2016-17 Store Championship tournament reports!

Store Championship season has started! Who’s had a store champs already? How’d it go? What were people playing?

I went to one store championship last weekend, and I’m off to another one this weekend. After that, no more have been announced near me, but there’s a couple stores that had championships last year that haven’t announced anything for this year, so perhaps there’ll be more announced later.

(I’ll put my report for last weekend’s in a comment, so the first post in the thread can be more overview-y.)

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Confession: I didn’t take any notes last weekend, and apparently I have a memory like a sieve, so this is not going to be a great tournament report.

I played Off the Grid Blue Sun and Hate Bear. In four rounds of Swiss, I won three whole games, putting me in ninth after Swiss. There were only ten players. So I’m glad there was an even number, anyways, because I would totally have had the bye at some point if there’d been one.

I played against another Off the Grid Blue Sun, an IG asset spam deck, a CI7 deck, and I’ve totally forgotten what else. I’m not sure I saw any yellow. On the other side of things, I faced a Val-rebirth-into-Whizzard Blackmail deck and I think a tag-me Whizzard, and two things I totally forgot. Hayley, maybe? Kit? No Smoke, I’m pretty sure.

I guess that means we haven’t been totally eaten by the Netrunner hivemind I hear so many complaints about, so that’s nice.

The store in question is very slowly putting in a cafe sort of thing on one side. They aren’t making food there yet, but they do have the soda fountain in, and they’re selling bottomless pop. There’s a thing for keeping soup warm visible behind the counter. I think the suggestion of soup at future tournaments is pretty exciting.

On that note, I hereby pledge to take notes at this weekend’s tournament, so as to provide a less terrible tournament report next week, unless I forget about my note taking plans the way I forgot about a lot of last weekend’s games.

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I would drive far as fuck to get to a tournament with bonus soup.

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I am trying not to get my hopes up too high, because what if the soup is overpriced and/or terrible? But I do think it’s possible that the soup will make me resent the hour long bus ride to get to the store in question less.

Maybe everyone needs to make post-SC pho a thing.

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Soup and board games is such an obvious synergy, I can’t believe it’s not more common.

OP plz change thread title to Soup Championship tournament reports kthxbai

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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.

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A final thought on both tournaments, inspired by writing out the reports: I guess they actually went better than they felt like they were going.

I usually win about half my games at tournaments, and when there’s more players, that usually puts me near the middle of the standings. I’d like to improve, sure, but I don’t make that much time to work on improving, and I’m pretty happy with my usual results for the amount of effort I put in.

Three games out of eight is right near half, so it’s pretty close to my usual performance. I think it just felt like I was doing worse than usual because I lost a lot near the start of both tournaments.

And also because I made silly mistakes in my first match today, but who’s to say if they were uncharacteristically silly? Probably they weren’t. So that’s good, sort of.

01/07/17: Store Championship Games And Stuff, Glen Burnie Maryland USA

Overall, a great time was had by all and Netrunner people continue to be the best people. @kevintame was both a fantastic TO (bringing healthy snacks and bottled water for everybody) and the winner of the day with CtM and Whizz. He’s a great player and an awesome dude, and 100% deserved the win. Here’s the numbers he collected: 草莓播放免费观看-草莓app官网二维码-草莓成视频人app下载污

I brought Stealth Kit with 3x Temujin and Architects of Tomorrow. These choices were mainly based on what I’m most comfortable with and what I tend to have the most fun with. I didn’t end up seeing much asset spam during the day, and the games were all really fun and interactive, so I think that was the right choice (despite my mediocre performance on the day).

The Kit deck uses 2x Paricia, 3x Temujin, 2x Beth, 2x Net Mercur to deal with asset spam in a fairly-generic fashion (even paricia is rarely a dead card). The rest of the influence goes to 1 Legwork, 1 Utopia Shard, and 1 Clone Chip. 2x NACH and 1 Film Critic is the extent of the tech. Utopia Shard is a nice way to take advantage of lightly-defended HQ, and can act as a sort of second legwork (in addition to disrupting kill combos etc).

My AoT deck is kind of a hot mess, but it’s fun. Based on some recent discussion with @LynxMegaCorp, I dropped the Surat City grid jank and put in some boot camps to help accelerate the board setup (rezzing ice / fetching brain-taping warehouses) and to deal with DDoS/Blackmail. Otherwise, it’s mainly bioroid ice, HB click-compression cards (AAL and Lateral Growth), and asset econ. Peak Efficiency and Biotic Labor close out the late game, otherwise you tax the runner and never-advance.

I neglected to take notes during the day, but here’s what I remember happening. I apologize if I misrepresent anything in a way that makes my opponents look bad!

