Wilfy Horig has just brought a neat little gaming trophy home to Australia: He’s the new world champion for Android: Netrunner.
The Melbourne based co-host of The Winning Agenda podcast took out the Netrunner World Championships earlier today in Roseville, Maine. Charging his way through the upper bracket, Horig didn’t drop a single game in the top 16.
The grand finals themselves was a straightforward victory with his Cerebral Imaging deck overrunning Gregory Tongue’s Hayley Kaplan deck.
But Horig had been pretty dominant throughout. By the end of the first day, Horig was ranked second in swiss play and stayed near the top of the rankings all the way through to the top cut.
He kept that position throughout with a methodical style of play, which showed when he squared off against eventual runner-up Gregory Tongue in the upper bracket semi-finals. It was a tight affair, with Tongue having some incredible draws that not only put him ahead, but almost knocked Horig to the lower bracket:
Horig’s deck, which revolves around the Cerebral Imaging identity, leverages an economic advantage over the runner by using cards like Bryan Stinson and Reversed Accounts. This economic advantage turns into an absurd hand full of cards thanks to Cerebral Imaging’s ability to hold as many cards as the player has credits and powerful card draw effects like Violet Level Clearance to fill his hand.
The rest of the deck then works around using a strategy known as ‘Fast Advance’ to effectively install, advance and score agenda cards in a single turn. Bypassing Netrunner’s usual back and forth about building servers to protect agendas over multiple turns.
It’s all a little complicated if you’ve never played Netrunner before, and there’s a ton of counter-strategies and metagaming that go on at the highest levels of card games that I won’t go into here.
Nonetheless, the world championship is coming home to Australia. And Australia was represented pretty well: On top of Horig’s efforts, fellow Aussie (and reigning national champion) Alexander Fordran finished 5th.
Adam Wells contributed reporting and background to this story.
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