3 SEAmless and a DReaM (4th @OTG)

God I love earth station.

I would say this deck was a meta call but I'll probably play earth station until the day it rotates. It just so happened that a bunch of things lined up for this tournament: lots of people turned up with crim (reg and knife), presumably because of the Tributary ban, and a single Crisium on HQ makes things a lot harder for both flavours. In addition, you spend most of your ice protecting centrals because your remote has the built-in earth station tax, making value runs difficult.

Milk Kit, which just won American Continentals, is not a great matchup but also not a terrible one either; often it takes her long enough to set up that you've clicked through a Regolith and are able to protect centrals. Trick Shot credits can't pay for the earth station tax, as has been said, so they're basically using it for the extra R&D accesses, which you can turn off with Crisium. On top of this, I changed the agenda suite to a disgusting 3x SDS, 3x Basalt, 1x Above the Law, which was not only good for agenda density during setup but also immensely slowed Kit down, as she had to play around non-negotiable program destruction.

digital rights management????

Shout outs to @Acatalepsy, who was sleeving up a PD with Digital Rights Management at 10pm the night before the tournament. I was helping him cut out proxies when I read the text and was like "damn, that sounds bananas in earth station". In a last second, probably inadvisable decision, I cut 1 Planogram from my deck to fit the DRM. It did not fire at all during swiss, but came in handy during the cut in a nail biter against Dr. Awkward. Even though I didn't win that game, I felt like I played out of my mind and clawed back to a winnable position from a turn 1 Lobisomem install into an early Basalt steal with nothing in archives to recur. DRM busted? Remains to be seen. Funny card nonetheless.

There are some changes I'd make to the deck going forward. I really miss tranq grid, which I had cut for Void. In practice, I never wanted to fire void because I wanted to keep cards in hand and often I found myself discarding it while digging for other things. Jury's still out whether DRM is actually good for this deck, but honestly I used to play Pivot and this is just pivot but like 10x better. I'd probably cut wall to wall (slow, weak card) for Audacity (strong, fast card). I kind of wish I had an Extract, but not sure what I would cut for it.

I was pretty down on my own play coming into this tournament. I went to Roseville hoping to just see my friends (shout out to Squeeeeeege, Acat, Evy, Cai, and LB) and maybe play some netrunner. I was blown away by my performance in the swiss and by all the support and hype from the community. I felt like I played pretty sloppily in the first two rounds of the cut (shout outs to the stream; I flipped the Seamless at the end because I thought it was the winning agenda :p). Despite this, round 3 I won against jesse's Knife Sable to bring back the mojo, bringing me to that last game against Dr. Awkward that felt just right.

Thank you Squeeeeeege for your incredible energy, both in swiss and in the cut. You're cracked at netrunner and probably should have won our cut game. Click 1 drawing that Seamless was my only out. Let's keep repping B-tier Weyland in the top cut 😤

Thank you to Acatalepsy for first introducing me to this beautiful game. I can't believe I got to play alongside you after all this time in person. And thanks for letting me use your extra DRM proxy 😅

Shout out to system savvy for fun non-netrunner times! Always a pleasure to see you all, let's do it again soon!!

Shout outs to the OTG Crew: Orbital, Stwyde, Cranked (thanks for letting me borrow seamlesses), and CTZ. Amazing tournament, would love to come again!!

Special thanks to PISED gang and QTM for all the support from the sidelines!! Double piss in the cut!! QTM strong!! We're so good!!