Facechecking Nationals - Part 1 (The Road To Birmingham)

While I've been playing A:NR for over a year, until very recently I had only ever played against my friend Paul (who I played the original Netrunner with, back in 1999). In June we discovered a GNK was happening in Milton Keynes. so we popped along, only to get utterly destroyed. The two games I won that night were against him, and he didn't get a single win... but we had a lot of fun in the process, and decided to go along to more competitions.

So this past weekend, as you may be aware, was the 2016 UK Nationals.

Yes, my second experience of the competitive Netrunner scene was the biggest event in the UK because apparently I'm a bit of an Anarch in that regard.

Which decks to take? Runner was easy - my Val deck (Drinking The Pub Dry) was fast, resilient and above all fun to play but I just couldn't find a corp deck I enjoyed playing. I spent a lot of time trying different netdecks out, seeing what I liked amd how they worked (so I would know how to face them) but just never felt inspired. They just weren't as fun as playing my dodgy Tennin deck!

Discussing this on the Facebook "UK Netrunner" group, someone said to me:

"Take the deck you know, and that you enjoy playing. You're better off with an uncompetitive deck you like and have experience with than a top tier deck that you either don't like or haven't played much with"

So "Damned If You Do..." Tennin it was! I did make some fairly major changes to it, moving its concept from asset spam shell game bullshit to remoteless fast advance but it was still a tricksy deck full of traps capable of flatlining people who weren't careful and that's really what I enjoy about Jinteki. There's something delicious about the runner feeling like they need to make a run on your open archives to avoid you getting the free advancement token and then finding out it's full of Shock, Shi-Kyu and Space Camp... *evil laugh*

The day itself eventually arrived, and Paul picked me up at 6:45am which means I had to get up earlier for Netrunner than I do for work and we set off for Birmingham with 90 minutes to spare before the end of registration. Which it turns out was damn lucky as not only was every motorway full of roadworks, but somehow we'd both got it into our heads that it was at the NEC after getting there, realising our mistake and then driving to the ICC we arrived with 15 minutes before registration closed! Quickly writing out our deck lists (me because I'd brought a printed out email, him because he'd not done it) and having a quick smoke, the round 1 pairings were posted...

Continued in "Facechecking Nationals - Part 2 (7 Rounds for 7 Agendas)"