Massive deckbuilding project

The story so far:

I want to build a deck for each identity. Big project, obviously, so I would super appreciate some help.

About me: I like to play Netrunner for fun. I’m not hugely experienced. I like playing the game much more than building decks. I like variety and to see fun interactions of cards and playstyles. I don’t need a deck to be awesomely competitive, as long as it’s interesting and fun.

So I’m going to try to put together a deck for each identity and keep them as assembled as possible so that I can quickly play it with my friends more like a game and less like a collectible card game.

Help I’d appreciate:

  • I’m happy to netdeck the crap out of this project, so if you have any decks you think I would enjoy (fun/interesting/competitive, in that order), please let me know.
  • Since I haven’t done a lot of deckbuilding or any competitive play, help with understanding the names of deck archetypes and what they aim to do would be super helpful. I think I’ll compile a list of these archetypes as a good starting point.

A few details:

  • I own 4 core sets and all cycles through the latest big box expansion (Data & Destiny), so card selection shouldn’t be an issue as long as we don’t go to Mumbad.
  • In the name of completeness, I would like to use each card at least once (even the crappy ones). I can always sub out similar cards for crappier versions that attempt to do similar things. -edit- Ok, ok, I don’t need to use every card. I just want as broad an experience as possible. :slight_smile:
  • I don’t need to keep all the decks constructed all the time, of course, but I will leave them as assembled as possible and go fetch the additional needed cards based on a master list. I’ll put that together, of course.
  • I’d like as wide a variety of archetypes as possible. Ideally, no two decks should be trying to do exactly the same thing in the same way.

Following this post will be the list of identities and archetypes that I’ll maintain over the coming weeks as I do my research. There are a couple things I have in flight in real life right now that, once done, I’d like to try to spend some time on this project before getting my next contracts.

Thanks for any help and thoughts! I intend to update regularly; hopefully life doesn’t get in the way too much!

-Michael

Possible archetypes list

HB


Jinteki


NBN


Weyland


Anarch



Criminal



Shaper


Independent

2 Likes

Aesome Idea, I’d be interested to hear how this goes! One thing I think might be a lot of work for almost no reward:

The cardpool has a lot of cards in it that just have no reason to be played. (percentage-wise, it’s not too bad compared to other similar games, but the pool is pretty big now so there are a lot of them). These go beyond “a lesser version of some other card” and deep into “you will be shoehorning a single copy of this card into a deck and discarding it every time you draw it just to fulfill this requirement.”

I definitely stand by the desire to see interesting decks and interactions rather than strictly the most competitive ones, but if your lists are cluttered with junk they might not be interesting so much as, well, just bad.

5 Likes

Making a meaningful use of each card in the game is a much greater challenge than making a meaningful use of each card.

Musings on making something meaningful out of several of the underpowered cards…

Record Reconstructor and Donut Taganes could hang out together in a deck that topdecks operations the corp won’t really want to play. The same deck could triple down running lots of uniques like Kati Jones and John Masanori so that it can use Capstone.

Alpha and Omega might fit into Apex thanks to help from Prey. Handling Omega using Kit could make it difficult to address Alpha later.

Deep Thought and Chakana probably feel more meaningful in a “Djinn Toolbox” deck with 1 of each of various viruses with situational uses, than they do in faction in shaper where R&D is already defended.

Similar for Pheremones.

I think you’ll want your Maxx to be a Pancakes Wyldslide Power Nap Starlight Crusade Funding to hand the funding. Triple pancakes helps with the click loss sometimes. Actually, grab Genetics Pavilion while you’re there, only chance.

Perhaps you pair Uninstall with Savoir Faire to make Uninstalling a Chamelon feel better than Scavenging it.

1 Like
3 Likes

Is there really that little luck of the draw in this game, that you can afford to dig for the better version every time instead of figuring out a way to play with the worse version? But I get what you’re saying about the very specific cards (Wyrm, for example), which, if you don’t build a deck around them probably won’t do anything. So yeah, maybe I’ll relax that at least a little bit. And it’s not like I can’t tweak things over the long haul.

