Watching a Netrunner metagame review
Watching Netrunner
I've been playing the new Netrunner set for eleventy-twelve hours since it came out yesterday, and now I'm all worn out
Funny bit of Netrunner "symmetry" that I've liked ever since learning about it is how runners have a neutral economy card called "VoicePAD", a phone for taking jobs, but the equivalent card on the corps' side is "PAD Campaign", an advertisement for that same phone.
Infracted at the Netrunner tournament for waiting for my opponents to say "I run HQ" and immediately replying with "Gesundheit"
Unfortunately this game is mostly just a combat TCG, and moreover heavily involves die rolls. I have no interest in dice-based card games. Anyway, now I shall randomly access a card from the Corp's hand
Idea I had for a Netrunner April Fools event is "Errata Standard", where they issue ridiculous "errata" for recent banned cards.
Tributary: "The first time each turn a run *ends*,"
Cyberdex Sandbox: "The *second* time each turn you purge virus counters,"
Endurance: 10 influence
In both games, your decks tend to have a ramshakle selection of econ cards that fit together in non-obvious ways, but in Netrunner these "gamey" cards feel like they speak to the complexity of getting by in its world, or of the labyrinthine esoterica of future corporate finance.
Another thought about Netrunner vs MTG… The parts of both games which involve gaming the economy - spending cash to get it back, weaving a web of discounts, limited-use currency, and drip econ across the game - makes way more sense in Netrunner's capitalist dystopia than in MTG.
Netrunner tip: if you play the Corp, and you keep your starting hand, that signals you've got a great start… but if you mulligan, then that signals you drew lots of stealable agendas. To avoid giving away information, simply always mulligan regardless of how good your hand is.
I'm wistfully remembering getting roasted to a fine gold in the Netrunner tag on Cohost for implying that this card was better than it reads
Have you ever won a game of Netrunner so undeservedly that you feel physically ill, and your only solace is repeating the FGC mantra of wisdom, "We take those"
Just watched Netrunner world championships, and if my lose condition was my opponent hitting 3 out of a specific 6 cards from my 44-card deck, and I sat down to play Loser's Finals, and then my opponent hit three by turn 2, I would probably not react as well as that player did.
Playing a game of Netrunner as a control runner is making me realise in high resolution that I maybe don't have the constitution to play control decks. Even when I'm miles ahead, I'm still sweating up a typhoon, waiting for the other shoe to shoot me in the foot.
Imagining a world where Netrunner came out first and all trading card games were asymmetric by default. Imagining a world where red, white, blue, black and green in MTG each had completely different decks, game rules and win conditions.
The one constant impression I have about Netrunner is that, whenever I talk or think about the mechanics and in-game terminology, I always go down on my knees and tearfully thank divine providence that it isn't Another Goddamn Fricking High Fantasy Game.
Netrunner is a good example: the mechanics relating to what the runner does in prep for runs, such as location cards, card draw events, etc., are a lot less definite than cards that are the focus of attention during runs (ICE, icebreakers, agendas, etc.). Backstory versus story.
Something I've been thinking about is how games, in particular TCGs, will have mechanics' diegetic meaning be more vague/ambiguous whenever they depict details at the periphery of the story, away from the focus of action.
Land cards (and their antecedents in other "dudebasher" TCGs like Legends Of Runeterra) are interesting to think about in Netrunner terms because they are simultaneously credits, clicks, AND basic actions – bearing the weight of basically the whole game's structure.
To me, the "golden trifecta" of Netrunner, as Richard Garfield designed it, would be:
• The asymmetry
• The basic actions (that you can always use without needing a card)
• Clicks (as a second, constant resource that loosely constrains how many actions a turn can contain)
Going to start perpetuating misinformation that the Netrunner cards are called "ICE" in reference to the definitive cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash
Right now both Netrunner and Magic: The Gathering are running pro tournament streams on their companies' respective Twitch accounts, and it's a real jarring contrast of two different kinds of quality.
Lands……………
It's kind of wild to think about how Netrunner decks only allow 3 of each card name, AND random discard is a major mechanic in almost every matchup, and it still has fewer blowouts than standard MTG.
The best thing about competitive Netrunner is that there are no mirror matches… so you can always blame the matchup : )
Magic as a narrative theme is almost always something layered on top of the physical world, whereas cyberspace can replace the physical world entirely, and any inconsistencies inside it are explicable as mere differences/simplifications compared to the real world.
