Worlds 2024: Full Tournament Report

Regression to the Mean Can Be a Fun Ride

Everybody wants to rule the Worlds.

So, I went to Worlds.

I did not go with any expectation to win the event- I can do realistic analysis of where I’m at w/r/t to the best players and I knew I wasn’t there. My goal was to make the day 2 cut and I failed at that, but I am not completely dissatisfied with the outcome given a few factors:

1. I did not get as much practice as I wanted. Worlds takes place smack dab in the middle of the Fall academic semester, and I have work responsibilities to attend to. I also enjoy playing other games and have other activities so I just generally do not grind games as much as someone who really wants to win a tournament of this caliber needs to.

2. I have never played at an event like Worlds before, with so many rounds, and so many excellent and highly motivated contenders.

3. I was flying out Friday, crashing at a cousin’s place and immediately waking up for the thing.

4. I had a shitload of fun anyways.

Before getting the report started, I wanted to give a big immediate thank you to johnofarc/knack and GoHawks/netjogging for helping me prepare, as well a handful of other DC area players who regularly show up to play at our meetups. Additionally, I had a few games and discussion session with The King who is the only other person more opinionated than I am about metagame matters (and, as anyone watching coverage knows, extremely good at this damn game).

I’d also like to thank people who comment on my blogs or chime in on any questions that I have on Stimslack or GLC. You’re all awesome. Lastly, I got in a couple of games with a new testing group, the S.C.R.U.B.S. (Semi-Competent Runners Using Basic Scripts)- a fitting name for my playstyle if there ever was one.

Upon arriving at the venue, I was greeted by Jai who is just an excellent human being and clearly there to kick some serious ass and take no prisoners. I was immediately asked my opinion on Trick Shot- does it merit a ban? I reluctantly placed a mark on the “No” column. My reasoning (at the time, more on this next week) goes thus:

1. I like cards with pure upside and it’s nice for Shaper to have something beyond SMC which draws people to the faction.

2. I would prefer Crim be given a boost rather than Shaper be taken down.

3. It gives Shapers an in-faction tool that helps keep up with spam while applying pressure on centrals.

4. We’re gonna rotate a huge portion of the card pool soon, so just let it ride.

Next, I went and caught up with DoomRat (who taught me the game ages ago) and then proceeded to buy a bunch of sick alt-arts from the Artist Colony and NSG Store.

Then suddenly it was time to play games.

The Decks

For my runner deck, I was locked on Spark Kit as of a few weeks before Worlds. Yes, it’s a deck that can lose to itself. Yes, it runs into random problems from Trojan Horse and SDS Drone Deployment. Yes, it’s a Shaper deck that often can’t make the most out of Trick Shot credits because it lacks SMC and Muse. And yes, it can’t play Coalescence.

But the event econ is SUPER EASY and consistent, and games where you make some bucks and spark into Lobisomem early allow a ton of early aggression that often yield the Shaper an early advantage- that’s usually extremely difficult for the Corp to come back from. In essence, you’re trading absolute win % for ease of piloting, which I felt was a very, very good idea for an 11 round tournament, especially considering that I’m generally less comfortable with playing runner. I don’t think I would change this choice if I could redo my tournament, even though my Kit deck did not perform particularly well at the tournament. The only other thing to mention about it is that I opted for a somewhat unorthodox Deep Dive list (adapted from https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/83c9f901-57da-466c-933d-bea73c948f75/kit-whale-wolf-3-0-0-at-nanpc-sf-8th-overall- and BlueMilk). In my testing, Deep Dive was great at closing out games against Corps with poorly defended centrals (including Azmari, PD, and Asa) and it is seldom expected out of Kit, which makes landing it easier. It is also an event, so it naturally plays well with PPVP and Maemi. Lastly, you can DJ Fenris for Sable and still have a click to double-steal, although 80-90% of the time Fenris is either in the bin or installed for Steve. During the day, I didn’t manage to land a single Deep Dive, but it was not Deep Dive’s fault.

For Corp, I opted for Dial EA For Murder (Combo Azmari). I’ve been singing the deck praises even before it had Djupstad and Punitive. Besides being generically good it has two excellent properties:

• Extremely favorable matchup against most Crims.

