Games Hub Edinburgh Store Championship

After last week’s crushing failure I ventured once more into a Store Championship with some tweaked decks in tow and a few lessons learnt. I had changed up my Corp deck a lot, focusing it more on the Glacier archetype, with a few Faust counters for good measure, and I had rolled back the changes to my Whizzard deck that hadn’t gone so well the week before. You can find both decks below:

Let’s see how I did

Rab and I had both bottomed out last week and were looking to redeem ourselves. I started off corping against his Whizzard and quickly realised that this was the Faust build, or near enough, that was front page of netrunnerdb this week. I didn’t see a whole lot of ICE unfortunately, and what little I did see Rob made short work of. However with a bit of judicious play I managed to establish a small server and get agendas scored out before he could assault the core servers for points.

I ran against HB but just couldn’t really establish much of a foothold. An early asset server behind a Turing caused me problems and an early NAPD score left me poor. I should maybe not have taken it but it’s always a hard call to make that one. I managed to get up to 4 points before Rob scored out.

I started out running against Stephen’s Sync. I kept pressure up reasonably well, breaking in where I could and sniping agendas until I was in spitting distance of the win. Unfortunately I made an error when we were both close to winning, leaving a remote run till my second click. Turned out to be a Turing that I couldn’t break and Steve psychographic’d out a GFI in the next turn. Lesson learnt!

The reverse matchup was against Noise and I had added CSV alongside the repositioning of the deck to Glacier. This  turned out to be an excellent choice and slowed down Steve’s big digs at R&D. A reasonably taxing server allowed me to score out without too much bother.

In shock news Seamus had abandoned his Argus deck for Haarp, and I figured pretty quickly that it was a kill deck. Careful picking around agendas and judicious use of Turntable allowed me to grab Agendas, and steal Astro tokens, from everywhere. A news team slowed me down a little, and I did miss the loss of Data Dealer, but I managed to stay ahead on credits to avoid any Sea Source nonsense and Seasmus just couldn’t find his Breaking News.

Against my Sol Seamus broke out the newest shaper runner Jesminder. I knew she would have less trouble against some of my Ice and I sort of guessed that she would be running Vamp. That knowledge did not translate into better play. Despite seeing Targeted Marketing earlier on I did not select Vamp and ended up being hit for it twice before I shut it down. I managed to get up to 6 points after an early score of 4 from Seamus but he kept up the pace and pressure well and dove into R&D repeatedly for the win.

Points: 6

David is well known for considering all sorts of weird combos in his decks so I had no idea exactly what I was going up against. I ran first against his NEH and quickly got smacked in the face by some Grail ice. I was more cautious for the rest of the game and though I managed to get up to 6 I couldn’t quite find the last point I needed to take the win, my barrier breaker alluding me. I’m seriously starting to consider an SMC over clone chip to speed the deck up more.

The reverse match saw my Sol up against David’s Nasir. I knew quite a lot of my Ice would cause problems for Nasir but David played it well and kept the pressure up, leaving me looking for a window. I managed to score out a couple before he really got going but finding space to hit the last points was tricky. An artist colony in play and a fan site scored left me wondering about the clot so a GFI double advanced forced him into a run and revealed that he didn’t have a clot. The Beale in my hand got scored out the following round with the astro token I had in play and that was it.

I did massively better than I had the week before and had some much closer games. The corp deck did well and I think I will keep testing it as is. Whizzard was a little more disappointing but felt a lot stronger and I think a bit more practice and a couple of minor tweaks will seem me doing better with it. I’ll be back at Store Champs in a couple of weeks time so stay tuned for more Tales Of Amazing Failure!