Who are QEH?
Team Profile
Founded: Nov 2023
Members: 15
Mission:
To provide a chill, very queer space for Birmingham Netrunner players to iterate on and improve their decks and Netrunner skills. We’re not focused on finding the “best deck” but instead making people’s decks the best they can be.
Notable Performances:
13th @ UK Nats 2023 (less than a week after the group was founded!)
8th @ Bristol Regionals 2024
2nd, 7th, 8th @ Nottingham Regionals 2024
Notable Decks:
girls! (2024)
Self-defence (2023)
Other Notable Creations:
Holy Sh*t Netrunner (a format where we made all the IDs way more powerful, and all IDs are legal)
Esa in Suburbia (the greatest combination of stock photo alt-arts and decklist writeup known to all nrdb)
We’d be remiss not to shout out The Tag Mill, started by Rosie and Zoe, who are both in QEH and make very cool Netrunner themed merch.
How to get in touch:
@ any of us on Discord (@aceempress, @l0velace, @znsolomon if you want the most online people), or look for us at any big UK event!
Foundation
After UK Nationals 2022, the Birmingham meta was having a bit of a resurgence - the University of Warwick group had met a few players from Birmingham who'd variously started or picked the game back up after UK Games Expo that year. This eventually grew into a large, consistent fortnightly meetup at Birmingham Geek Retreat with roughly 10-12 players at each meetup.
QEH was formed on a rainy Thursday afternoon at one of those meetups a week before UK Nationals 2023. It was created with the aim of starting a more casual and local queer testing group, rather than QtM’s larger and more competitive focus. Within a few hours, there was a name, a Discord server, and a small group of founding members.
There's this idea online that testing groups are these big, formal, closed off affairs that separate the Netrunner elite from the rest of us. This isn't true—you can just start one with friends, just like QEH!
Testing Process
We play Netrunner in a variety of formats - both serious games in Standard with the aim of annotating replays (the blunder marker is very important), but also casual games with very spicy (read: bad) brews and formats like Chimera (listen, it's good for fundamentals). Like many testing groups, we have Discord threads for deck ideas which get bounced around and refined, but also threads for looking through replays.We try not to focus on grinding out games, for the simple reason that after the fourth loss of the day to Jnet casuals your brain becomes unhelpful frustration soup, which is both deeply unpleasant and not productive.
We don’t focus on being on the pulse of the meta or focused on what matchups to expect, because that doesn’t fit our aims. We’re not trying to sweep tournaments or find the best deck for the meta, but instead to just improve as players. We believe more in finding decks we enjoy and getting good with those!
Applications
We’re an invite-only space, to manage size and ease the burden of moderation, so we’re not open for applications. However, we don’t at all believe in hoarding our knowledge—if you’re curious about any of our decks, anything in this article, starting your own testing group, or how Thunderbolt made top cut, please do ask any of us on Discord or in person!
If you are part of an existing testing group, or if you are trying to get a new testing group up and running, then The Surveyor would love to publish a profile of your team!
Send a message to kikai.noraneko on discord.