it has been a bit since girls wins (girls wons?)
(This post was originally posted on Cohost, as a followup to this post.)
On 14th August, a few days after that successful weekend, I bought flowers for @AceEmpress and I. We call it girlsmas, and will try to celebrate it yearly.
girls wins became deck of the week on NetrunnerDB, meaning that the deck was on full display on the homepage of the website for a week. It has eclipsed every other deck I've published in terms of likes, favourites and comments. Most of the comments are some variation on "girls wins". I think this is good.
Three different streamers played the deck, including one who really liked the decklist description (and thought that it was really cool that the deck had pushed my transition forward). I think all of them liked the deck, but I'll be honest anxiety about whether they'd like the deck or not meant I watched very little of the streams.
Mainly though, this has been a huge result for the visibility of my local testing group, Quear Earth Hub1 (QEH). It's a group that, before now, was basically unknown - confused as some kind of QtM-lite at best rather than its own thing. But we're now finally a bit more present in the Netrunner community as a whole!
We now have a cute article on The Surveyor detailing our group and trying to emphasise that testing groups just need to be a group of friends who test rather than some "Netrunner elite" or whatever. We are suddenly known for a deck we produced, and hopefully can produce more in future. Our methods, where people play the decks they want and we tweak them to their best rather than trying to find the best "meta deck", work!
Hopefully this is the start of a modest line of successes, but we don't need it to be. We've made something, and I am immensely proud.
This is what I wrote and forgot to post about a week ago. Since then, girls and the girl who created it got one more success. I finally achieved a little personal goal of mine, after many near misses: I made my first ever top cut, after going 5-1 at the latest Accelerated Meta Test tournament (with girls and ob of course), putting me first place after the swiss rounds2. After a fair amount of time doubting my ability to play Netrunner, it was nice to be reminded that yeah, sometimes I can really pull it off.
It only took... nearly ten years of playing. I might be a slow learner, but I'll still savour the victory.