Whiteblade111: Cascadia 2026 Champion!

by Sam Keilback 

On July 30th - August 2nd the fourth annual Cascadia Netrunner tournament ran at Mox Bellevue! Nearly a hundred players attended from all across North America to compete at Cascadia this year, which was also the official American Continental Championship. Players competed over two days of swiss, playing 10 rounds and a cut to top 16. At the end of the event the fourth Cascadia champion was crowned:

Congratulations to Sam “Whiteblade111” Keilback for winning Cascadia 2026!

And a huge congratulations to all the players who made the top 16 this year:

Whiteblade111	cablooshe	Lia	Thomas Haas
CyberShark	ossa	Wikignometry	btgood2me
Ebrey	FAC3L355	Friday	Laura_42
Wynaut	Rielle	Uskighte	Myriad

The swiss and cut rounds of the event were streamed on the Null Signal Games youtube channel and can be found here. A special thanks to JuniperTheory for her assistance in setting up and running the stream during the event.

Whiteblade111 won Cascadia playing fast advance Nebula and Madani Magdalene! Her Nebula deck utilized Kingmaking and Moon Pool to aggressively score multiple agendas from hand. The Madani Magdalene used Basilar Synthgland and Madani to generate a massive economic advantage over the Corporation, and then tried to score all 7 points in one turn with multiple Deep Dives.

We caught up with Whiteblade111 to ask her thoughts … well, that’s not really true because I wrote this article! But since I’m here, I’ll try and share some of my thoughts on the event and my decks.

Congratulations on winning Cascadia 2026! You took down the tournament with Nebula and Madani Magdalene. Why did you bring those decks?

Thank you! I am really proud to have won Cascadia. I founded Cascadia in 2023 with Sam Posa (Radiant). While Cascadia was a big success, as the lead organizer for the event in 2023 & 2024, I didn’t get the opportunity to participate as a player. I’ve always thought of Cascadia as my dream event to play in, and thanks to ManintheMoon I have now been able to return to Cascadia as a player and claim the champion title.

In the lead up to Cascadia I was finishing my law articles and preparing to write the bar exam. I actually just wrote the bar exam a week before I left for Seattle! I did not have much time to prepare anything in depth. I knew Ob was likely to be one of the best decks, but I just didn’t have the mental capacity to learn and practice Ob in a week. 

I am a big believer that when you think all the corp decks suck, you should play Titan. Scamming wins with fast advance is a time honored tradition of mine, and many of my big event wins have been on Titan or Sportsmetal fast advance. nervousnightjar won the online Americas Megacity a week before with Nebula. The list felt super tuned, and honestly any deck coming out of France (read: from Davz131 or his associates) felt like a solid pick.

The Madani Mags has been a pet project since Elevation came out. In my heart, I believe Madani is a fundamentally broken card that will one day be banned. I played a bit of Madani Mags in the Districts meta and thought it was great. It struggles really hard into AU Co. and when more attrition focused versions of Méliès U became popular I put it down. I love playing the deck, so I figured I would just try and dodge AU Co. and hope for the best. I never thought I would win on it.

Magdalene has been making various top cut placements throughout the Megacity season, but almost no lists have been playing Madani. What are the strengths of this specific version?

I feel like Madani Mags is so completely divorced from the other Mag brews. I am really impressed by what Wenjong has done with Hermes Mags. Minstrel is doing wild things with 60+ card Mags decks in events.

Other Mags decks want to grind for value or rely on the shaper toolbox to find correct answers to various problems. Madani Mags plays like a pure combo deck. You are really intending to win the game in 1 or 2 turns and run as minimally as possible. With the amount of economy and card draw in the deck plus Madani to be able to install on your opponent’s turn, you generate an overwhelming economic advantage.

You can completely run over someone who can’t attack you early. Getting to host all your programs on the Madani also offsets some of the major downsides of Basilar Synthgland. It all sort of combines together to create a very high tempo shaper deck that plays like a combo deck with some minor control elements. I adore it.

Nebula has now won sizable events back to back. Do you think Nebula will continue to have success at other Continentals?

I would be surprised if competitive players pick the deck up. I think a lot of the enfranchised hardcore tournament grinders are going to play Ob instead because you have a lot of micro decisions where you get to flex your skill edge.

Competitive players get really scared about playing a “low agency” deck like Nebula, even though Nebula has a ton of minor avenues for skill expression. Most competitive players have a degree of cowardice in their hearts and so will probably decline to play Nebula.

Nebula does have quite a terrible Criminal matchup, especially if they’re on Sang Kancil. If Criminal can emerge as this weird anti Ob and anti AU Co. deck, I could see Nebula being worse just by virtue of Criminal’s rise. I think teched versions of Seb could also be quite good against Nebula.

Will you be at Cascadia next year? What about future Showdown events?

I am definitely going to try and make Cascadia work. It’s honestly one of the highlights of my year, I’d hate to miss it.

Showdown events are tougher because I usually don’t play on Jinteki.net. However, I am going to try and make the Worlds Showdown as the prizing looks really excellent!

Cascadia is now doing champ cards to immortalize the winner, do you have any plans for your Cascadia champ card you’re willing to share?

Mutually Assured Destruction is my champion card from winning Asia-Pacific Continentals in 2020. Since then, I’ve changed quite a bit, and I’m not as thrilled with the artwork today. I’ve thought before about recommissioning the artwork, and I’m excited to do MAD as my Cascadia champ card with new artwork!

Anyone you want to shout out?

A huge thank you to Abraham and Ariel for running the event. I reconnected with old friends and made new ones at Cascadia this year. A big thank you to all the staff who ran the event and Lucy, Stwyde and Limes for helping with the Cobra troubles on day one of the event. Thanks to Mox for hosting Cascadia again this year, the best venue in Netrunner.

A big thank you to my testing team, Snarebears! Especially Cablecarnage for answering all my annoying questions about the meta.

Lastly, thank you to my Partner, May (Metronome). You support me endlessly and I love you so much.

The majority of the 2026 Cascadia Prizes will remain exclusive to the event for quite a while. The exception to that is the Mount Rainier Treeline, now available here on NetrunnerCards.Net.

This site will only shipping orders for the next 2 days and then all shipping will be paused until Abraham and Ariel return from traveling in late October. You can still place orders during that time, but everything will be shipped in November. 

We don’t yet have dates for Cascadia 2027, but the Worlds Showdown is coming up on September 19th! Check out the exciting prizes on offer here. We hope you come and play!

Finally, Abraham and I want to offer another massive thank you to the staff and volunteers who made Cascadia 2026 possible! Thank you to Ariel, Sam, Daniel, Justin and JuniperTheory for helping run the event, and to Lucy, Stwyde, Limes and everyone else who assisted with the Cobra issues on Saturday.

Credit for all photos goes to Saif, who was kind enough to take pictures of Cascadia.