss the deck did its job. I lost first round to Andy with Inversificator. I’m not sure if it’s because that’s a matchup that needs to be addressed (since the deck runs more code gates than the other two types combined) or if it was player error because like I said, I was new to the deck and I might’ve played it all wrong. My opponent, Mike who also made the cut, was able to nullify my ability and made it really hard to score out of remotes. I won my next two rounds vs a Noise and Poutine Andy. Last round I played Jesse and somehow managed to beat his DLR Maxx, which is a pretty terrible matchup since she sets up a lot faster than Poutine and my ICE can’t slow down her main line of attack same way it does for non-degenerate decks. She puts you on a very short timer while also having Siphon spam which makes your set up time potentially a lot longer. The matchup is not unwinnable, obviously, but you need Crisium and/or Caprice on HQ as soon as possible and you need to start scoring right away or you’re just gonna be milled to death.

Because of corp dominance in the winner’s bracket and 50/50 rolls I ended up playing and winning with the deck 3 times in a row to make it to the finals. I played Jonas round 1 with Lock Hayley, Jacob round 2 with Sifr Whizz, and Dane in the winner’s final with Maw Ed Kim. I beat Jonas again in the finals after I lost to his Moons deck. AgInfusion felt really good vs all three, with Lotus Field being the MVP vs Sifr Whizz.

Cards I would consider if I were to play this again include:

-1x Fast Track: You really need at least 1 NM2 to lock up the game and being able to get the first one when you see a window is very important. Being able to jam a second right after they failed to get the first one is also very strong.

-1x Susanoo-no-Mikoto. This would just be for making the deck a little more resilient to Inversificator. If you are playing against Inversificator you really need to weigh the benefit of rezzing any of your code gates since they can use them to make a strong remote a lot weaker. Definitely get rid of any rezzed Lotus Fields the second they drop one. In fact it’s probably right to not rez Lotus Field at all if you can help it in those matches. Susanoo could give you another non-code gate option that’s reasonable on a remote.

I don’t know for sure that’d I’d make cuts for these cards though. The obvious choice for the Susanoo would be to cut a DNA tracker (you don’t really want those moved to the remote since they don’t ETR), but Tracker is an otherwise amazing ICE and Susanoo seems kinda meh in a lot of matchups so that’s a tough call. The only thing I can think to cut for a Fast Track is one of the econ cards and I don’t know how much the deck would miss it. Cutting a Sweeps seems okay and it could free up 2 more influence for another barrier or Sentry from OOF, but I’m not sure what that is. The econ felt good, but not like I had infinite money or anything. In fact, I won the final game with only a single credit to spare. So Fast Track might be a card that feels like a good idea, but is ultimately not worth it.

Thanks to Jesse for coming back to the main land and giving me an excuse to return to Netrunner again after a 6 month hiatus. Thanks to Rob for driving down. Thanks again to Zach who couldn’t make it but gave me the deck lists. Big thanks to Jonas for great games, organizing the accommodations, and for driving an extra hour or more out his way to get me back to home to Baltimore late Sunday night on top of the 4.5 hour drive back from NC. And thanks to Scott, Jon, Brandon, all my opponents, and everyone else who hung out with us, for making this weekend a blast.