Jank means: Individually useless items that combine to form some sort of combo. Often, the combo is unrealistic in it’s complexity or consistency, but doesn’t have to be.
It has nothing to do with how ‘good’ it is, aside from the fact that Jank tends to be bad anyway objectively. Exception: Those early ‘CI Shutdown Insta-Wins’ were Jank that were actually fairly solid, before ways to play around it became common.
So stuff like ‘Whizzard using good cards’ is not Jank. Each thing has value in of itself. Likewise ‘Kit using decoders for early aggression then swapping to AI or full-rig’ isn’t Jank. Those are each valuable.
Shit like ‘I will use Dr. Lovegood on some Apex Cards so that I can blah blah blah’ is Jank. As is ‘I will defeat my opponent using Chums and Cell Portal Infinite Combo’.
Fun thread. Yes there are 8 non jank decks in netrunner period. And that list rotates every cycle or so, but yes everything other then top tier is jank sorry. If you wiki jank it talks about it being related to the gaming community it pretty funny.
A Chaos Theory deck that just uses econ and breakers and MO isn’t top-10 material, but it isn’t Jank.
DLR forever deck is Jank, and it’s currently top-notch. Because none of that crap (papparazi, pavillion, DLR) does anything except when all of them are around.
I also think of mechanics that break or ignore the typical circuit of play. Iceless Corp decks or breakerless runner decks, Power Shutdown combos that score 7 points in one turn or Medium-Hivemind decks that access 20+ cards in a single run. Jank decks reach toward the game’s various extremes and subvert expectations.
A Jank Corp deck is a deck that requires your opponent to do a specific thing for you to win (it loses to a player who just mashes Opus for 8 until they have 60 credits and then rig-builds and wins).
A Jank runner deck is a deck that has overly complicated solutions to simple problems, i.e. “Fuck, a Wall of Static! I need to set up my whole combo to get through that!”
Jank on either side can also be a combo deck that folds immediately to a fairly common card (Hivemind combo vs CVS, some 7-point combos vs Clot/Hades Shard).
Jank is what the people that play the same shit over and over again consider everything else just because they believe “it can’t win” games with a good, stable ratio.
That might be true. Doesn’t make it any less true unfortunately.
If a jank deck had a good win ratio, it wouldn’t be considered jank…would it?
(food for thought)
My reputation IRL says anytime I go ‘i got a new deck guys’ is basically me saying ‘i got some garbage you are gonna roll your eyes at’
Regardless that my decks are almost always reasonable and win most their games.
So yea… I guess I am a jank player. Or at least people say that about me. Like above :PPP …so… I actually do approve. You just aren’t correct though <3
Building a deck around trying to kill someone with Shinobi? -> Jank (i’m on my 3rd iteration now, trying to do it out of Sol… DAMN YOU FAUST)
Professor? Jank
As others have mentioned… Bagbiter, Game Day, Notoriety? Surprisingly powerful, but janky AF.
I don’t think it has to be viewed as pejorative. To me, if someone says they are playing jank, that just means something different than the standard T16 of $lastmajortournament
[quote=“captain_frisk, post:38, topic:5849, full:true”]Building a deck around trying to kill someone with Shinobi? -> Jank (i’m on my 3rd iteration now, trying to do it out of Sol… DAMN YOU FAUST)
[/quote]
Snap! And if it has failed miserably, snap again!
Although pulling off the unexpected Andromedolypse makes up for it.
is!