• Basically 100% win rate vs. a player that has not seen or practiced against it.

Since my goal was to make day 2 and not win the event, I felt good about the choice. I brought a back up deck, but hadn’t tuned it or gotten enough reps. The back-up deck? Asa. [Cue Curb Your Enthusiasm end credits music.]

Now, if you look back at my previous column, you’ll see that I redacted a deck that I felt gave the best possible win % against Lat. The redacted bullet point was NEH and R+. There was no way in hell I was going to play NEH murder at Worlds because even though I have reps with the deck and it is quite brutal, it is often extremely mentally taxing to play and games tend to go long. R+ I skipped mainly for lack of reps. If I could run the day back, I would opt for R+ over Azmari combo… even though I didn’t play against Lat all day I did play against a lot of Shaper, as expected.

The Tournament

“Netrunner is a difficult game.”

When people say this, it means a lot of things. It means that it has a lot of rules you have to remember. It means a steep learning curve and evolving metagame trends. It means that it has critical timing windows. It means you have to keep in mind the possible combinations that un-rezzed ice can represent. But when I say it, I also means “your opponents are working very hard to make you lose”. People who stick with Netrunner have generally climbed a fairly tall mountain and people who stick with Netrunner and go to Worlds are not throwing together some pile at random and fueling up with thoughts and prayers to RNGsus. So thank you to all my opponents who did their absolute best to make my brain melt.

Lastly, before jumping into the individual rounds - I asked all my opponents’ permission to mention them directly by name in this tournament report, and everyone graciously agreed. If you see your name here unexpectedly or simply don’t like what you read, just drop a line in the comments or ping me on the GLC Discord and we can either figure out a solution or I can straight-up redact stuff.

Even though I took notes post-games not everything may be completely accurate, 11 rounds is a lot to remember. Feel free to chime-in in the comments with corrections.

• Round 1 vs. Jesse (Azmari Murder)

Jesse studies combinatorics, which features quaint things like

I know the sigma means series from 0 to half n. That’s as far as I go.

and Azmari kill combo has a natural intimidation factor. Thankfully, because I was playing the deck myself, I was familiar with the Dead End lines that usually get one killed. I started to feel more comfortable after dropping 2 Stoneship Chartrooms, but knew that kills through two Stoneships were still quite possible. A reasonably lucky access from R&D without getting Punitived was crucial, as wall as choosing the correct things to shuffle in for a Degree Mill. After our game, Jesse mentioned that if I had run the remote, he had the kill due to a Klevetnik trigger blanking one of my Stoneships (something I “knew” instinctively, but hadn’t actually reasoned through fully when figuring out my lines). Jesse went on to have a good World’s run and ended up placing higher than your truly despite the early loss. Hopefully we get a rematch sometime soon!

1-0

• Round 2 vs. Axel/elfy (Mercury)

I was pleased to be sitting across from Mercury because:

1. I like my odds as Azmari against all Crims.

2. I like Mercury, so even if I lost there was a silver lining of getting a Mercury deck closer to the cut at Worlds.

Other than that there’s really not too much to say about this game. I was a little flooded at first, but set up the kill pretty quickly as is par for the deck. I needed to dodge one R&D double access so I could either kill from the remote or double punitive from hand and didn’t. I did make a pretty serious mistake which is that the R&D agenda touch happened with a Spin Doctor on-board. Diluting R&D is a pretty basic move and could have easily resulted in a different outcome here. This is part of what separates mid from champ.

1-1

• Round 3 vs. Kyle/nullromo (Kit)

While I like my odds as Azmari against Crims and Anarchs (except Esa or an early Maw), the deck only gives about even odds vs. Shaper, and the odds get worse the more they’ve practiced and the more tech they have. Nullromo started the matchup burning through Stoneships though, so I rapidly surmised he was unfamiliar with this combo and indeed it turned out to be the case. One thing I didn’t get to ask was whether he was playing Pinhole Threading, which is another key card in the matchup that can slow the game down by a turn or two per copy.

