Worth noting that sideboards also cause rules nightmares due to influence requirements.
I didn’t say good matchup, just equal. Maybe it would be a bit sub-par versus everything!
I was just wondering whether such a theoretical deck would look more like forty-five toolbox cards that were never the best card for any situation but had many moderate effects, or forty-five “silver bullets” that were each awesome in a very limited way?
ahhhhh sideboards, where NEH FA decks go to switch to butchershop for game 2 and 3 xD
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I actually speculated on how netrunner might do sideboarding this very morning, taking a leaf out of Decipher’s old Star Wars CCG.
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Sorry to see you stepping back, Chill84.
I’ve never played with the Whizzard deck nor had any interest in doing so, and have often felt from the other side like my winning or losing was rarely due to just how consistently the Whizzard deck came together. It tramples some of my favorite archetypes, so I’ve had to adapt (by joining the asset-spam army), but over the course of many games against the archetype, and for that matter Noise, I still feel like I’m winning against newer players and being challenged by skilled players, and the complexity of the puzzle and my commitment to finding new angles of attack (like Hayley Blackmail, which I still think is a great deck even against IG) keeps this game alive for me.
Honestly, I think what’s contributed to this funk as much as Whizzard’s dominance, the MWL, and poor design choices in Mumbad Cycle has been the Slack chat itself. I said this there, and I still firmly believe it - it’s very easy posting in there to get hotboxed by the anxiety and funk. Just witness the freak-out that occurred the past three days over the IG deck. Which isn’t Abram’s fault, not in the slightest - the IG deck is just the latest in a long line of decks that are scary the first few times you play against them, until you see the seams and adjust your plan to attack them. (Indeed, the very first day the deck was around, Dan was already calling out the ways to shut it down.) But in that atmosphere, it’s very easy for something unusual and scary to trigger another death-spiral of “rip Netrunner” sentiment, even among top pros who should know better.
We’ve been here before so many times that a terrible card like Mumbad City Hall - which reminds me of Wireless Net Pavilion in its “which intern designed this horseshit”-ness - doesn’t even raise my blood pressure. It’s a metagame, kill your darlings, whatever it takes to win, etc. Whatever mantra gets you through the day. But this game is still tons of fun from where I’m sitting.
But hey. We’ll always have Apex.
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I challenge you to name an era where luck wasn’t a huge part of the game.
IMO there has never been an era where the format wasn’t very high variance and very luck dependant. This is a good thing though, since players could get lots of very different games. You would have to take risks that may or may not pay off given the situation.
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I’ll tell anyone burned out on the game to mix it up with some drafting - Grid for 1v1, Trad / Winchester for more players.
The draft itself is super fun and agonizing “Desperado + Lady…or Sure Gamble and Parasite? GOLDURNIT.” and the decks are kooky and weird and occasionally absurdly good - but they have to make do with whatever you get. It levels the playing field and makes for shorter games with less grinding “My engine went off immediately, prepare to be pummelled by the same 20 cards everyone uses for always until your own engine comes together after I’ve all but won.”
Plus a bunch of cards you literally forgot existed become key players! There’s nothing like Wendigo actually being useful to make you reevaluate your life (and check you aren’t having a stroke.)
I play some constructed to keep in shape but I’m seriously considering just becoming a full-time drafting hobo with occasional forays into the jankier of my local meetups for that sweet sweet BWBI goodness 
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FYI, in UK Whizzard isn’t dominant at all. Noise + kate/Hayley are the most common and we see about as much whizzard as leela (which is still a fair amount) in tournaments, whiz is around of course but he is not as popular as these forums might suggest.
Perhaps his lack of popularity it is something to do with the idea that being an ID for the day is to some degree a level of escapism and role play, and whizzard doesn’t offer much of that for the vast majority of the player base 
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I agree, local metas are much more diverse than what this board, or Jinteki.net suggest. I see a variety of shaper and criminals at every tournament that are completely absent from Jinteki. Also, I have not seen a museum deck (except for one jank deck) in a tournament, but I have seen almost nothing but museums online since the card was printed.
