I get the impression that the Netrunner content creators are all pretty busy and have lots of good ideas, but I had a couple ideas I’d love to see addressed for the current state of the game and thought others might have some ideas to contribute as well – hence this thread.
Here are couple ideas/requests I had:
How to play against asset spam.
How to decide what assets to trash and which ones to let go (a variation on the first one).
Top Ten mistakes players make (could do this for each side).
Take a popular deck and explain why it is so good.
One topic that I’d love to see that I imagine a lot of beginners struggle with if they’re anything like me would be how to not fear ICE. (I mean, besides just installing SIFR.) As well as a general discussion on face-checking and it’s subtleties.
Not being whizzard.
Not being whizzard.
Not being whizzard.
Not being whizzard.
Not being whizzard.
Not being whizzard.
Not being whizzard.
Not being whizzard.
Not being whizzard.
Not being whizzard.
Whizzard: It’s good because you have 3 recurring credits to trash cards.
Asset Spam is not something that requires a particularly ‘strategy’ to play against. For most decks, either you trash everything (or almost everything), or you lose at some point in the (sometimes quite distant) future. Sometimes you can leave things like PAD Campaign running, but even those really need to go or you risk losing the economic war.
Typically you need to identify the most important things to trash - Political Assets (Sensie in particular), win conditions (SanSan, Jeeves, BioEthics), recursion (Team Sponsorship), econ (Temples) is a rough order to go for, but sometimes it’s more important to trash econ than SanSan (e.g. if the corp is broke or you have R&D lock).
But order aside, you still need to trash everything. Ultimately this is very hard because it costs a lot, and there are frequently other threats to deal with at the same time (Breaking News plays, random Psychic Fields, HHN). Andy is fast enough against a lot of decks to do it, but not all, and sometimes a bad start (or a good corp start) will leave her floundering. Whizzard starts with 3 cr/turn and that’s a big deal. There’s little else that can reliably handle asset spam, and ultimately little hope beyond trashing everything.
“There is little hope beyond trashing everything” is a sad statement if true.
I was thinking last night about a blog post that Abram wrote about Corp strategies. He wrote that “if” strategies are much weaker than “unless” strategies. The distinction is between strategies that say “I will win if the runner does X” and those that say “I will win unless the runner does X.”
Maybe not entirely, but it seems like asset spam is much more of an “unless” strategy than something like glacier.
Anyway, I’m way off topic on my own thread. Other ideas you like some of our experts to write about or discuss?
I’d love to have anything useful to add to your top 10 list, but I really can’t think of anything that comes close. A few weeks ago I came up against a Gagarin asset spam deck, and even though my deck had tons of money, I just had no way to keep up with trashing when Museum/Jackson/Friends brings everything back.
If I am really worried about any asset spam deck, I know my only answer is to play whizzard. If assets (and asset recursion) are going to continue the way they have, I feel like that ID needs to be evergreen…
Well, now you know why Whizzard has dominated the asset spam meta!
It’s not that sad. If everything is trashed, these corps ultimately are as helpless as any rush deck versus a runner with a full rig. And it’s not that other decks than Whizzard can’t, it’s just that other decks can’t as reliably (or without being stuffed with asset hate and raw cash).
Okay, let me go with the way the topic is heading.
There must be better and worse ways to approach this problem of “everything must be trashed.” There must be mistakes that the Corp can make that can be seized upon when spotted. What are some of those things? How about a blog post or podcast about that?
The ‘trash everything’ rule is often quite different for denial decks. Being on siphon Omar, it often seems correct to leave sensies and only trash econ, whereas in other scenarios (also true for decks like Smoke with an insane late game) I will prioritize killing draw so that I have time to set up and lock RnD (This also means killing Jacksons).
The plan for the runner is indeed to trash everything of importance. If the asset spam Corp makes mistakes (e.g. not caring enough about their econ, too little defending of the central of importance, spamming out the wrong assets at the wrong time, etc.), then this will only become clear once the runner has a hold on the board.
You don’t stop controlling the board as runner if you are able to. If you start focusing your attention elsewhere and leave stuff, that’s when potentially the snowball starts and you start losing.
Topic for writers/podcasters: Short-hand tips for beating non-standard but powerful strategic decks. There are decks out there that do not get played a lot in casual meet ups but spout up during tournaments. If you don’t know how to play them, you are in trouble, but it is hard to get experience playing them. Give us a little help by coaching us through these match ups so we are not caught totally flat-footed when they show up.
Some that I am thinking of:
IG Prison
CI7
Power Shutdown Boom
DLR [Runner name]
Eater-Keyhole
