the startup format is really cool!
(This post was originally posted on Cohost.)
I ran a Netrunner Startup tournament at a local game store on Saturday, which went well! I'm a big proponent of Startup and we have a reasonably consistent influx of new players in our area, so I try to get them playing in tournaments by running Startup. This is the second such tournament1.
Fortunately for me, there were an odd number of players so I got to play to avoid any byes. Please enjoy my decks: Androgynous Hottie Seeks Femme Fatale (Mercury) and Multi-iced Servers any% Speedrun (Built to Last).
The main reason I'm posting about this though is that the Startup format is currently in a great place. It provided an amazing field for a lot of new players to attend, both new to the game and returning from the FFG era - the overall winner was even a new player! But also, it was cool to see such a range of decks - 8 unique Corp IDs and 9 unique Runner IDs, and every deck I played against had a very different strategy2.
I'm really excited for the future of the Startup format, and hope that more people come and play it - I know there are people who worry about it potentially being a format flooded with banned Standard cards (Endurance, Drago and Nanisivik), but they're much less problematic than in Standard and contribute to a fun environment.
Also I like being a queer TO in a heavily queer scene it's nice
I've run a fair few small tournaments, but a lot of them were before Startup even existed as a format, and would have definitely been in Startup if it had existed.↩
Of course, this may just be symptomatic of the fact that nobody in the tournament was a "top tier" player or whatever, but the data coming from other tournaments also suggests a similarly varied meta.↩