NRDB in Review ┻━┻︵ \(°□°)/ ︵ ┻━┻ *9-9-16

I don’t normally post much, but I wanted to say that this isn’t how I feel about the game at all right now. I’m sad to see that a lot of people aren’t enjoying it. Hopefully the meta will come around to a place where more people are having fun.

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I’m with you. I’m pretty happy with Netrunner right now, but my local meta has a much larger gap between Jinteki.net and meat-space play.

I have never seen a museum deck entered into a tournament, and I have only seen one at a local meet-up, but on Jinteki.net they are very common. Conversely I see lots of anarchs both online and off, and of course tons of Faust, so that part seems accurate.

I like playing in meat space much more than online.

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But when runners aren’t robust and fast to set up, why not just play FA or speedy defensive upgrades anyway and get the quick win?

I wonder if its a problem in the cost curve of ice/icebreakers, in that its too compressed to allow a range of quality or design finesse (similar to the compressed gold curve for 1st edition AGoT compared to 2nd Edition). 1 credit either way in an ice/icebreaker interaction drastically favours one side or the other. If breaker suites were composed of cards like mongoose and cerberuses clever corp play would better able to exploit that. I’d have more hope for them solving this if it the worst offenders icebreaker-wise weren’t in the core set.

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I got burnt out of Netrunner in February, taking the month off to enjoy other things in life. When I finally returned, I swore that I wouldn’t play on Jnet again, nor would I build “competitive” decks. I’ve become known for running jank at my local playerbases, doing my best to stay toe-to-toe with those that do bring whatever the flavor of the month in tier one decks to the table.

Switching over to casual play has made this game enjoyable again, which is depressing in a game designed to reward critical thinking. I’m about to take another month off to go for a long walk(El Camino) and hopefully I’ll be re-energized when I come back.

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[quote=“zagzagal, post:414, topic:5589, full:true”] So many corps are hiding behind FA , defensive upgrades, or asset spam. If your deck is relying on a gimmick as its main plan of course if they get the right silver bullet it will be near impossible to win.
[/quote]

How are those things “gimmicks”? FFG prints the cards and the players just play them. FA, upgrades, and assets are real Netrunner now.

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That is the part about giving up win percentage against decks that don’t counter you. There is no deck, and can be no deck has good win percentage against all the runner can bring to the table. You play FA or defensive upgrade heavy to get a high win percentage against a large portion of decks but what then happens against a deck heavily teched against yours.

For example; If you are playing FA and run into a perma-clot deck what is your win percentage?

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‘Feels more luck-based’…

More than back when Plascrete Carapace was the only answer to Tag-n-Bag?

Silver Bullets have been part of the game since the very first datapack. (Heck, even just the Core set if you count Net Shield as a silver bullet for PE.)

While it may be true that the largest factor is What Deck your opponent is playing, Who you’re playing also clearly matters. (Dan’s proved this once and for all with 2x Worlds Championships.)

I feel we have a decently diverse meta, and that Asset decks are now viable, when before they weren’t. (With RP being one of the very few exceptions.) This is why these Silver Bullets are mattering so much now. It feels like we’re in the realm of Modern or Legacy from MtG, where there are so many Good Decks that you can’t answer all of them, so instead you take A) A deck that you think is good against the majority of what people are bringing B) The deck you personally are best at playing, or C) The deck that is the current OP deck.

The metagame is even starting to stabilize enough that we can identify Aggro, Control, Combo, and Midrange decks. (Aggro is still relatively weak at the moment; See lack of Criminal victories or Rush decks.) Pitchfork and Museum decks Control the game, Noise and CI occupy the Combo slot (various Runners can also claim Combo, and FA can as well), and Dumble/Foodcoats bring up the Midrange banner.

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Please can we stop shoehorning netrunner into MtG terms? I have no idea what you’re talking about. Like, how is noise a combo deck?

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I use ‘real’ Netrunner sarcastically as most people do to refer to ice and money corp decks, or money and breaker runner decks. The ‘gimmick’ decks I refer to are decks that can be hit by silver bullets or lean heavily on a series of cards to extend scoring windows larger, or create new scoring windows that are not natural to the core flow of the game. The designers and players love these cards, my self included.

That said the corp game at its core is still built and it looks like balanced around the foundational idea of get money, place ice, and score in the windows provided. Every other efficiency that a deck brings to the table swings some set of wining percentage in a match-up. Most of these efficiencies raise your win percentage, but it will cost you against a deck that is designed to exploit it.

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I don’t even mind the museum decks that much. Though, I’ve been playing with SecTesting a lot, so it kind of forces them out there normal game plan or I’m super rich.

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Because he plays repeatable Viruses to open a simultaneous attack vector on both Archives and R&D, pressuring the Corp to win faster and also possibly winning through an alternate win condition that most Runners don’t have available to them. You can tell Noise is a Combo Runner because you will never see a Noise deck without Viruses; His deck is always built to take advantage of his ability. You can argue that he’s not a pure Combo runner, but because Runner victory isn’t straightforward in most cases, it’s hard to have an ‘I Win Now’ combo on the Runner side, unlike the Corp side with various Tag+Meat strategies or 7-Point CI.

Alternately, perhaps you’d prefer Apocalypse Kate or Minh MaxX or DLR Val to be a Combo runner?

