Tournament write-up time! Since we’ve had some awesome guests from abroad and I had the pleasure of playing against two of them, I’ll do it in English this time.
I was playing pretty much the same decks I’ve been playing all season long: Polish HB and Stealth Andy. After Batty was released I thought that Criminal days were over, so I started experimenting some other stuff. I tried to make up with my Netrunner love Kit, but even though I was doing ok my win rates were nowhere close to what I could pull off with Andy. Pretty much the same goes for Val, Noise and Kate. I could play them decently well, but didn’t have that modest “I’m really awesome with this deck” feeling. So I went with Andy and I’m really happy with the choice. The deck had a strong showing, only lost 2 games (getting to 6 in both of them). The new adjustments (Drive-Bys, 2 copies of every breaker, Datasucker as a 1-influence 3rd Cloak substitute) really worked out for me. For the corp deck I was messing with different versions of EtF, but decided to go for the one that carried me in Wrocław Regionals (the only change I made was changing a 3rd Eve for a 3rd BB Grid).
Decklists:
Stealth Andy Stealth Andy (5th @ Polish Nationals) · NetrunnerDB
Polish HB Polish HB (5th @ Polish Nationals) · NetrunnerDB
Swiss round 2: Bartek
I had a Super-Bye so I started from the second round. Out of the 71 people I could face I got paired with the guy who showed me Netrunner 2 years ago and with whom I played the most games in my life. Neither of us was happy about the pairing. We first played a 50-minute EtF vs Val thriller. He had serious winning chances out of R&D. With BP and Desperado he was able to get in there for just a few credits and I had to use a Vitruvius counter and Archived Memories just to fetch Cyberdex and purge his Medium. To be honest I should have lost this game out of R&D accesses. I only managed to close the game thanks to NEXT Gold + CVS. As we started the 2nd game there were 13 minutes on the clock. Turn 1 he iced HQ, remote and installed in the remote. Knowing Bartek, such a play indicated Astro 70% of the time. I installed a Corroder and Siphoned (I knew he was playng FA) through a Wraparound and got the Astro. Rest of the game was one-year-ago-criminal-style. 2 more Siphons, RDI and a bunch of R&D runs. I managed to close the game with 40 seconds on the clock.
Swiss round 3: Jander
Jander and I played many times on different occasions this year and we never split games, it was always one or the other. We were playing on Teamworkcast camera, so we agreed to show the world, how awesome Polish HB is. We both lost pretty hopelessly. Runners won both games confidently with next to no winning chances for the corps. He did not have any of his NEXT ice early and I was able to deny his economy with Drive-Bys. I scored 7 points just as his servers were slowly becoming expensive for me. As corp I even managed to get to 5-points, mainly because I didn’t lose too much to the gazillion Maker’s Eye’s he made. He just responded by playing another 4 card Maker’s into R&D that was about 40% agendas. Polish HB got decimated twice and the world is probably gonna watch it :(.
Swiss round 4: Yarrow
Another scary opponent. I played HB vs MaxX first. I lost 4 points to early accesses, but was able to set up pretty well. I had a half-decent remote and R&D that was expensive enough to break to prevent a Medium dig. Yarrow, however was able to muster enough resources (or rather Stim ;)) to get into my scoring server twice. I won the first Caprice, but not the second and lost a 3-pointer off the remote. Corp game went smoothly. He was struggling to find ice early. I found a Future Perfect in unprotected R&D 1st click when he only had 2 credits. Later I got a Nisei off a random R&D access (“hmmmm, Eli, do I wanna bother to see one card… yeah why not I have Datasucker counters…”). He was so behind that he tried to push another Nisei through a mediocre remote server. That didn’t work and I won the game pretty smoothly.
Swiss round 5: Sidzej
In the first game I faced HB:FA. I didn’t have my Desperado early so I was struggling economically and he went for the slow game. Basically every turn of his was install, credit, credit. Most of the ICE went to R&D and I saw a bunch of Biotics in hand. I was struggling to break the tower of sentries on R&D with stealth credits and buried my chances that were already slim by miscalculating and jacking out after going half-way from a server that was completely rezzed pre-run. Thankfully I’m a guy who gets really motivated by own mistakes and played the HB game pretty much flawlessly. I did not have too many agendas, went for a tower on R&D and remote while Sidzej was struggling to find his breakers. Managed to close the game before he got properly set up.
Swiss round 6: Jawohl
I wasn’t happy to play life-and-death games against a friend in the last round of swiss, but what can you do. Jawohl and Blackjazz are the two PE players I respect most in the world so I knew I had to be super-careful. He scored a False Lead and a TFP, but I managed not to do anything dumb. He had lockdowns on both centrals and I did not want to dig for a Refractor, but I was okay with running through it with 5 cards with hand. My Drive-By came too late for TFP, but arrived just in time for a Fetal. I closed out the game before it got too intense. Even though I played flawlessly (I think) I still would have died if one of his 2 unchecked Remotes was a Philotic. The other game was vs Gabe. He mulliganned into a pretty bad hand and I was able to lock him out almost completely. I lost a Hades to a random R&D access, but was able to close the game without much stress. That put me at 18 points and gave me 4th place in Swiss. My first mission was accomllished :).
