My friend Ben and I went to our very first Netrunner tournament on Saturday. It was being run by Quinns (the one from Shut Up and Sit Down) in the Loading Bar in Dalston.
The day started off at 06:30 and getting a 08:29 train from Sheffield to LONDON. That went swimmingly. A lovely woman sat next to us and was fairly interested in Ben’s last minute deck building. We got some food and headed to Dalston. We foolishly didn’t check the engineering works and the tube took us one stop before we had to walk.
Walking was actually a good result because it meant that we didn’t arrive an hour early! We also came to the realisation that London is pretty shit. Anyone who says “It’s grim up north” has never been to the bits of London we walked through.
Don’t let people tell you London is good. It’s shit. Only go there if you have good reason.
— Slippers Ex Machina (@MegaSlippers) April 5, 2015
We were the first to arrive and we got signed up first. I put down MegaSlippers as my nickname which turned out to be a pretty good idea because there were at least 4 Daves there (also two people recognised the name from Twitter).
I was running my Stealth Kit runner deck and my Shameless Two Ways Near Earth Hub corp deck. We chatted with some of the people there like the DJ guy (I can’t remember his name for the life of me) and Leigh Alexander about the decks. Once more people started arriving we were surprised how genuinely lovely everyone was.
Round 1 saw me facing off a great guy from Latvia. It was terrifying. The most stressful two games of Netrunner I’ve ever played. Luckily I won both. Winning the first round meant I headed downstairs to the TOP TABLES. I did not expect to do that all day! As it turned out I would spend the rest of the day down there.
According to Quinns we split really quickly. I can testify to that because I drew the following 4 rounds. I almost took round 4 if only my opponent hadn’t run R&D with an interface. I was on 6 points with a Breaking News in hand.
My final round was very interesting. I had the perfect game as NEH and won very quickly by getting on the Astrotrain off the back of an Architect. When my opponent played his NBN: Making News I wasn’t too scared initially. When you get hit for 16 tags with a double Midseasons your brain stops working. 16 tags? WHAT IS THIS MADNESS? He then started digging with Jackson Howard to find something. I was terrified. I assumed he was going for Scorched Earth. Turns out that he was going for a Psychographics/Project Beal combo.
I think my most proud moment was beating Jinteki: Replicating Perfection. I thought that would be my worst match up given that with my Kit deck I never feel comfortable when ICE gets three deep. However I got all my breakers up fast and lots of stealth credits. I could walk through all the ICE in the world.
At the end of the day I was very pleased to discover that I placed 6th out of 30ish. One place off winning a Diesel cocktail. Quinns being the lovely human that he is brought a ton of spare IDs for the top 16 but seeing as I own everything I passed that up so others could get one.
This was probably the most fun I’ve ever had with boardgames. I’d recommend a Quinns’ tournament to anyone.