Really appreciate thoughts like this. I don’t have enough experience to even know what some of the niche cards are, much less figure out how to use them. But I do loves me some jank, so keep it coming!

I highly recommend just doing one deck per faction (so 6 runner and 4 corp), which will take you a lot less time to build and make each individual deck a lot more entertaining.

You will still have 24 different matchups to play with which is still a lot :smile:

5 Likes

Thanks for the input!

For generic and popular archetypes

For more fun/interesting decks, find a card you like the sound of and use the search function on NDB for ideas.

3 Likes

forgot about this, but I second this as a great source for learning archetypes, and an awesome resource in general. It’s not always super up-to-date but it can always give you ideas no matter what you want to build

That is awesome. Thank you.

I’d say just keep in mind all the different aspects of the game, and allow each deck to have a way to interact with the other decks. Like, have an ambush, a few assets, some operations that do non economic stuff, ice that is relevant to the ID you’re playing, and focus on theme. If you’re making a game to play with friends, it’s not going to matter that you have a making news deck with surveillance sweep and net police AND primary transmission dish in it. It’s going to be fun when you come across the forger and decoy and power tap equiped Criminal runner. Honestly, I would probably relax the influence and out of fashion restriction for agendas if you want to make the most out of every card. If something is unbalanced, you can fix it later and laugh about it sometime.

No matter what you do though, make a grail deck in custom biotics

Ok, finally found some time to work on this. I put together (read: copied from the Internet) 8 decks today.

I think doing this one deck per faction per sitting is a pretty good strategy. Gives me breadth without exhausting me. As the card pool gets smaller because I use more and more of them, I can start designing my own jank decks with what’s left. Hopefully I can find some more hours in the near days!

Here’s what I built. Would love any thoughts you have on variety or tweaks or anything else.

HB: Cybernetics Division: The Spiteful Mind
Description: A flatline deck that attempts to leverage brain damage.
My thoughts: I’ve been waiting for brain damage to get enough cards to be a viable HB strategy. Hopefully this deck can get it done. I’m thinking this will aim for a midgame kill unless the runner plays really conservatively.

Jinteki: Chronos Protocol: Grail
Description: It seems to be just kind of a spiky deck that the runner has to carefully navigate. Combined with high-subroutine grail cards makes it trickier.
My thoughts: I haven’t played with any grail ice yet, so I’m not sure what this deck will play like.

NBN: Haarpsichord Studios: The News Team Predicts a Doomsday
Description: It’s a Power Shutdown shenanigans deck. The author claims it is very fast, though.
My thoughts: I’m not sure how interesting these kinds of decks are, but there was a lot of chatter about them when they started to work, so I feel like I should have at least one of them in my rotation.

Weyland: Blue Sun: O&C Bootcamp Glacier
Description: It’s a lategame deck that has a ton of econ to build a giant wall of ice.
My thoughts: Single deep server glacier decks make games take a long time, but they sure are interesting to play. I hope this one is a workable example of the idea. I don’t know what O&C stands for.

Anarch: Noise: Good Things on Sale, Stranger
Description: It has a very slim breaker suite, but the combo of Wyldside and Adjusted Chronotype means it should pretty quickly be delivering a lot of cards and credits into your hand.
My thoughts: Looks fairly straightforward, strong attack on central servers. Could be swingy since there are really only 6 breakers, so if they’re near the bottom of your deck things might not go well.

Criminal: Gabe: Ser Gabriel
Description: It’s an aggressive early game deck with the flexibility of Knights, Sneakdoors, and Inside Jobs. Make money while running!
My thoughts: This is an old deck, and it might not work very well or be fun to play anymore. I may make some updates after I play it a few times.