2-1

• Round 4 vs. Kay/GermApple (Big Deal PD)

I practiced this matchup a lot before the tournament and Kit is very close to 50/50. It boils down to how quickly you can get Lobisomem and basic econ up- if it happens in the first 3 turns, you’re closer to 85% to win. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, Kit is a deck that just has some percent chance to “lose to itself” sometimes, moreso that than most Runner decks. Like, yeah if you’re playing Esa and don’t see Ghostongue and Marrow, it’s going to be rough, but you have other tools. But if you’re Kit and don’t see Spark or Lobisomem after drawing 20+ cards… you’re dead. Kay did not mess around though- playing exactly correctly to minimize the amount of time I had to find my cards. I could have tried a Compile sooner, but even if I’d slowed the game down by 1 agenda, I don’t think there was a universe where I could have won this game. Kay was a very gracious winner and went on to have a very good tournament and make Day 2.

2-2

• Round 5 vs. Nick Mason (Kingmaking Azmari)

This is not a match-up I expected or practiced, and after our match Nick mentioned that he was getting good equity from people making bad assumptions about his strategic position in the matchup. As Mike Flores taught us Magic nerds a million years ago “incorrect role assignation = match loss”.

2-3

• Round 6 vs. Patrick (Sable)

Patrick is playing Sable which I’m happy to be facing up against. While it is the most click-efficient/fast of the Crim IDs, and can get a ton of mileage from an early Swift (which Patrick plays on turn 2), the time most current Crims need to set up a position to contest the remote and have a robust econ is just a lot. I start to feel a bit pressured when Patrick is sitting on a mountain of cash (double Bravado, double Carpe Diem) and Curupira/Shibboleth, but one of the ice on the remote is Smiling Tsarevna and Patrick opts not to contest it, allow me the combo kill. Once again, a single Pinhole threading could have made this game borderline unwinnable, but they don’t always have it or draw it. Also, although he didn’t make any clear misplays, Patrick was unfamiliar with the combo- he might have risked running the remote if he knew what the deal was, which would have made things substantially more difficult depending on how much credit differential there was post-run.

3-3

• Round 7 vs. Harp (Akiko)

I don’t have too many notes on this game except:

1.       Harp knew the lines and played very carefully and thoughtfully.

2.       I waited too long to force the issue.

3.       There wasn’t too much negative variance here due to psi games or anything.

This was exactly the kind of game my Corp was not hoping to have to deal with: fast setup, fast econ, carefully considered aggression. If I had made the cut, this type of play would certainly have ended my run before too long, specially considering Lat has inherent advantages in this type of matchup that Akiko does not.

3-4 ; at this junction I had to win 4 games in a row to be live for day 2. But I was in a positive mindset.

• Round 8 vs. Izzy (PE)

Well, there goes the positive mindset. Izzy and I have been trading game wins/losses at competitive events for over a year since she flatlined me with Keeling PE at Philly Nats in 2023 (a tournament eventually taken down by then 6-month Netrunner rookie Wikignometry) and then when I flatlined her with NEH at Pax Unplugged 10 months ago. It’s always violence. Can’t we just Install Advance Advance sometimes? On top of that, I felt it would be some type of Karmic Justice if I was knocked out of contention from my first Worlds by my most hated ID of all time in the last Worlds it is likely to be legal in. So, yeah, PE. You can learn more about the deck here:

https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/dc5eed30-a33a-4c65-8739-6780867a3e2c/hawaii-five-0-the-only-undefeated-jinteki-deck-at-worlds

I had a very bad opening hand, which I mulligan into a somewhat subpar-but-not-hopeless hand. In this matchup I want econ, Steve, and Spark in that order and my hand gave me none of that, but it had draw. This time I was the one burning through Stoneships to dig into something with a plan (protip: this is not correct, just click to draw and leave the Stoneship right where it is). Eventually I took one risky run on HQ, not factoring Moon Pool into consideration and Izzy made it clear I was 50/50 to die on HQ access. I lost the coin flip and died (Fujii followed by an agenda score). The write-up makes it perfectly clear that this is the intent: force the runner into enough coin-flips and if they lose too many that’s that. I do not like this kind of Netrunner; but when Shaper Inevitability is so strong, it really does push competitive players to use strategies that don’t rely on ice too much since its worthless late game¹.

