Black Lion Games Store Championship

Store Championship season is finally upon us in Netrunner land which means the competitive side of the game is starting to ramp up towards Nationals later in the year. Winner’s of Store Championships get a first round bye at Regionals and the winners of those get a first round bye at Nationals so these are hotly contested competitions.

I was hoping to do ok running similar decks to those I had the week before, here they are:

I wanted to try out Cerebral Static as I had seen a lot of Noise at Stirling and thought it would be a decent counter to those decks.

I was playing around with adaptation of the Wooley deck using Wyldside and it had fairly well at the Stirling GNK.

Peter is our local rules guru, organiser and all round nice chap. It had been quite a while since we had played against each other but I knew that Peter was well up on the current meta.

I corped first and got a targeted marketing down to stop the siphon from Peter’s leela. I failed to keep her out and after getting rid of an earlier flood couldn’t find my way into a scoring window.

As runner I was up against HB. I was expecting foodcoats but instead came up against something running NEXT ICE and Batty. I played poorly getting my rig hit hard by a Batty and NEXT Gold I could sort of see coming. I should have hit it with Parasite and waited but my tendency to rush got the better of me. I lost soon after.

Simon was one of the players who had come through from Dundee and not someone I had met on the scene before. I ran first against his Argus. Having played against a fair amount of Argus in the local meta I started off cautious building my money pool and hitting servers were I could. I managed to pull out 4 points before making an absolutely ridiculous misplay. Simon had Jackson out and used him twice in the previous turn throwing a lot in the trash. I was behind on cash and ran archives to see if anything was there which he let me hit and then Sea Source, Scorch, Scorch in the next turn. I would have probably had this if I hadn’t run and Simon played it cool.

Another Leela faces off against my Sol and again I just couldn’t keep her out. I’ve played well against Leela previously but today I just had a blind spot. I could have had a better time if when I fired a Breaking News off I had the money to trash his Kati with about 12 creds on it. Another stupid, unforced misplay. Leela quickly made short work of me with all her money.

Rab is another one of the local players and had won the local GNK that Black Lion ran a few weeks earlier. However we had both had bad days and were languishing down in the darkness of the bottom half of the table. We were both hoping to redeem ourselves.

I ran first against his NEH and found myself unable to counter a Guard of all things that he just scored out behind. I figure I should have built with draw earlier on a bit more and given myself the card advantage to deal with whatever came.

My Sol hit the table against his Kate and this was one of the only games that Cerebral did some work for me. Kate was poorer because of it but Rab was running some sort of Gingerbread Panchantara build that I was very vulnerable too due to my tracer ICE. Despite this I built a decent scoring remote up and got the win in. A split kept us both in the dark of the bottom of the table.

Another local player and someone I haven’t played against in a good while. Ronan started off by running with Leela against my Sol and I was hoping my blind spot would not rear it’s ugly head. Thankfully I played this one well, building up my servers to keep him out and getting the Astro train running to score out relatively quickly.

My Whizzard was tested against another Argus deck, but I just couldn’t find a reliable way in to score points. Ronan scored out against me in quick succession and I ended up with a split and another 2 points.

4 points

I did not exactly cover myself in glory. I didn’t tilt or anything just played badly but we all have our off days. My performance in the GNK the week before was good and I have started tweaking my decks to focus them better on what they are meant to be doing.

My Corp deck was a bit all over the place not really being focused on Fast Advance or Glacier and my meta choice of cerebral static proved to be a no go.

My runner didn’t win a single game and I have rolled it back to the version I took to Stirling, with some tweaks for the local meta.

I’ve got my next store champ in two days time, so stay tuned to hear more reports of glorious failures!