I will continue to use Jargon as long as it continues to exist. If you don’t understand, you’re welcome to ask for clarification, but claiming that ‘Aggro’ ‘Combo’ ‘Control’ are specifically MtG terms represents a misunderstanding of the concepts behind the words. And it’s the concept I’m trying to communicate.

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FA and Clot is actually a matchup I don’t mind so much (and I’ve been playing FA for a long long while now), because – absent Sacrificial Construct – you get into a bluffing game. “Install. Action?” Threatening Shipment From SanSan or Astro tokens or what have you on installs, seeing if they’ll respond – I didn’t mind that part of the matchup, although I know that plenty of people weren’t wild on it.

The way PolOp hit my Palana glacier deck feels very different. Playing Val with PolOp, I felt completely hosed as soon as PolOp hit the table. I can’t rez ice because of Blackmail, so Marcus Batty is effectively blank. So, what, I need two Caprice in the server to score out? I tried to aim for that, but of course I wasn’t able to pull it off in any of the games I played against that deck. Even compared to FA vs. Clot + Sac Con, I don’t think I ever felt so hopeless. Against Clot + Sac Con, I could still slap down some ice and pray, or try to bait out the Sac Con trash with a 15 Minutes or something.

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No; Caprice is unique. You certainly rez another after the runner has trashed Caprice, but you can’t rez her clone before the runner has passed the final ice on the server, leaving her ability moot.

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Yes. Because I played when Plascrete Carapace was the only answer to tag & bag, and the truth was, it wasn’t the only answer to tag & bag, it was just the best one - some might say “most reliable.” You could still MOpus to a billion credits and beat the SEA Source (and later, Midseason) on the trace. You could Vamp or Siphon the Corp and keep economic pressure on. There were probably other decks that tried other things (Public Sympathy rings a bell), but I can’t remember them all that well. That’s another interaction I actually like, by the way: when the Corp realized the Runner would be able to out-money their SEA Source/Midseason trace in X turns, so they had to force the Runner to spend money somehow, threaten to start scoring points. Or start rushing earlier in the game, so you could be near game point when the Runner’s econ engine hit full speed, which was the Supermodernism philosophy in a nutshell. Supermodernism was good, but it never felt quite so hopeless, to me.

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Oh, right. Jeez, what is Jinteki glacier’s out against Val + Pol Op? “Don’t let them get a Pol Op?”

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Crisium and possibly Batty on HQ, Caprice in the remote. Palana goes fast, you can usually find what you need.

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The Val list my friend plays usually aims to Blackmail HQ and install Pol Op early if he’s up against HB or Jinteki. I hope the answer isn’t “did I draw Crisium before he drew Blackmail?” But I should post this in the Palana thread so I don’t drag this one further off on this side tangent.

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I think you just add some snatch and grab tech on top of your crisium

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TBH let’s face it,Glacier took a real hit here.I actually feel Lukas doesn’t really like Glacier archetype that much,I remember he repeatedly said that he don’t like long-time match up and Glacier style deck,though it is ironic that he invented MoH before he leaves.

I kinda understand @Chill84’s feeling.I play Netrunner from the core set.At first it was Andy domination,but Andy’s ability provide enough consistency to lower the luck factor;then it is Prepaid Kate,but Kate is so perfect that unless some extremely bad hand she usually didn’t care much about luck.Then we got Anarch,and if you don’t got Wyldside + Chronotype early you are done.
That being said,the meta’s diversity is somehow better then it was.

Me and my friend rarely got chance to attend tournament,but we always play competitive decks together.I play with PPVP Kate,Leela,RegAss MaxX,and now is Kate/Noise,also played RP,now is NEH/EtF.He played Noise, DLR Val,Kate,Bootcamp Glacier and NEH.We always enjoy our games,I mainly play only Netrunner,and he also play HearthStone (“Dumb little game”,said my friend).We tried MtG together but we just keep getting back to Netrunner because we just feel like it’s the best and least luck-involved game,even when I hit 3 agendas in T3.
I remember there was one time he played Noise,put Wyldside T1 yet cannot find Chronotype/Aesop the whole game.When I finally advanced my last agenda,he still couldn’t find it.I said “that’s really bad luck”,but he said he feels like the real problem is he didn’t know how to make the best use of 3 clicks a turn and deal with extra 2 cards per turn.Rarely (actually I don’t know if there is any) in a situation we feel like “it’s just luck”,we always feel we didn’t do enough and cannot pilot like top players.It’s the uniqueness of Netrunner and this type of uniqueness keeps us continue to play this game.
Right now the meta is in a complex situation,I kinda feel like Lukas left some big monster in the Sansan and Mumbad Cycle before he leaves and it’s up to Damon to fix it.I’m very looking forward to the 6th Cycle,MWL change and Rotation to shake up meta a lot.Anyway I always love NRDB in review and what really saddened me today is that @Chill84 write an article that is not funny.:frowning:

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Because of the way PolOp works, two Caprice works in a server.

Rez Caprice. They trash it with PolOp. Rez second Caprice.

You have to Rez Caprice before they pass the last ice, sure, but they also have to trash Caprice with PolOp before then, too.

Honestly I’m more excited about using PolOp to trash cheap ICE. Emergency Shutdown, Crisium and PolOp for days, boyz.

Ugh; hate talking about cards I don’t have in my hand. :stuck_out_tongue:

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