While I’m never exactly happy to lose at a competitive event, Izzy was clearly overjoyed to have gotten a kickflip Moon Pool flatline so I think fun was positive sum here if we do the hedons and dolor math.

3-5 ; out of the running, fuck it we’re here to play Netrunner.

• Round 9 vs. Malina/SovietLoveHammer (PE)

Malina was quite tired at this point and my opening hand was fine. I won this game on a technicality (game loss issued by judge after Malina flipped an extra card on damage) which is not something I love doing, but I’ve been on the receiving end and this is how We Do at competitive REL. She was gracious and signed my playmat which I’m quite thankful for; I know that no one likes to lose like that.

4-5

• Round 10 vs. Manuel (Arissana)

An early Ping tag stole a lot of momentum and Manuel was aggressively trying to deny me my Azmari money, so I broke my basic script heuristic of “Always Event” and flipped between Event and Program as I felt was optimal. While I did eventually manage to position the game into an unwinnable fork (which Manuel knew about because he knew about double Punitive in hand from Burner and random accesses) it was a lot closer than it may have looked from the outside. This game taught me that Arissana can actually still be extremely threatening when playing “close to the ground” (few assets, apparently low money) because they can summon what they need at split-second from Muse. I think with 5 more credits Manuel wins this game 80+% of the time, but the early Ping exacted enough tempo loss to make it impossible by the time I assembled Exodia.

5-5

• Round 11 vs. AbyssStaresBack (AgInfusion)

Although I tested vs. AgInfusion (both with and against) in my preparation, this is a matchup that I certainly could stand to study more. Early accesses are important, and I got those from a strong starting hand, but knowing how to play the mid and late-game are equally important. ASB was playing Bio Vault, which I only suspected after an overwrite in the remote made it impossible for him to be manually advancing anything other than an upgrade. I haven’t really thought about the best lines to take against Bio Vault, but it combines really well with Ag boops and Nisei Mk2 counters. We ended up 5-5 and tying on time. I think I played pretty well and didn’t tank too hard, but if we had had time, I think I was slightly unfavored (40%) because landing a Deep Dive was going to be very, very difficult or impossible. Kudos to my opponent for playing such a demanding deck for 11 rounds of Swiss and still making it a great final game.

5-5-1

Well, that’s that. I finished dead in the middle which I don’t consider too shabby given the level of practice I got. It was an absolutely great time, and solidified my opinion that Netrunner is still the best 1v1 card game that exists, not close. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Null Signal Games has been a really great caretaker institution and there is a clear path towards really increasing the size of our local and global communities.

Other Stuff

I grabbed a lot Alt Arts, they were incredible so I consider it money well spent. Huge shoutout to everyone who was nice to me and said they read the blog (Eric/Whiteblade!!!), I really appreciate it. Extra special thanks to AugustusCaesar who not only recognized my handle but also straight-up gifted me a super sick Arissana alt art that will surely encourage me to get more reps with everyone’s favorite frog skateboard-tricker. Also special thanks to the Artist Colony/NGS Store peeps who lent me a silver sharpie to get my unbelievably awesome Holo Man playmat signed. And obviously a heartfelt thanks to all the volunteers, judges, staff, and players who made Saturday an unforgettable experience. Massive thanks to Rielle for coming up with BlueMilk Kit, a deck that has done really well for me on Jnet and real life and was a blast to play on Saturday as well. HUGE shoutout to DanB/Booshy who has been a pillar for the entire community for many years running now and was the highest-ranking Kit player after the Swiss. Love seeing you actually get to play and way to show us how it’s done!

I plan on blogging more about Worlds next week (look for a return to regular updates on Tuesdays) and I have a feeling I will be attending many more events for the 2025 Season.

Come back Tuesday for: a photo essay about San Francisco, spoiler discussion, meta commentary, and gameplay dissection of the most interesting matches.

Now, hit that Subscribe button!

1. More on the meta and other player’s choices next week, but William/sokka opted for BTL with 14 ice, so it’s not actually useless now is it? And AgInfusion and HB also gets a lot of mileage out of its ice. Maybe the “Shaper good = ice is garbage” narrative is not entirely correct. (Top 16 cut Worlds Decklists can be found here: https://nullsignal.games/blog/2024-world-championship-recap/)