Shaper: Kate: Prepaid Signature
Description: It’s an event-heavy deck that uses Prepaid Voicepad and lots of draw to churn through things.
My Thoughts: It’s not typical Shaper big rig, but I’ll have plenty of opportunity to build that with other identities, I think. I’m a little concerned about the comments saying it gets hosed by the Most Wanted List, but since I don’t know what that is, it’s probably a meta thing, so not something I have to worry about.

Adam: Um, It’s Adam
Description: It’s pretty much Adam with a basic Anarch breaker suite.
My Thoughts: I haven’t even played Adam yet. I like his directives for theme, but am not sure how they’ll play out in the game, yet. It seems like the new factions might not be that deep yet, so this is a pretty straightforward deck (it uses a lot of the cards in the other runner decks I built today).

Ok, that’s all! See you later.

2 Likes

O&C is Order and Chaos.

For the Kate deck, it’s fine, but if you have a playgroup it’ll be nice to inform them that the list does not conform to the MWL.

For reference, MWL is NAPD Most Wanted List, it’s a list of cards that reduce the available Influence you can use by 1 for each copy of the card included, even if it’s in faction. As you said, you don’t really have to worry about it unless you take a deck to a Tournament, or play with people who expect MWL-legal lists.

1 Like

Ah, that must be what those stars were after some of the cards on NetrunnerDB.

Thanks!

Next set of decks!

In general, there are definitely some themes I’m seeing with netdecking. For the corp, pretty much every deck is tripling up on Jackson Howard, and a surprising number of them are using NAPD contracts as well (well, surprising for me, probably uninteresting for more experienced players). For the runner, it’s a little less consistent, but I’m seeing more clone chips and lucky finds than I expected.

Also, I realized as I started building that identity cards are just cards. I want to build a deck with every identity because I thought they would play significantly differently, but that’s not necessarily true. So maybe I’ll just keep building decks until I feel like I have each interesting deck type I’ve encountered represented, and then experiment with swapping out identities from time to time.

Anyway, here’s what I built this time.

HB: Engineering the Future: Redcoats NEXT
Description: Make lots of money and build a very expensive scoring remote, protected by NEXT ice.
My thoughts: It seems like the latest iteration of a very standard original deck; win the money race and use the advantage to keep the runner out while you score.

Jinteki: Personal Evolution: Watching Them Die
Description: Wants to slow the runner down with 1000 cuts, and hopefully kill them off with finishers. All the agendas and assets are painful to encounter. Not sure what Cambridge/Minh means.
My thoughts: I don’t know if it will be different enough from my Chronos Protocol Grail deck, but at the very least it seems like the sources of hurt it tries to put on the runner are different. We’ll see.

NBN: Making News: Moonbase Alpha
Description: A tagstorm deck that can scorch for the win, psychographics a big Beal, or rush with Astroscript.
My thoughts: It seems to aim for flexibility at the cost of economy.

Weyland: GRNDL: Hypermodernism
Description: Deck aims to start strong and score quickly, before it runs out of gas.
My thoughts: Power shutdown in this deck seems to be to kill the cheap quick tricks the runner puts out. There’s enough teeth in here to slow the runner down without seriously threatening the kill.

Anarch: Valencia: Investigative Journalism
Description: IT’s an Eater combo deck that forces a bunch of discards and then uses Hades shard to pick them out of archives with no run, or Blackmail to get in easily.
My thoughts: Interesting combo deck, I haven’t had a chance to try Eater, so I think it sounds fun! I wonder if it just plays like a more complicated Noise, though.

Criminal: Silhouette: Modified Notorious Daily Quester
Description: Score points the janky way, by successfully making 3 central server runs per turn.
My thoughts: This type of deck always seemed like it would be super fun to play. I am happy to try Doppelganger here, and Silhouette’s ability seems like it would help avoid pitfalls or find exactly the right cards.

Shaper: Kit: Stealth Kit
Description: A full set of stealth breakers and the hardware to support them.
My Thoughts: I almost put together a stealth criminal, but they had to spend too much influence to even get the full suite of stealth breakers, so that was boring to me.

