Davz131: 2026 Summer Showdown Champion!

by Sam Keilback

The 2026 Summer Showdown has wrapped up! With nearly 200 players attending the event, this Showdown looked to be one of the largest Netrunner events of the year! Players battled it out across 10 rounds of swiss and a top 16 cut. After two days of playing, we have a victor:

Congratulations to Davz131 for winning Summer Showdown 2026!

We wanted to highlight our entire top 16 finishers. These players made the cut in an incredibly competitive field:

davz131	34Witches	Zomzraft	Minstrel
Athlichi	passive_mult	metronome	CyberShark
gruntownie	V1rtue	jfoley	LLBlumire
Sl33p3r	HexNet	Yi Sun	ToBeAsh

A special shoutout to 34Witches, CyberShark and jfoley, who all also made the cut at this year’s APAC Showdown!

The swiss rounds of the event were streamed on the Metropole Grid here (for the first three rounds, click here)! The exciting cut games were streamed on Aksu’s channel and can be watched here!

Davz131 won the Showdown on a Hermes Loup brew and brutal Au Co. asset list. Davz used Loup to slowly control the board while relying on Hermes to make any fast scoring corps stumble. Davz’s Au Co. played two Measured Response and threatened to either score points via Regenesis or flatline the runner!

We caught up with Davz to ask them about their lists and the event.

Congratulations on winning the 2026 Summer Showdown! You took down the tournament with Au Co. and Loup. Why did you bring those decks? 

Thank you very much! I was expecting a lot of Jinteki, split between Méliès and Au Co. Anarch, with an inherent redundancy of its cards, felt like the faction least worried about taking incidental damage and best suited to navigate both a glacier-y matchup and a more horizontal one. Loup has cemented himself as the home of "good stuff" Anarch so I brought that. On the corp side, I played what I was most comfortable with.

After the Ashen Ban, it was unclear what Loup would look like in the new format. Why did you decide to play Hermes?

The previous Loup decks had some struggles against faster decks overall and this deck has replaced the Audrey/Ashen package with a lot of money so Hermes seemed more valuable than the extra money of Keiko. Having a Hermes down gives you a little bit more time, makes central defence more important and in general, provides an effect no other card in the game has.

You've played Au Co. in several tournaments since its release in Elevation. How do you feel about Au Co.'s position in this format?

I feel like Au Co. at it’s core is a deck that will always have an effect on the meta by virtue of the complexity of the boardstates it can create. These can be tricky to dismantle, even for tournament players. As for this particular format, I reckon it will keep warping slightly, keeping some Runner decks out and maybe inciting some tech cards to be included in lists to improve this matchup, whether it be into lists with Measured Response, Hostile Architecture or any other flavours.

Can we expect you at future Showdown events?

Let's say I've only missed a few of these since they started, I very much hope to keep that going!

Anyone you want to shout out?

Huge thank you to ManintheMoon for these along with everyone involved in the running of these events! Shoutouts to Gruntownie since this Au Co. list is his brainchild and shoutout to everyone in EA Sports for being wonderful!

Thank you so much to Davz131 for answering our questions!

 

34Witches had a breakout performance on a new and exciting PD deck. Using the base framework of Flood PD, 34Witches played an aggressive combo focused list that could even win by turn 4! We asked 34Witches some questions about how this deck was built, and where it might go in the future!

Congratulations on your finish at the 2026 Summer Showdown! Your PD deck was a hot topic at the tournament. How was your PD deck different than the regular Flood PD we've come to expect? 

The main difference between the combo PD I've been playing and ordinary Flood PD is that we go all-in on the one-turn scoring lines, which exist in the more standard versions but are relatively rare. This makes us somewhat more fragile, but also a lot faster!

What was the testing process like for developing this deck, and how long did it take to make this version of the archetype?

We only discovered the deck five days before the showdown!

Protheseus (a fellow SCRUB) ran into jtfq99999 playing a different version on Jnet and posted about it in our testing team server. We talked about it a little (at this stage we still thought it would lose to Hermes), and I took it out for a spin on jnet to get a feel for it. jtfq himself happened to spectate one of my games and taught me some of the combo lines. So, I invited him to join us, and he put us onto the Simulation Reset/Your Digital Life variant, as well as Neurospike as a way to beat Hermes.

The original version we started with was very different. We weren't trying to draw the entire deck, and we were importing economy assets like Anthill Excavation Contract. It took a few days of rapid iteration until we landed on a list we were comfortable with for the Showdown.

Do you see yourself playing this at future tournaments? If so, how do you see this deck changing?

I've already brought this to Cambridge Megacity and finished 7th there, with PD going 2-2 (both wins vs. Hermes Loup in swiss, losses to Stealth Loup in swiss and Seb in the cut). The version I brought there was a bit less fragile, at the expense of being a bit less explosive (swapped Humanoid Resources for the third Regolith and a Calvin Baley). In hindsight, this was probably a mistake and a more explosive build would've had a better chance of beating Seb before he was able to establish board control. 

I hope to bring this deck to some more events, it's just a question of what I'll be able to make it to. Kikai's version of the deck from Cambridge (with which he placed 4th) is another interesting development - it's a lot less all-in on the combo, dropping Simulation Reset entirely in favour of a second copy of Flood The Market. This isn't too far removed from the first versions we tested.

Can we expect to see you at future Showdown events? 

Absolutely! The two I've played in so far have been a lot of fun, and I'll be at the next one for sure.

Anyone you want to shout out?

I want to give a big shout out to jtfq99999 as the brains behind the whole thing! The combo PD archetype is very much his creation and I really owe the whole thing to him. He was also a great help with learning combo lines, and I wouldn't have been able to get as good a handle on the deck as I did in the limited time before the Showdown without him.

I also want to shout out Protheseus for designing the excellent Aggro Esa deck I brought, and for spending several hours coaching me on how to play it after I pivoted to it at the last minute.

Also, I've heard that The King took down Toronto Megacity with a combo PD build? I've not seen the list, but I'm very happy to hear it, if so! It's really great to see other people get results with this deck!

Thank you to 34Witches for answering our questions about their exciting PD deck!

Last but not least, 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 Andrej and Aksu for streaming!

Looking to play in the next Showdown? The 2026 EMEA Showdown takes place on July 11th! Tickets go live on June 13th and will be for sale here, on NetrunnerCards.net.

And, here’s a sneak peek of some upcoming prizing…