  • Game 1. v Anish
  • Lose AoT vs. Whizzard on points: was at 4-6, had the choice of scoring an ABT that I had previously installed or purging a loaded medium. Scored and crossed fingers to get to 6-6, he won off of a medium dig next turn.
  • Timed Loss Kit v. EtF (4-6, I think): Got a good econ start with Temujin + Beth. Major turning points in the game were hitting what I thought was going to be one Mumbad Virtual Tour and an agenda, which turned out to be 2 MVTs. Legworked for an agenda, picked another with utopia shard (I think). Another critical misplay was thinking that Architect had strength 3 when installing Atman from hand (which I set to 4, thinking it would cover both Eli and Architect). Rookie mistake!
  • Game 2 vs. Dan
    • Runner loss Kit v. GRNDL (flatline): My opening hand had no breakers or stealth credits, not ideal for what I assumed to be a rush match. He IA’ed behind ICE on turn 1, scored an atlas on turn 2. I drew into an SMC and got overeager using it + clone chip + bad pub to set up Refractor + cloak so he would have to slow down-- made an ill-advised run against R&D last click to use the bad pub and ate a Snare to end the turn tagged. He wisely chose to use the atlas token to burn my house down.
    • Corp loss AoT v. Ken (4-7?): Was doing a decent job of taxing him out-- one of the best things about AoT is a cheap ICE on Archives shuts off Temujin pretty hard. That being said, I let him keep a TC on the board (pointing at R&D) once he self-tagged, because I thought 2 Fairchild 3.0’s would be taxing enough to dissuade him from using it and I didn’t have the tempo to trash it. However, he made good use of that (+ gordian blade), to subsidize maker’s eye. I fired an ABT to shore up my ICE and was well positioned to score out in a 3- or 4-deep remote, but he made another ME run and got the win.
  • Game 3: Bye
    • I drove down the street to a sushi place since I had eaten greasy pizza the previous night and wanted something wholesome. My lunch came with miso soup that was actually quite good-- bits of crispy bonito added a surprising hit of flavor, and the green onions were also nice and crunchy. Sushi was solid, though they had avocado in pretty much every roll (to which I am allergic). Eel roll was great, the sauce was delicious and the skin was nice and crispy but the meat was soft. Very generous tuna rolls.
  • Game 4 v. Charles
    • Corp win AoT v. Smoke: he had a relatively slow start, which I was able to use to get a very favorable ICE setup (with FC 1 and Ravana on the outside of servers and more expensive Heimdall 1.0 / FC3 on the inside). That plus an early brain-taping let me amass enough credits to defend a remote until he was rigged up and score out with bioitic.
    • Runner win v. AoT: I had an above-average start in econ (Temujin + 2 Sure Gamble’s in my opener) and was able to keep ahead throughout the game. Paricia did work preventing his econ from getting off the ground, and I was able to close the game with 2x RDI and maker’s eye.

Even with the bye, my record kept me out of the cut. Some day, I hope to make a cut at an SC!

Other highlights of the day were learning about @thebigunit3000’s work in hedgehog rescue (potentially finding a home for a needy hedgehog with Dave’s daughter!) and having A REAL LIVE IRISH NETRUNNER PLAYER in attendance. Alan taught us his local folkways-- using a guessing game to pick who corps first? Fascinating. They got a whole 'nother country over there.

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It should be half of SC season at the moment. I’ve seen quite a lot of reports from USA, some from UK, but very little from mainland Europe. In Poland no shop has received their kit yet. Do you know if they have arrived to other countries?

I almost brought soup… well a pot of Chili that is, but I was unsure if stinking up the game room at Games and Stuff with a bunch of guy’s gas would be ok with management.

Not yet to Hungary. SCs in the region start this weekend with Vienna and continue through the next weekends: January 28th Brno, February 4th Budapest, February 11th Bratislava.

Three SC:s so far in Sweden, with 16 more coming up in the area (11 in Sweden, 3 in Denmark and 2 in Norway) that I know of.

Canton Games Store Championship (Baltimore, MD)
It was my first time TO’ing and I would have made an odd number, so I didn’t play. The event was held at Myth & Moonshine, which has BOTTOMLESS MIMOSAS on Saturday. Here’s the event page, which doesn’t seem to accept imports from the tournament software I was using: AlwaysBeRunning.Net - Tournaments - Decklists - Netrunner
If you went and feel like posting your info, go for it. I think this site is cool but it needs some lovin’.

20 people came, which was great. A lot of people from the stimhacks were there, including THE BIG WINNER @crfluency,second place @mediohxcore, @Basoon, @thebigunit3000, @CodeMarvelous, @CoolIdeasClub and probably a bunch of people whose handles I don’t know.

CORP

  • 11 HB (2 AoT, 3 CI, 6 EtF)
  • 4 Jinteki (2 Palana, 1 PE, 1 PU)
  • 2 NBN (Haarp and CtM)
  • 3 Weyland (2 Blue Sun, 1 Gagarin)

RUNNER

  • 10 Anarch (4 Val, 6 Whizz)
  • 8 Criminal (4 Andy, 1 Gabe, 1 Geist, 1 Leela, and 1 Silhouette)
  • 2 Shaper (2 Kate)

The cut was:
1 @crfluency With 7-point CI and Hatebear
2 @mediohxcore With 7-point CI and power tap Andy
3 Blake With Val and CtM
4 Jake with HB:EtF and Andy

I thought that it was a pretty diverse field. I would guess that the combination of anti-CtM tech and the threat of Sifr pushed people away from CtM and towards the more tried-and-true HB (which has the best access to anti-ICE trashing tech). Big props to Blake for managing to make the cut despite all the whizzards, salsette slums, and citadel sanctuaries I saw. Violet Level Clearance is definitely a shot in the arm for 7-point CI. It was really cool to see people playing against CI that knew their shit cold: I’ve thought of it as a relatively non-interactive match, but I think that’s primarily due to my lack of familiarity with it.

On the runner side, Anarch is super strong and Andy remains the best criminal, so no real surprises there. Aaron Marron is a friggin beast, and I saw him everywhere. There were definitely a few people on Sifr (Kate with parasite and Atman, various anarchs with various good anarch stuff), but I don’t think that any sifr-based decks made the cut (I could be mistaken). I thought that was interesting. Maybe it’s not as OP as some feared, maybe corps were well-teched against it, maybe people haven’t figured out the best way to use it. Will be interesting to see how it shapes the meta.

I didn’t have any soup, thinking it would probably be wise to stick to something more in the wheelhouse of a bar. Hush puppies had some sort of mysterious goo within that was quite tasty.

Good games and good times!

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there are also @SimonMoon and @Tr33beard from NYC. Unfortunately they had to play against each other in the swiss :frowning:

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