Sunny: Vanilla Sundae
Description: Basic link Sunny.
My Thoughts: I’m not actually done with this deck yet because I’m unhappy with the version I linked. I want it to focus more on the link abilities to see how far they can be taken. I basically have what’s in the link plus the other of Sunny’s class cards that didn’t get used. I’ll whittle down the deck toward the end of the project.

Ok, that’s all! See you later.

Next set of decks!

I’m starting to get into a teensy bit of jank. There are IDs that just don’t seem to be used, so in some cases the types of decks I want to build require some tweaks to make them fit what IDs I have left.

Round 3!

HB: NEXT Design: Mandatory Upgrades, Inc.
Description: This HB deck is based on Upgrades, Inc, and aims to score a Mandatory Upgrades slow and vanilla-like as a springboard to overwhelming the runner with actions. I had to replace the EtF identity, and NEXT Design seemed like the best choice with what I had left. To account for the reduced influence, I swapped out the 3 Jackson Howards for 3 paper walls, which increases the number of ice for the identity ability and doesn’t increase costs very much (hopefully).
My thoughts: I liked having the opportunity to use Mandatory Upgrades. Hopefully it works out reasonably well.

Jinteki: Jinteki Biotech: Six-Point Exploding Heart Technique
Description: It says it’s a rush deck with a flatline backup. This is the first true rush deck of the ones I’ve built, so that’s interesting, but it doesn’t seem to be 100% committed to rush.
My thoughts: It will be fun learning to use the identity ability, and learning how much rush this deck actually puts out.

NBN: Near-Earth Hub: NearPAD High Assets
Description: First corp deck here that goes horizontal. The author made a great writeup with rationale for each card and how to play the deck. Sweet!
My thoughts: Seems that playing this deck will take finesse and balls.

Weyland: Blue Sun: The Government Takeover
Description: Uses Blue Sun’s ID for big money from Big Ice Rezzed by Priority Requisition. Has lowest possible agenda density with Government Takeover, and works to prevent all agenda stealing, with the possible baiting of GT, resulting in a next turn kill with Punitive Counterstrikes.
My thoughts: I swapped out the Blue Sun from my Bootcamp Glacier because I think it fits better with this deck. So I went back and modified Bootcamp Glacier to work with Building a Better World. The econ package in that deck included recurring Adonis, Oversight AI, and Interns, so I swapped those for transactions.

Anarch: MaxX: Hivemind Combo
Description: Put a bunch of virus counters on Hivemind, load a bunch of viruses on Personal Workshops, then make a huge triple medium run and go through the entirety of R&D.
My thoughts: Sounds awesome. I’m a little disappointed that this is my second Grimoire-powered big-dig virus Anarch, but I will make sure my next couple are different.

Criminal: Andromeda: Connections
Description: It makes a lot of money through connections.
My thoughts: I’m not yet sure what else it does. I guess tries to win through late-game agenda sniping. If that’s right, you have to make the right calls on what’s where…

Shaper: Chaos Theory: Full Disclosure
Description: A deck full of events for Oracle May to profit off of. Eureka also lets you hit the ones that aren’t events.
My Thoughts: Seems different and fun. Got lots of new cards in this one. Going to consider tinkering with it to add more doubles and a Starlight Crusade Funding.

Was planning on building an Apex deck, but I have to run to a thing!

Bye!

If you want to build Apex, here’s some things to consider:

  • Wasteland is a great econ card for no influence, especially as apex doesn’t need much money anyway. Pair it with a chop-bot, and that’s a free prof.contacts each turn for 3 creds.
  • Apex’s ability lets you run a lot more unique stuff than you normally would, so go nuts with the extra e3/chop-bot/heartbeat
  • You’ll need another breaker besides endless hunger, especially to deal with program-trashing sentries. Faust or Dagger with ghost runner support is a good idea here.
  • Embrace the jank. Play those apocalypses. Have a blast :smiley:

You still haven’t made that custom biotics deck