Interesting motivation for playing something you love:
Best of Faction: Each faction’s best player receives a faction-themed click tracker set.
On NAPD, this is going to be rough. If you want to run 3x you’re going to have to pay big. No one wants two of the same agenda with different arts in their decks.
Spoiler: no one tries to win based on the mousepad.
Shit, that explains so much about my tournament performance until now.
The press release states:
Completion Prize: Each player that plays through all Swiss rounds of the Android: Netrunner World Championship receives two additional copies of the NAPD Contract alternate art card.
So just stay for the duration and get a sweet playset.
That’s new, and awesome. Here’s hoping its accurate as they’ve not done it that way before.
Guys, make sure you insist the new friend prizes are good, you don’t want to get stuck with a crap one. Wish I could compete in this world net fighting tournament with my ultimate glacier decks with you guys!
While I am inclined to agree, that Apex mat does look pretty friggin’ sweet.
On the topic at hand, I think we’re looking at a lot of PPVP Kate, Noise, and Valencia DLR as the main Runners. There will probably be more than a few Geist, Leela, Maxx, and mini-faction IDs as well. I’d think Shaper will be the most represented, probably half the field, with Anarch being a quarter to a third, and the rest being a mix of Criminal and mini-faction.
On Corp, I have no clue. I know Team Sponsorship is probably going to be everywhere, and all the factions play that pretty well. I’d guess maybe NEH would be the biggest portion of IDs, followed by RP, then ETF, and in waaaay last place BS. We might see a fair few NBN IDs from D&D too.
What did they give last year, 2 if you stayed? I made T16, and somehow ended up with 4. No idea there. Lukas may have been making it rain.
Anarch will outweigh Shaper. They have more popular IDs currently (Val, Noise, MaxX) than Shaper.
You just got 1 more for completion, so 2x in total from start to finish. They say completion prize for NAPD is 2 as well, but they’re using the word additional. So, as long as you start with 1 you should end up with 3. If it’s like last year, they’ll give out 1 at beginning and 1 at end; language makes me think this is new.
For those of us not making top 16, it’s good news. (And i would love to and will try, but I’m going to have to happen upon something crazy for that to be a thing)
Everyone attending Worlds gets one in their initial pack. Everyone attending Worlds gets one of every alt art card without even participating. And a deck box. And a t-shirt.
You think so? There’s a lot of people on Kate right now. I’m guessing it will be like Andy from a few years back. Sure, there are a lot of popular Anarch IDs, and I see there being a good mix, but I just don’t see anything flipping the current groupthink that Kate is THE DECK.
That groupthink is already on the way out.
There will be plenty of Haley for instance.
Apparently at the bottom of the sync article that just came out we’re talking D&D next week. So, live for worlds.
[quote=“mvt, post:33, topic:5137”]
There will be plenty of Haley for instance.
[/quote]depends on where you’re sitting
Yeah, Hayley won’t be in the top half, much as I love her. No tournament results worth mentioning from this summer, and if she were a thing there would’ve been something.
Kate’s too inconsistent – ask @spags how many times he went through 50-75% of his deck this weekend before drawing a Prepaid. 
Meanwhile, I drew my single Corroder in Noise against him within the first two turns every time, right as he went to score behind a Wraparound/Wall of Static.
Anecdotes; But, there’s a faction of shaper players here in WI who won’t put prepaid in a deck and swear they don’t need it. And, yes, they win tourneys.
Most games, sadly.
Still went 10-4 on the weekend.
Been awhile since I’ve been on the nets, but I’ve been playing locally :).
My basic hypothesis is that a corp that wants to win is going to have to be able to apply early pressure, since runners are incredibly, unprecedentedly strong in mid/late games, and in such a variety of ways. I do not think there are glacier decks that have reliable late-games anymore unless you really, really lean on Caprice psi games.
Sunny, Kate, Noise, and pick-a-DLR-cancer-deck are just inevitable: they will win, unless you can go faster than them. There are some solid tier-1.5’s that wtfpwnzor most builds but are less reliable out of Leela, CT, Quetzal, Whizz, MaxX, maybe even Geist and Apex. Kate’s so good she has multiple tier-1 approaches!
The only thing I disagree on is Adam. Adam just dies to a meta where rushy-killy decks predominate.
Spark is way, way better than Sync! Being able to deny the runner a few credits at strategic points is pretty nice, and yellow cards are still great at rush/FA. For pure competitive play, there’s no reason not to bring one of the burly NEH builds, but Spark is the one who pushes at that, since Film Critic ruins everyone’s dreams of Haarpsichord shenanigans. Stupid Film Critic.
There are some rushy Biotechs that might see play since they can toggle (or pretend to toggle) between damage and rush. I don’t think anything else here is particularly competitive outside of a few select Jinteki Clone Whisperers.
Weyland is in an interesting place right now where I feel like all roads lead to renovating the shit out of Oaktown. I think Blue Sun is pretty good at that, but so’s Core Set Weyland, which is fun.
HB has pretty good midrange game still, but it’s all pretty boring IMO. Upgrades, Inc. type stuff, with new and better pieces. Team Sponsorship is a pretty big deal, as we all now know since their big ad blitz has them all over NBN’s partner networks.