Lia: 2026 APAC Showdown Champion!

by Sam Keilback

The 2026 APAC Showdown has concluded! With 112 attendees, players from across the globe met up to play Netrunner! After two days of hard fought tournament games, one player emerged as the champion:

Congratulations to Lia for winning the APAC Showdown!

We also want to shout-out our other top 16 competitors, who fought their way to the top of standings after 10 rounds of swiss! The top 16 were:

liadahlia	FireRL	CyberShark	Tradon
Wenjong	Choux	Midrev	xiatt
34Witches	Myriad	Combination Bean	fruwuitloop
Lost My Thumbs	rosewary	Smolgrump	jfoley

 

If you missed the live stream, you can watch the recording on Jai’s channel. The swiss rounds can be found here and the top cut is here!

Lia won the event with Sebastião and Flood the Market PD. She was on stream several times, and had some extremely tense games against Méliès U. In the end, she was able to use the relentless ice destruction tools of Sebastião to grind down FireRL’s BTL Glacier deck, taking home the win!

 

We caught up with Lia to get her thoughts on the event:

Congratulations on winning the 2026 APAC Showdown! You took the tournament with Flood the Market Precision Design and Sebastião. Why did you bring those decks?

I brought Flood the Market PD because I fell in love with the deck the moment I picked it up. Also, because I didn't wanna play Méliès U. Seb, well they banned my wife Sable, so Seb's my rebound.

 

How did you prepare in the lead-up to the event?

I already knew what corp deck I was playing so it was only a matter of refining it. On the runner side, I struggled a lot with choosing a deck. Criminal felt like it auto-loses into a good Méliès U player, so that was a non-starter, and just being poorly positioned into the meta. I hate Shaper, so Anarch it was. 

I worked on doom rig Loup for a while. It turned out to be too boring and too honest for my playstyle, so I picked up Seb. He is everything I loved about Criminal while being very well positioned into the meta. He has a great matchup against Méliès U (which is a good sign) and a great matchup into virtually every corp I prepped against. I actually could not find a single bad matchup for Seb. I speculated that Ob would be one, but no one had a refined Ob list so early in the meta yet, so Seb is just a perfect winner right now.

Flood the Market PD is a new corp archetype in the Vantage Point meta. How did you work to develop and tune the deck?

The deck was originally posted in my testing group, SCRUBS, by NotAgain titled "The most messed up deck in VP." The main thing that distinguished it from other Flood the Market decks was that it ran Humanoid Resources, Warm Reception and had more operations like Nanomanagement and Red Level Clearance for reach. 

I loved the deck the moment I picked it up and knew I was going to be bringing it to tournaments. So, I iterated on it heavily and arrived at the current version. The original list was on 3x Megaprix which turned into three Ingatan Project, which turned into three Offworld Office, which ended up being the perfect fit. Offworld Office is a fast advance agenda that nets four credits, triggers PD and The Powers That Be. Sometimes you can score it off of Humanoid Resources. 

Originally, the deck was on three Wage Workers, which was cut down to one in favor of a third Warm Reception and third Cyclotron. Wage Workers did practically nothing for the deck except in some fringe use cases. The deck used to play two Perfect Recall, but they were cut for more ice. The ice suite and influence was changed around to adapt to the very awful Seb matchup (Predictive Planograms and Flyswatter). It's still awful, but this change was instrumental in helping me tie against my testing partner, CyberShark, during swiss (the only Seb I had to play). During iteration, I found the deck to be extremely powerful into every runner matchup with the exception of Seb, with great matchups into Shaper and Crim, so not much work needed besides teching for Seb.

You played some really close games versus Méliès U in swiss and the cut. How do you approach that matchup? 

This matchup is actually one where I prepped heavily. This paid off because I have played this matchup seven times already across two tournaments (5-1-1). Seb's too complicated and too nuanced to describe in a paragraph, but I'll keep it short.

Seb's very favored into Méliès, you want to find Lago Parona Shelter, find Friend of a Friend, then find Crew Charm and the rest of your engine. Then, you want to pool a few Transfer of Wealths into your hand to hang over the corp's head as a sword of damocles. You want to set yourself up so that as soon as the corp pushes, you click one Transfer of Wealth. When the corp rezzes 10 credits of ice on HQ you eat one or two of them, siphon the Corp, charge Audrey and then immediately pivot to the remote. If you did it correctly, the game is practically over. The next ten turns are just a victory lap.

The real wrench in this gameplan is actually time. This matchup almost always, always goes to time, and time is not in Seb's favor since the corp often gets the first few scores. Manuel wouldn’t usually be important in this matchup since you can completely control the Corp and starve them out, but due to time, try to get Manuel up before the first Ashen Epilogue. This way you can find random points on Transfer of Wealth runs and be prepared to lock R&D a few turns before time is called. 

Are there any new deck ideas you’re excited to try out at future tournaments?

Nah, I'm a boring spike so I'll probably play these two until they get banned.

Can we expect you at any future Showdown events?

Yes! You can expect me in all of them, whether I'm playing or casting is subject to my mood though.

Is there anyone you’d like to shout out?

I'd like to shout out CyberShark and Laura for being my testing partners and SCRUBS and QTM for being cool testing teams. I also stream every Monday @ 6PM PST on my youtube channel. Come hang out, we spent the previous stream having hot takes about the meta :)

Thanks again to Lia for answering our questions. We’re excited to watch her performance at future Showdown events!

Want to play in the next Showdown? The Summer Showdown takes place on May 23rd! Tickets for the event go live on April 18th, so check back soon for more information.

Lastly, we want to offer a massive thank you to all the judges and commentators that made this event possible, all the players who participated and a special thank you to Jai for streaming the entire event.