I have been looking for a measure that I can use to evaluate my deck. Has anyone ever tried pair total cost to rez all ice versus the total number of credits that a deck can reasonably be expected to generate? I am wondering if there are ratios that indicate good or bad builds.
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I havenât done this but I actually think itâs a really interesting idea. The problem is mostly that asset economy is really popular and often cannot be measured in exact terms; how many credits does a PAD Campaign equal? And then thereâs things like how often ETF or Palana trigger, econ ICE like Pop-up Window, etc. Itâd be really tough to sort out.
I know this isnât the answer youâre looking for, but often the way to tell if a build has the right amount of econ is just to play it over and over to see how the credit totals go.
I have a rule of thumb - in a deck with a ânormalâ amount of econ (say, 9 cards dedicated to generating credits) the total rez cost of the ice canât be more than 60. Also if I have cards that form part of my strategy (eg. Biotic Labor), their costs are included as part of the 60. If I want to go above 60 I have to add more econ.
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Netrunner donât work like this. Some game you are flooded, sometimes you are full of ICE, sometimes you need to rez all you have, sometimes you rez 1 or 2 ICE. Same for the runner, you donât need to play all your deck to win a game, you need to play what you have in the moment to win the game.
You need to play a deck A LOT to understand what it needs to shine and most of the time you need less economy and more trick to apply your strategy.
I understand that Netrunner is a game in which you draw cards and sometimes you draw different cards or not all your cards.
That said, what I am exploring is whether it is possible to come up with some sort of metric or even rule-of-thumb both as a guide for newer players or baseline for testing variations.
Data would be hard to collect and likely not practically possible to collect in a way to get a reliable sample. But, as I am new to the game, I did not know if the rather smart players who have come before me had discovered or created any kind of metric like this.
I fully understand the value of playing the game to get experience. I was wondering if the player community was also open to or had develop more analytic approaches to making decisions.
and here on stimhack you can find all data you need.
There is an article too that talk about economy here and you can search on boardgamegeek for some good old article about netrunner.
Most of us take or taken this game very seriously and try to take the anaytic approache on the game everytime in every aspect of it, but most of the time click credit is a good economy option on your tool.
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Iâve often thought about some sort of ice analysis but this particular question has several issues:
- Data: Constructing a dataset of decklists for a given meta and rating them into good/bad is a significant task AND one that would be invalidated by new ice and economy options coming out.
- Gameplay matters: unlike many other games the corp doesnât have to expend resources at all, they can choose to let the runner in. Ice has a dimension beyond its raw statline as a tool of obfuscation and bluff. Unlike games like Conquest, MTG, and hearthstone the mathematics of an optimal curve are less relevant for netrunner where you can wait and click for more credits.
- Game mechanics: ice does not exist in a vacuum, the relevance of ice depends on the environment of played icebreakers, and thus an economy/rez ratio seems like too fuzzy a heuristic to have utility. Without understanding this the choices of some very successful decks will seem weird (2 vanillas 2 bastions for example). If youâre having trouble evaluating ice, you might want to consider clicks spent: âif I build a server of {ICE1âŚICEn} that cost me X clicks, and Y clicks will be what the runner have to expend to build a solution to that server and make a run on it, what is the ratio of X:Yâ.
- Type matters rather than weight: unlike other games where you are pitching your curve against the opponents, a very cheap ice can keep out the runners whole rig if they donât have the correct breaker. Thus an overall cost ratio isn;t a useful heuristic as it doesnât capture type diversity.
- Strategy matters: corps include different ice for different reasons - taxing but porous ice for central servers and hard etrs for remotes are just one example. Ice isnât just bodies to place on curve - you should have a plan A for every ice in your deck thatâs different from every other ice in your deck.
A heuristic for if your ice is too expensive might be useful for extremely new players, but complexity of decision trees once you get past a super basic threshold of affordable is why the community hasnât really tried to find a singular metric.
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