Can’t. Would be too misleading, as the following tournament report has no soup in it. In compensation, I have included a short panini review.
Whizzard won two games last week, so he got to stay in my deckbox. Blue Sun had to leave. It was replaced by Ben Ni’s worlds SYNC deck, because (a) burninating SYNC are the best decks, (b) I think am slightly less terribly at playing such decks, and (c) I already had it put together and I didn’t get around to considering other options.
Round one, I lost to DLR MaxX, in part because I forgot my opponent had Paparazzi installed. Then I lost to SYNC because I optimistically ended a turn with only six cards in hand.
Round two, I had the bye. Since this was at a board game cafe, I got a panini and a slushee and looked through their open copy of New Angeles. The panini had chicken and bell peppers and cheddar. It was pretty good, but the bell pepper pieces kept squishing out the sides, and also it wasn’t soup. The slushee was wildberry, which was nice because they’ve mostly had cherry lately and I like the wildberry better. While I’m reviewing the food, I’ll mention that I also had a hot chocolate during round one, which was also pretty good.
Round three, I lost to Smoke, who had NACH and Film Critic going before I really got off the ground. Then I lost to SYNC because I wasn’t at all prepared for Observe & Destroy to take out Obelus, and I made some poor decisions while trying to recover. My takeaway was that I should have taken that turn more slowly and thought things through better.
Round four, game one was versus IG. An early Siphon put me in a pretty good position, and it didn’t take too long to get Medium going and steal two agendas. While I was doing that, my opponent installed a bunch of remotes and slowly advanced them. When I stopped ignoring them and ran one, it turned out to be a game-winning Fetal AI. Game two was Andy. My opponent went tag-me early, and I won through trading Quantums for Foods with EoI.
Round five, game one I faced another Smoke, but this one was slower to set up, so I managed a 24/7 BOOM!. Game two was against IG, which I didn’t manage to keep poor enough this time, and eventually Genetics Pavilion and Bio-Ethics Association did me in. I did get in some deep Medium digs, but all the agendas were in HQ, which I guess I should probably have realized sooner when I didn’t see them in R&D.
Final result: tied for fifth place out of seven. I am kind of worried about my local meta and the turnout we’ve been getting. Some people who haven’t been out much lately have committed to coming to Netrunner night this week, but it’s to play New Angeles, so I’m not sure that’s exactly a great sign? I dunno. This is a pretty depressing note to end on, so let’s add a nice thing that happened: A player in the top four who won a playmat last week passed down the one he won this week to me, which was very kind of him.