Swappy Steaks (15th @ Worlds)

I had fully intended to play Smoke in the main event, but after a lukewarm performance at Crown of Servers, I panicked. I wanted to swap to something else, but I didn't bring anything as a backup, aside from my untested Startup list that I was going to wing it with on the Sunday.

Frantically, half an hour before the event was going to start, I took out the rezekis from my startup list, and because I never bothered to spend all of my influence for the startup list, put fermenters in their place, threw in a couple overclocks, figured paperclip was better than cleaver, and "good enough".

Oh, and while waiting in line to submit decklists, I overheard someone mention misdirection, said "oh shit!" out loud, and crammed that in too at the last minute.

There are probably choices to make this list better but I didn't have time to think too hard about them.

Tao's ability was relevant every game, although rarely game winning; however, a couple times it proved to be very powerful. Putting all the crappy ice on the remote can make it really hard to score out against boat, and if they overcommit money-wise away from R&D, the ice swap lines up some brutal Stargate runs. Also, a lot of lists have some particular ice to annoy boat, and you can just move those ones to wherever renders them the least useful to the corp.

The Revolver was questioned by some, but I like it; in particular, busts up Ansel. Lots of chips keeps it on the board, but the chips really shine at keeping Fermenter on the board constantly, and no one wants to purge it out. Fermenter really stood out on the day, and well, boat is boat.

I've never travelled for a big netrunner event before, so it was really cool to finally put faces to all the names that I've seen for years, and I'm happy that Tao didn't completely fall apart. It was awesome to play against a lot of really strong players, and equally awesome to have the fellow BC players that travelled with me hyping me up as I was doing well. I keep playing this silly card game because of the community, so shoutouts to everyone that both everyone I met and the everyone that I usually play with (I'll see you guys at pubrunner again soon!).

(PS 100% of the Tao players made the cut, something something egregious)