Top 16 game 1: Ania
Here’s an inspirational story for all the new players out there. Ania’s fiancée only taught her how to play Netrunner a few weeks ago, she came along to have some fun and ended up in the Top 16. She did not even know the game very well (“so what does Kate’s ability do?”), solid understanding of her Noise and NEH was enough to carry her very far, I was very close to falling victim to her Noise as well. I lost 4 points off mills and could have easily lost to a last turn medium dig (there was Hades in a pretty thin R&D). This might not have been flawless Netrunner, but was pretty damn amazing for a new player. Hats off.
Top 16 game 2: Mark
Another NEH FA, another explosive turn 1. He installed 2 remotes and iced one of them. I mulliganned into a super-awkward hand that had no Desperado, no ST, both Drive Bys and both Inside Jobs. I played a Gamble, Inside Job’ed an Astro on remote and Drive-By’d a PAD (it was actually a misplay, I should have played Drive-By first: this would have backfired terribly if Mark installed the cards the other way around). I had my breakers but almost no economy. He denied me a Siphon by rezzing Architect on HQ and a SanSan, but I got Breaking News off the access. Since I was pretty broke, my gameplan involved running arhives for 2 ST credits, a card and a sucker token and running R&D through Eli to see 2 cards. I got a fair amount of accesses but saw nothing. Meanwhile he scored a Palooza, an Astro and a Beale using the counter. I finally saw an Astro in R&D. I found the game-winning Beale in R&D when he already had enough for the Fast Track->SanSan->BN play.
Top 16 game 3: Marchewa
Here’s what I knew about Marchewa’s deck before that game: it’s some Hyperdriver Chaos Theory jank that apparently works amazingly and will certainly finish me with triple Notoriety if I lose 4 points. So I had to rush. I mulliganned into an average hand with some ice, but no economy. I quickly set up a server with Tollbooth and Next Silver and install-advanced a Vitruvius there. Marchewa installed an Inti and ran it. I rezzed the Tollbooth and he got Faust off SMC for almost all his money. There I decided to go for a ballsy play: I install-advanced-advanced another Vitruvius in the same server. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t run, as he had to spend the entire turn drawing up and wouldn’t be able to afford NAPD. Sadly he called my bluff and got to 4 points. He then started setting up with Bagbiter and Hyperdriver for the game winning turn. I found a Jackson and started digging for Caprice to stop him on one of the centrals. Sadly, I was a turn late, I drew 2 of them at once but did not have a click left to install. He Legworked, then played TME and found an NAPD, ran archives and played Notoriety for the win. Pretty amazing deck that caught myself and lots of others completely off-guard.
Top 16 game 4: ff0x
The cool part is that I finally met ff0x and we got to play. The less cool part was that we had to fight for survival in the tournament. At this time there were only 2 tables playing at the time and we had quite a few spectators: I think we gave them a pretty epic game to watch. He kept his hand and played something like hedge fund, install 2 remotes leading me to believe that he has Midseason in hand. I started with an awesome Andy hand. I had a Desperado, Security Testing, John Masanori, Dirty Laundry, access to breakers, even RDI. With such a start I decided to try avoiding unnecessary risks until I can outmoney him, so I laundried archives. He iced his HQ and R&D, but I wasn’t interested back then. He played a few money operations, but I found a 2nd ST (I had archives and a PAD Campaign wide open for money runs) and started closing the money gap. He had something install-advanced in a remote, I let it sit assuming it was a Palooza. Once money was close he started installing remotes and I started checking them. One of them was a Breaking News that I managed to steal without getting Midseasoned. I was starting to build my rig when he installed 2 new remotes in the same turn. I checked one of them: another Breaking News. I decided against checking the other one: the worst scenario I assumed was an Astro and I was confident I could deal with one Astrocounter, especially with 2BN out of the way. What happened was pretty spectacular and pretty sad for me. The remote I did not check was the 3rd Breaking News. He double advanced it and played Closed Accounts. 31 credits down the drain and I went from being in the driving seat to being in serious trouble/almost dead. I still had Daily Casts running and 2 ST, so I could start my money race anew. Meanwhile he installed something over the install-advanced server. I finally found Ghost Runner (I already had all 3 breakers and had everything except stealth Credits that game). I installed GR 1st click and Siphoned the double iced HQ on the second. Worst case scenario happened again: he had 2 Data Ravens so I had to jack out upon seeing the second one and spend the rest of the turn removing tags from 1st Raven and from Masanori. I knew I’d die so I left his remote uncontested until he got to 5 points. It was time for an all-in. I went to fetch the Palooza from archives, installed RDI and ran. I saw an Astro and a Jackson that I trashed. Ran R&D again 4th click (if it wasn’t for Jackson trash I’d run HQ with 40% winning chances 
) and found nothing. Shame my run at the championship has ended, but it least it ended with an epic game.
At the end I’d like to thank the organizers, all of my opponents and the supporters. That was the biggest live tournament I’ve played in and it was truly amazing. I won’t deny I was dreaming of a ticket to Worlds or at least that giant mousepad with a junkie transsexual on it, but 5th place against such strong competition feels pretty damn good as well.