One big thing about Netrunner that really helps it narratively cohere compared to MTG is how everything is "just" electronics – so for instance, it isn't a logic problem to use your battery-themed card to add power to your werewolf-themed card, because they're both just software.
Watching Netrunner
If NSG does ban Hoshiko (the card) to keep Standard going until April, they should make it a fun event to look forward to. Lean into the spectacle. Wait until October, then drop a 20 sec trailer. Post daily 500-word fiction leading up to the day. It'd be an anticlimax otherwise.
People are doing some "challenge MTG players to evaluate Netrunner cards" content lately, but they're not fully tapping the really funky-sounding card text.
Like, how much do you fetch-cracking bird-bolters think THIS piece of nonsense is good or not
It's a little bit of a lost opportunity that Netrunner got chess cards printed in 2013 but didn't make Rook a fracter, Knight a killer and Bishop a decoder.
The symbology would have lined up so well…
Which Netrunner code gate ICE is this
. o O ( …Tributary: legal for 8 weeks. Endurance: legal for 8 months… )
*reads Netrunner banlist post*
I do say, this makes me ponder if there are any longrunning jokes out there about good Jinteki ice, in particular regarding whether they're allowed to have it or not. Alas, as I am a pure-hearted maiden, such knowledge is far beyond my ken.
Netrunner players are so laid back… every match I watch has someone asking to redo the whole turn because they weren't 100% optimal, and getting "sure no problem" every time. If you tried that in Magic: The Gathering, the opponent would make the Abbey Matron from Homelands face.
Obviously it makes sense considering that NSG a) only releases 2 sets per year and tries to make them count (hence a huge proportion of new cards being as wordy as MTG mythic rares) meaning b) Standard rotates glacially as a result. There are cards from 2017 in today's Standard.
The other day I heard some streamer say that by the end of this year NSG will have been running Netrunner for as long as Fantasy Flight Games did, and my mind did a circus pratfall.
Not even in the "I'm old" sense but in just an "is that actually true" sense.
Theory: the proliferation of "on encounter" effects on Netrunner ice in recent years is analogous to Magic: The Gathering splashing "enters the battlefield" effects on basically every creature since the late 00's.
lmao, Netrunner just let us sit for 9 months with an out-of-place "criminal" runner who isn't self-interested or even motivated by money, unlike most past examples, and then today they revealed, ah, all along we meant… that https://nullsignal.games/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/1493193154LIB_RWR_14-Scoop-sized.png kind of crime. Well played NSG
Magic: The Gathering put all the weapons from Clue in a recent set… pretty sly, Hasbro.
Netrunner card name idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs_attack
#JustHotJintekiThings
It always pwns me off whenever Netrunner tourney comms mention "mulch" and "the mulch deck", and – no matter what – I have to look up the card every time.
When I browse through the Netrunner card database, reading a card called something like "Reversed Accounts", and then see cryptographic currency spam in the comments, I just think "Ah, an in-universe bit…"
It took me awhile to understand this, but the flavour text on the left card explains the abilities of the right card, making the latter much more sinister. (In Netrunner, you lose the game if you ever have "-1 cards" in hand.)
I like it when Netrunner card combos can get darkly hilarious.
Just watched this year's Netrunner world tourney… Damn, those grand finals (https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1951574246?t=9h4m3s) really were pretty wild.
One nice thing about Netrunner is that when extremely predominant cards are rotated and replaced with nerfed or rebalanced versions with different names, it makes sense given that the same thing happens to programming tools every few years as well.
Infracted at the Netrunner tournament for calling R&D "Research and Development" three times in one sentence
*downloads a thing that removes the DRM from Kindle documents* This is just like Netrunner
*logging on to my Netrunner ICE roleplay account* I was born before the first byte was written and shall die after the last platter stops spinning. My blade is beyond flaw. My sight is beyond error. I will suffer no Prometheus. This crappy remote with 1x Spin Doctor is my Olympus
*immediately watches a Weyland game where they do 8 meat damage on turn 4* Ah, that funny old Weyland
Netrunner tournaments are good entertainment… Lots of close games that use almost everything in both sides' decks. Just make sure you have NetrunnerDB open in another tab though.
Me checking out the current top Netrunner corp deck
Sorry everyone for being extremely slow on the uptake here, but I just realised Netrunner recently released an icebreaker card that was a literal arctic ship.
