You might want to watch some of Team Covenant’s videos on Netrunner on Youtube then. They do excellent commentary on games with explanations of what the cards do as well as plays that are being made. Very easy to follow, and very nice for a beginning player to watch and learn how the current decks are being played =)
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And none of them works without either having 6 3/2 agendas or the fear of astro-chaining.
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One interesting thing to me about this data is that you’re comparing Worlds, a tournament where the vast majority of people are gunning to win at all costs, to a much less high-stakes tournament, and you still are left with comparably diverse metas, perhaps, one could argue, a less diverse meta at ChiLo.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: There were a lot of much better ways to undermine the dominance of NEH AstroBiotics than restricting Astro to 1 per deck, which just outright kills NBN.
It’s not because players are too lazy to figure out the next best NBN deck. It’s because Astro is hugely important to every NBN deck, and always has been. DRT, Midseasons, Never Advance, whatever else you come up with all rely on SanSan-Astro to get the runner to play on NBN’s remotes, forcing them to waste time and money checking things and trashing things. Without the threat of the Astro train, a runner can just trash rezzed SanSans, take money, and plow R&D and probably win without risking a Midseasons or hitting installed Snares with DRT out. Is there a funtional NBN deck with 0-1 Astros? Maybe there is at Tier 2-3, but if you’re trying to win, it’s almost certainly a worse bet than almost everything else available. Should there be a viable NBN deck without 3 SanSan 3 Astro? It would be nice, but the faction, up to this point, has been balanced with the ability to play those cards in mind, and without that, NBN is pretty awful.
3.28% NBN is a much bigger problem than AstroBiotics, and this could have been seen from a mile away. My issue with ChiLo wasn’t the desire to gut AstroBiotics, which I hate, but the way in which it was done: with a mallet when it should have been with a scalpel.
The saddest thing about seeing this, to me, is that Clot is about to come out and kill at least as many decks as the Astro restriction at ChiLo. You probably won’t see 3.28% NBN post-Clot, but killing off HBFA, CI, Tennin, and severely nerfing all NBN decks could easily have an even greater effect of killing diversity in the meta.
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As much as I agree with a lot of the posts that criticize the Astro restriction, I have an issue with the thought that no one prepared for this event.
We didn’t just show up on the day of the event, surprised that Astro was restricted. We knew about it for months and had the means of testing in our own meta. I had, I think, at least 8 players show up from my own store so we prepared for it and prioritized testing for ChiLo over testing for GNKs. If you look at the prize support, you will realize we had plenty of will to prepare for the event. First place got ~$400 worth of prizes, top 4 got around $100-150.
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I’ve found that in any game I play with competitive play it doesn’t matter what is done there is almost always a not extremely diverse meta.
Competitive players are going to find the best deck/team and use it. Is there a reason why that specific cards was singled out for this event?
I mean, that deck didn’t even win worlds did it? I mean I don’t know the meta game that well yet, I know the decks that seem to be winning, but I don’t know the exact combos used yet. I feel that tourney specific bannings are just kind of odd. Anything outside of the game company making erratas and banning cards I don’t really like personally. If one thing is banned/restricted then the next thing in line will just take it’s place, and people will say that is OP and want it gone.
It still feels to me like NBN just doesn’t have a lot to choose from right now, actually it feels like the game hasn’t really reached it’s full potential as far as card pool. I think when that happens you will see a more diverse meta. But even then it’s not going to be extremely diverse. Games with organized play rarely, if ever, see a ton of differences at the top. I thought it was cool to see somewhat of a decent amount of different decks being played on the worlds list. Even though overall there were a lot of Andys and NBN, it seemed to me like there was at least more choices than that, as seen by what won.
Not sure that these samples are actually equally diverse. Do you have the raw numbers for each faction and ID? It is impossible to do a weighted diversity index from percentages.
Kudos and thanks for bringing data.
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In general my comment was about interpreting the data and bias in the sample when analyzing the stats, not my view about effect. My thoughts are very close to what @mediohxcore wrote in what I thought was a pretty good post.
As I think deck archetypes are pretty important instead of just talking about different IDs (as some factions can swap IDs petty easily and almost have the same deck while other factions demand entirely different deck archetypes or even have several strong archetypes within the same ID) I see some clear limitations in giving any comment about the difference in diversity. That the most played identities where played less is a good thing. That NBN disappeared as a faction was a bad thing.
Runner thoughts:
Would we have seen less Andy if worlds was played with the entire Spin Cycle, perhaps but it seems likely that Leela would have grabbed some of that playerbase.
The decline of Whizzard & Ken is likely not statistically significant but could be theorized. My hypothesis would have been some decline for criminals in general with a increase in Noise in the Chi-Lo meta but that doesn’t seem to be the case. For me that would be a sign that most players where still running with the runner they felt most comfortable with rather than having done major preparation for the unique meta.
Corp thoughts:
Blue Sun took the throne as most played deck with a very large portion of the playerbase, somewhat strange considering how strong RP is. Could have some theoretical ground in stealth Andy as tech against RP.
A large increase in HB, guess they grabbed most of the players that have a strong preference to fast-advance.
In general I don’t think this can be called a more diverse meta if you look at identity spread, and most of these where likely running glacier in some form limiting the number of played archetypes as well.
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I played HB FA because I had a strong suspicion that Blue Sun would be the most prevalent and that other players knew that there would be a strong showing of glacier with no NBN presence.