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Can’t agree with this enough, I really wish draft formats were a bigger part of the community b/c they’re stupid fun! Like first week you played Netrunner fun. Talk about that one game all week fun. It makes the cards you’ve played a million times fresh again, and turns many binder fodder cards into old friends quickly. If you have a RL Netrunner group and haven’t done cube drafting… man. you gotta try it
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How would one go about cube drafting? Let’s assume I’m an complete n00b and have literally no idea what you are talking about.
If there is a website or other online resource I should reference I can check those out if you point me in the right direction.
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I believe you can do it from Meteor, but I forget the specifics
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I think you’re looking for this
Cube Drafting is a special draft variant in which instead of drafting from traditional purchased draft sets, players draft from a special predetermined pool of cards made explicitly for the purposes of draft play. The pool of cards is known as a Cube and usually contains a minimum of 320 cards per side to accommodate an eight-player draft (You can draft with smaller Cubes, they will simply handle less players) as well as customized starter cards for each player.
Cube drafting has all of the fun of regular Netrunner drafting but with some additional advantages:
Infinite Reusability – Cubes can be drafted any number of times for a different experience each time.
Fully Customizable – Each Cube can be unique and allows for entirely different drafting experiences.
Changes Over Time – As new cards are released, you can adapt and change your Cube to the changing environment.
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that’s because most locals are very casual compared to say stimhack league.
In stimhack league 2 my matchups were as follow (for stats I kept track of)
15 NEH astrobiotics
2 HB glacier
1 RP glacier
On the runner side I played vs
12 Andromeda (4 tag me 6 daily casts 2 siphonless)
6 Kate with prepaids
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I highly recommend the Stimhack Cube if you don’t know how to build one.
Oddly enough, after reading through this thread, I feel better about Netrunner than I did before reading through it. Taking a step back, I feel like there is still a very wide variety of decks that can perform reasonably well in any given tournament on both sides, and with the increased numbers of asset spam and addition of Polop, Criminal looks like it can make a comeback. I’ll be interested to see how things shape up on Saturday with lots of regionals happening. Yes, there are new challenges being presented, but I honestly like that it keeps me on my toes and forces me to continue to get a read on the meta and make different deckbuilding decisions.
As the person who made the Slack chat, I would kind of agree with you here. While I like how it brings together the community, it can also have problems being an echo chamber. I don’t really know if there’s anything I can or should do about it – it is what it is. Personally, I only read it from time to time, and engage in most of my Netrunner conversation with my local meta in our own various chats. If someone doesn’t have a local community and is restricted to playing on Jinteki and only hanging out in the Stimhack Slack, I can see how one might perceive the game as one particular way.
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second this. I have a hard enough time keeping up to date on deck-types and building/rebuild constructed decks; building a cube from the ground up is a whole other beast. Never had a bad time with the stimhack cube yet - I think they do a good job of representing an interesting variety while keeping it playable.
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So far I’ve had (I’m pretty sure):
5 Noise
2 Whizzard
1 Reina Siphon Spam
1 Hayley Chameleon
1 Stealth Andy
1 Ken Express
And on corp
3 Foodcoats
2 Palana
2 Blue Sun
1 Haarpschiord
1 Near earth hub
Maybe local leagues are more casual than the SHL, or maybe the SHL is very susceptible to group think and favor playing the ‘most powerful’ archetypes that emerge from the community consensus. My argument is jinteki.net, and particularly SHL players are often more focused on refining an existing archetype than trying something new. Many posts here when someone suggests a new idea or counter-play are typically met with dismissal.
At a local 46-person SC, we had geist emerge as the #1 seed out of swiss (before business first released). At another 26-person tournament, an odd-ball Sol tagstorm deck won the whole thing. There are other decks that can do very well that do not appear in the SHL meta.
I don’t expect to convince anyone with these anecdotes, since I expect that our prejudices will direct our thoughts more than any data points, which is the original problem: we are far too willing to dismiss ideas that challenge us instead of re-evaluating our ideas (and decklists).
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Could it just be to do with the times that people play at? If you don’t vary up when you play your games, then it’s quite possible you will just keep hitting the same meta of similar folks from the same time zone. Just a thought, but it would be interesting if there was data that could give a breakdown of what is played when.
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Oddball decks do indeed do well sometimes on a local level. I took an Apocalypse Noise deck with only three viruses to top seed at a Store Champ. Only lost game was after cut.
Also played some games in SHL with it and did win some (also lost some)
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