Thule You Really Wanna Hurt Me? Say No To Ice (Worlds 2023)

Worlds 2023 was my first Standard tournament and at the time I’d only been playing Netrunner for a couple of months, but I’d fallen head over heels for the game. As a beginner, my aim was to win just one game. With that in mind, I set about turning my winning Start Up Thule deck into a Standard deck.

The opening of my very first tournament game went like this:

• Couple of early hedge funds and grease the palm of an NGO

• Mitosis and look at the runner straight in the eyes and smile

(runner smiles, shrugs, sets up and pokes centrals)

• Advance one card twice and the other card once

(runner gives a nervous laugh, shrugs, continues to set up and poke centrals)

• Advance the second card twice and the first card once

(runner’s face is full of regret and they run centrals for every click)

• Seamless one card and double advance the other.

• At this point I could have been honest. I could have said, look, one is the Clearinghouse and the other is a Cerebral Overwriter. Would you like me to show you which is which?

(They run, they commit to access, I flip, I grin, I pay three credits, they take 7 core damage).

I got to do The Thing^tm at the very beginning of my first game. I could have gone home happy at that point. I got more wins than I was expecting over the weekend (mostly from my runner), but nothing that topped the feeling of my first game.

Other upsides of the deck:

• Watching for the moment the penny finally drops and they realise there is no ice in the deck. Some shaper players kept compulsively installing breakers throughout the game. One even saying, “I don’t know why I’m installing all my breakers, you definitely don’t have an ice do you?” before playing Spark of Inspiration for their third breaker.

Downsides of the deck:

• One of my games the runner installed conduit on turn two…

Little did I know that a much better player had built a much better “no ice” Thule deck and also taken it to Barcelona. I didn’t find this out until much later, but it made me vicariously happy – and Santa’s deck is actually consistent.