I know at least a couple people who strayed away from RP because of Andy-switchblade, but we have really been working switchblade hard in Ohio area so it was probably at the front of mind.
I didn’t say that no one prepared for this event, I said that most of the players choose to play something else
- because it was easier/safer than find a competitive NBN deck in a truncated meta.
- and probably not because NBN is a dead faction if 2 astro are missing.
My 3 points was about finding a competitive NBN deck with only 1 astro, don’t make me say something else.
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Your original post was a bit unclear but I see what you mean now. Apologies.
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We’re just going to have to see. Those decks will die at first but when the play of Clot evens out to 1x played with Tutors, those decks could splash some bait cards and operation recursion. I don’t see a 1c virus costing influence taking 3x in a deck. Players will probably have 2x timesto use it on average.
The unfortunate binary nature of Clot vs. fast advance may be salvaged by Cyberdex Suite, though decks like NEH and HB will often need to install it in a protected remote.
Cyberdex Suite and more than one AD in hand could also be a necessary include the the 7-point CI abomination you’ve been playing. These are both acceptable speed bumps to 2 archetypes that need some slowing down.
There could also be the risky but awesome bluff of installing and double advancing an advanceable ambush to tease out the clot. The runner burns an SMC/Clone to tutor it, and then hits a trap next turn to add insult to injury.
Tennen and TWIY fast advance will likely be complete casualties, but the former wasn’t that strong anyway, and the latter has already been eclipsed by NEH power creep.
On the power creep note, I just want to beat a dead horse and mention how unfortunate NEH’s unrestricted 17 influence is. If only the designers had the foresight to at least keep Biotic Labor out of that ID (3 strong fast advance options and an excellent innate ability are too much). “You may not include Ice or Operations from Haas Bioroid” could have salvaged the meta during Upstalk and allowed for Clot to not exist.
I don’t think NEH is game breaking, but the prevalence of numerous soft bans on it, while a little reactionary, are indicative of its design flaws. Now we’re going to have to live with another “Plascrete” for a while.
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Yep me may need to start double icing our Sansans and creating scoring servers the old way. runs for cover
Why do we know that clot is coming? A quick internet search only comes up with people talking about clot, not saying where it will be released or even confirming that it’s real. I thought this was in O&C but I’m not seeing it there… what makes anyone thing Clot is even real?
And if it’s not, what the hell are we going to do about NBN?
Snow-jax said it will come with the first datapack of The Sansan cycle.
That said, you just need 2 Cyberdex Virus Suite in your NEH deck to counter it 
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We have had two threads now about astro, and idk, people should take count of what NBN actually gets outside astro. Their ice suit is apart from tollbooth, not taxing, even awkward in places (tmi, raven). They get good tag punishment. Their economy is drip focussed or at least runner dependent. They get good control over the tempo of the game.
And idk, slow econ, early game ice (because most of it isn’t very taxing), some comeback tools in the form of the tag punishment cards aren’t impressive, no matter how much influence you have about what cards are in play. If the runner would ever get to set up an economy, how do you really plan to score 7 points? The threat of an early scored astro is what makes the rest of the (fun) cards possible and helps make NBN into the unique corp it is.
Just look at two 2nd tier archetypes, tag and bag NBN and “flytrap” as db0 called it, maybe it’s called tagstorm now? Tag and bag you could easily compare to the weyland decks, but where weyland gets to be rich by scoring agendas and getting closer to matchpoint in the same go, NBN gets some tagging ice, sweeps week and marked accounts. What forces the runner to run and throw it’s money away to allow you to tag him with SEA in the end? You’d run pretty quickly out of gas trying to advance out project beale’s, as you are actually throwing the credits away that you needed for the sea trace.
The non-scorched tagging deck plays on a different tempo, isn’t forced to be as fast, but tries to get the tags on the runner at some point, build that out and make a comeback in the agenda points via psycho beals and again, an astrotrain. Doesn’t matter if it’s by closed accounts or psychographics, astro remains one of the very few inhouse threats NBN gets, in a corp that’s otherwise not very imposing.
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If we’re talking about diversity, I think it’s probably worth noting that ChiLo didn’t happen in a vacuum. That is, it was one Netrunner event among a host of Netrunner events, and I would suggest that even if diversity suffered within the event (and with one faction at under 5% representation, I think that’s a fair claim), it still increased the breadth of Netrunner experiences on the whole for those who were able to participate.
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NBN has perhaps the second best Ice suite in the game (Haas>NBN>Jinteki>Weyland), and it’s easy to splash for Eli and Lotus to shore up the lack of cheap taxers. Pop up is really good though, and Wraparound is the best binary barrier in the game.
Sweeps is only a half step behind Celeb Gift in realm of econ ops, and with the hand size tech we’ll get in SanSan, Sweeps will get (probably just marginally) better.
The tag punishment tools in NBN are really interesting and effective. The problem is NEH poisoned the well with its brutally efficient speed, strong asset econ, and too much influence to play both the greatest hits from HB and Jinteki along with Biotics.
What I really don’t understand is why people are asking for more diversity from corp. We already have to deal with: NBN FA, HB Glacier, CI, Tennin FA, RP, PE kill, Blue Sun kill and whatever ONC brings out. Corp is almost too diverse, what we need is a few more power runner cards that don’t synergize with desperado.
EDIT: Forgot NBN kill decks, probably forgot something else as well
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I too feel like the runner needs a boost. I think Day Job is a good addition to the Runner side and may help considerably with how much money and how many options corp players have at this point.
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