in memoriam Nikola Tomić
On Sunday, February 9th, 8 runners met at Astal a, not really, shady board game cafe. They met with a single goal. To claim the ultimate prize in all of Netrunner! To see friends and frenemies, not so, long lost to the realities of adult life. Also, there’s the allure of great food and an awesome trophy.
OMAAA is an annual Netrunner tournament organized by Gordana Tomić and Marko Antonić. A memorial tournament celebrating one of the finest Serbian Runners, Nikola Tomić (1983 – 2014). This marks the 5th year in a row that the tournament was organized. It’s a great excuse to meet friends and enjoy playing the best card game ever made for a day. Runners present for this year were, in no particular order, Saša, Kristina, Franzee, Milutin, Zorić, Miloš, Krle, Mikica and little Gavrilo. Yes, I know, that’s 9, not 8. Gavrilo was around to absorb the tells and knowledge from grizzled veterans. I’m sure he’ll join us in a few years. 😉
We played the same “Brimingham” draft cube as we did previous year. One interesting thing that Antonić realized for this year was that it’s much easier to print proxies and use mat sleeves than to dig through collection trying to find cards for draft cube. I guess it helps having a script that creates print sheets from a NRDB deck.
You can check out the cube we used at the following links:
https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/37998/birmingham-cube-corp-blood-money
https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/37999/birmingham-cube-runner-blood-money
The biggest difference between standard and draft is that draft uses smaller decks (thus is played to 6 points) and doesn’t have factions. Since we were using a “known” cube, we were able to employ some amount of hate drafting, but Antonić was ahead of us and included a few extra copies of spicy cards, just in case.
This resulted in totally bonkers decks that were stupidly fun to play. There’s nothing quite like getting hit by an Apocalypse when you’re sure you hate drafted the only copy in the cube. 😀
The first thing we did was draft corp decks. It’s a standard draft fare, get one card from the pack and send it to the next player. Packs were “semi-randomized”, all packs contained at least 1 copy of a card type and the rest were “truly” random. Following the corp draft, we moved onto the Runner side. The Runner side is randomized in a similar fashion to Corp, with the difference being that Icebreakers are considered a distinct card type from the other programs. With drafting done, it was time for some food! As always, Goca organized a great catering service with awesome food. I think we were a bit overeager because I can’t find any photo of it. 😀
The tournament format was a 3 round Swiss, with the finals between the top 2 (and a match for the 3rd place). The most memorable moment in the tournament was a series of desperate Medium digs. Saša installed an agenda and would score it for the win on the next turn. Zorić was locked out of both scoring remote and HQ. He had some counters on Medium and started to run RnD which culminated in 7 card RnD access without a steal. There were 8 cards in RnD at the time. So, no problem, maybe the agendas were in HQ? Wrong! There was 1, on the very bottom of RnD!
The finals were tense. Mikica met with his padawan, Miloš. We (I’m Mikica :D) already met during the Swiss, so we both knew what the other one was bringing. His Apocalypse against my rush, my DLR (no, really, I won by decking in one game) vs his Scorch. My only loss during the Swiss was against Miloš’s corp. Now, about finals being tense, I lied. Miloš owned me in a spectacular fashion! Apocalypse, a glimpse into the things that would come mere weeks later. At least I dodged double Scorch… But still lost due to Faust burning most of my deck. 😀
Miloš won the tournament and the annual OMAAA trophy! It was a long time coming and it finally happened. I think he’s the most talented player we have at the moment, but I’m kinda biased. Seeing most of the players from our local meta was great and it showed us just how much we’re missing regular Netrunner meetups. For some reason NISEI produced packs didn’t go over well with us, I guess it’s more of a supply problem (shipping to Serbia is at least twice the price of a pack) than a design one, but it is what it is. Yes, we’re aware we can print them locally. It’s just not the same.
Always Be Running!