Last weekend, 139 players from across the world took to jinteki.net to compete in the last major event of the 2024 Netrunner Organized Play season: the Circuit Breaker Invitational. Now, the 15 best-performing players – plus the reigning champion from last year – are making their last preparations for the top cut. This Sunday, Jan 26th, they will battle it out to decide who claims the prestigious title of Circuit Breaker.
Watch the CBI finals on Twitch and Youtube – starting 07.30 UTC on Sunday, Jan 26th
Following this year’s new structure, the swiss rounds were split up into three pods, spread across time zones to accommodate players from around the world. Every player who competed had qualified by placing highly at a 2024 competitive event. We were expecting three fiery competitions between the best players around – and we were not disappointed.
The Asia-Pacific (APAC) pod was first up. It was a smaller playerbase than the pods that would follow, but still a highly competitive one, with several of the biggest names from the 2024 season taking their shot and falling short. In line with many players’ expectations going into the weekend, the field was largely made up of virus-based Anarch Runners and tempo-forward Haas-Bioroid Corps. After seven hard-fought rounds, Amarum, abstracted, Styx, Toron and Diogene came out on top and booked their places in the top cut.
The APAC pod may have conformed to metagame expectations, but the Americas and Europe, Middle-East & Africa (EMEA) pods increasingly confounded them as the weekend went on.
Unexpectedly large numbers of players chose Shaper and Criminal over Anarch in the Americas pod, while on the Corp side Jinteki glacier decks and NBN kill decks rivaled the HB tempo decks in number. But it was Weyland that performed the best of the four Corp factions, with three of the top five players representing the ambitious Consortium. Reigning World Champion Aruzan finished at the top of the standings in a 59-player field, followed by more big names in dranked (A.K.A. NotAgain), sebastiank and benvelopment, with davz131 winning the hotly contested fight for 5th place thanks to his superior tie-breakers.
Players across all three pods had locked in their decklists on Friday, ahead of the first pod starting – but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the identity breakdown of the EMEA pod. A whopping 11 players chose to play the versatile Weyland identity Ob: Superheavy Logistics, which must have felt like a good decision as they woke up to see that two Ob pilots had made the cut in the previous pod. With 53 players, the final day’s play was just as heated. Eight fraught rounds later, J0N4LD, The King and pouchoflavender put themselves cleanly through to the top 16, with former teammates Bridgeman and Kikai winning the hard-fought tie-breakers battle for the remaining two places.
Check out all the action from all three swiss pods on the NSG Youtube channel
After battling to the top of three of the most competitive fields at any event this season, the top five finishers from each event now have a few days to recuperate, recenter and ready their plans. The reigning Circuit Breaker awaits them in a stacked top 16 bracket:
- The Circuit Breaker
- Aruzan
- J0N4LD
- Amarum
- NotAgain
- The King
- abstracted
- sebastiank
- Styx
- pouchoflavender
- benvelopment
- Toron
- Bridgeman
- davz131
- Kikai
- Diogene
Unique among events in the Organized Play calendar, the CBI top 16 provides a rare chance to see the very best of the very best pit their skills against one another.
Will our reigning Circuit Breaker become the first ever player to retain the title? Could World Champion Aruzan make history by taking the two most prestigious titles in the same season? Or will one of the 14 other top players on this list win the opportunity to write their own name into Netrunner history?
16 players enter. One Circuit Breaker leaves. Join us for the CBI Top 16 on Twitch and Youtube starting 07.30 UTC on Sunday, Jan 26th.
