Winter Tournament – Knightly Gaming Lanark
Venturing into the snowy lands of the West of Scotland myself and a bunch of friends rocked up to the Winter Game Night tournament at Knightley gaming in Lanark. It was my first time through to this venue so some quick thoughts on that first.
Venue
The venue was well lit, had nice big windows to let in lots of natural light and had loads of table space. The tables were a little squished together for the netrunner tournament but that was due to a bit of double booking that they handled well. We were offered free tea or coffee on arrival and the tables were set up with sugar, milk and biscuits which was a lovely touch.
Throughout the course of the day I chatted to the staff and they were all friendly and enthusiastic about what they do. They had a small but focused range of stock, Yu-Gi-Oh quite clearly being a massive thing for them and they had a decent selection of the latest board games as well as accessories for card games.
Good job all at Knightly Gaming
The Games
The tournament consisted of 4 rounds swiss with a cut to top 4. I was running a Sol and a Hayley list, both of which can be found here:
Better Call Solo Boy (Iain Edit)
New Angeles Sol: Your News
Agenda (10)
3x AstroScript Pilot Program
1x Breaking News
1x Global Food Initiative •
2x NAPD Contract
3x Project Beale
Asset (3)
3x Jackson Howard
Upgrade (9)
2x Ash 2X3ZB9CY ••••
1x Cyberdex Virus Suite
3x Product Placement
3x SanSan City Grid
Operation (10)
3x Hedge Fund
2x Paywall Implementation ••••
3x Sweeps Week
2x Targeted Marketing
Barrier (4)
2x Eli 1.0 ••
2x Wraparound
Code Gate (7)
1x Archangel
3x Pop-up Window
3x Tollbooth
Sentry (6)
1x Architect ••
2x Assassin
3x News Hound
Round 1 vs. Steve Wallace
Steve is a good friend and we had played just the night before with the same decks. I knew I had a hard time against foodcoats but I did reasonably well till I ran headfirst into Ichi 2.0 with only 1 click remaining. A lot of my rig fell off and I struggled to get the momentum back. Corp side I staved off the drip mill against his noise but it wasn’t enough and he score out the last agenda the turn before I would have won! That monster.
Round 2 vs. Andy Heywood
I hadn’t played against Andy in a while so I’d sort of forgotten how to handle his Reina Account Siphon spam deck. He had me on the backfoot for a while but I managed to pick myself backup and score out late in the game. Paywall Implementation did some great work in that game. My Hayley matchup against his genomics went less well as I had basically forgotten how to handle that deck. I got Chairman Hiro’d and Ronin’d in quick succession and that was that.
Round 3 vs. Jess?
Sorry person from 3rd round but I forgot your name so going to have to guess. This was my only full win of the day. First matchup was his Valencia against my Sol. I used Targeted Marketing to keep him second guessing what to do. I scored out reasonably easily having got him to spend his blackmails earlier in the game. The reverse matchup was against Chronos Protocol so I was wary of rig shooting. I took my time, setting up pretty well and sniping into servers where I could. Lost a card here and there but nothing terrible and won without too much stress.
Round 4 vs. Philip Chan
Philip is a lovely chap and a good player from Glasgow. He corped first and got flooded pretty badly which led to a fairly quick conclusion to our game as I just bashed into servers with impunity. The reverse matchup was a bit closer but in the end Philip Noise’d me to death once more, picking his moments well and my R&D coughing up Agendas against my will. Sad times.
Had a really good time at Knightly and did slightly better than my last competitive outing going 4-4 against 3-5 last time. Hoping to improve that performance again in a few weeks time and then head into Store Champs season with some brand new decks!
