Oops! All Friends - 8th @ Americas Online Megacity

This is the list I brought to the Americas Online Megacity Championship event where it finished the event going 3W-1L.

Following the Summer Showdown tournament, a lot of people were enamored with Dee’s Mag list and Davz’s Seb list for their ability to lock down games with either deep dive or locking out the corp of all their win conditions. At the same time, a large part of the community was convinced that Reg Hosh decks just did not have the raw money as other decks to be successful in tournaments.

After playing around with both lists as well as some Twinning-based criminal decks, I still found myself coming back to Hoshiko, but I knew I needed to make changes to my old deck.

The first order of business was to axe the Ashen / Buffer Drive / The Price package. I really dislike the variance of The Price in control reg decks as it’s not really an econ or a draw card considering you can trash valuable money cards like Sure Gamble / Raindrops in exchange for a random install. Additionally, Ashen and Buffer Drive end up being dead draws in too many games where the corp is trying to rush to 7 (PD, Ob, FA Neb, PT).

Next, I ended up going down to 1x Boomerang to save some influence for more important cards. Boomerang is great in a lot of matchups like those rush decks I mentioned earlier, and it also has great use in glacier matchups to alleviate the pain of breaking high strength barriers (Bran, Boto, Tree Line). We’re also living in a post-Rashida world so getting into a server on turn 1 is less of a priority so I was comfortable with slimming down to 1x Boomer.

With the extra deck slots and influence, I focused on beefing up my raw economy by playing 2x Clean Getaway and 2x NFL. I’m not super excited about paying 2 influence for a copy of dirty laundry, but the $3 cost ends up being a great way to offload Maemi credits and the extra burst in credits helps with the asset matchup. I picked NFL over Stoneship because I valued the ability to clear a tag with a $3 upside over 2 cards or charging twinning, however, I need to revaluate that choice as there were a lot of non-tag kill decks that were successful this past weekend.

The last big influence choice was to play 1x Pinhole or 1x Azimat. I ended up going with Pinhole as I was expecting more scoring corps, but what ended up happening was I played 0 games where Pinhole was relevant and Azimat would have been much better in a top cut full of asset corp decks.

The rest of the deck rounded itself out nicely with a third Fermenter and 2x Gachapon. Gachapon is an incredibly clutch card that helps you against corps that are trying to go fast, can install a Fermenter on the corps turn for a cheeky $4, and can even bail you out by fishing for a breaker during a run. I don’t have much to say about Fermenter as the card is 100% cracked and every time the corp spends three clicks to purge virus counters, an angel gets its wings.

What I like about this deck so much is the ability to rely on your fundamentals during the swiss rounds when deck lists are hidden. Because of this, I didn’t write out specific game plans against corps and instead used this article by Noah McKee as the basis of all my runner games this tournament. I think this is one of the best articles ever written about Netrunner and it has helped me immensely with improving my play while also reminding me to be appreciative of my accomplishments.

This makes my fourth top cut placement in the last six tournaments I have attended, and it honestly doesn’t feel real to me sometimes. Being able to compete with elite level players in this game and learning so much from those games has been extremely fun and rewarding. I still have a lot to improve on, and I still have higher goals I want to achieve, but I want to take this opportunity and thank the whole community for their willingness to help me grow into the player I want to be.

With that, I want to specifically thank everyone that put in the hard work to run this awesome tournament. Thank you Droid, OF15-15, nbkelly, Kror, junipertheory, and anyone else I may have missed!

As always, huge shoutout to The Future Perfect, The King, and the Baltimore Meta for all their help in getting me prepared for this tournament. I will post the replays from the event as I get permission but if you have any questions, please feel free to comment or hit me up on Discord :D

Round 2 vs Lost My Thumbs on A Teia: https://www.jinteki.net/replay/9e7b6e75-16b5-48b5-b751-52310baaa830

Round 4 vs Baserton on Restoring Humanity: https://www.jinteki.net/replay/d7e0aa2b-edc1-48f3-a151-bb5ff1735d5f

Round 6 vs xdg on Nebula: https://www.jinteki.net/replay/198eba57-ef28-4a5e-abb4-86763586f76c

Cut Round 1 vs rubenpieters on Ob: https://www.jinteki.net/replay/950fea4f-f724-4660-856c-9fa5afa5a342