The 24.09 Metagame At and After Worlds
Last week I wrote about my Worlds experience, today I’m going to write about what I took away from the whole thing. Unlike last year, I didn’t make a slew of bullet-pointed predictions1 however, let’s look at some choice quotes from the time leading up to Worlds:
On top of that Deep Dive is just excellent. I’ve been a Deep Dive believer since last year and a lot of excellent players have joined the bandwagon […] The text on Deep Dive does not come at price. You can play it without extra clicks. You can choose not to access a lethal Fujii. Deep Dive is the The Truth. You can play other wincons in your busted Shaper card pool if you like the reassuring glow of hard inevitability, but I’m now at the point where I personally think it’s a mistake.
Let’s look at some players (and their final rank at the event) that opted to play Deep Dive in their Worlds runner list:
Sokka (3rd), Tzeentchling (8th), RotomAppliance (13th), AnalyzeChris (17th), xdg (19th), Whiteblade111 (22nd), Aruzan (1st), DeeR (2nd place), Jai (7th) , Tak (10th), Timmy Wong (11th), Ruben Pieters (12th), ctz (16th) …ok I think I’ve made my point. Basically, the vast majority of top-placing Shaper and Crim players had Deep Dive in their list. It’s hard for Anarchs to justify spending influence on it when they have stuff like Finality, Twinning (maninthemoon, 18th), and Stargate (The King, 4th ; passive_mult, 15th) in faction.
(SebastianK was the only Top 16 Shaper not on the card just to spite me, clearly.)
From September 20th:
In fact, I think the default outcome of this is that 20+% of the World’s field will be Lat. You need a plan that beats Lat. How the hell do you beat Lat?
If you go to The Surveyor’s metagame data you’ll see that I was almost close-but-not-quite on this, the meta ended up being 18% Lat, not >20% but I’m giving myself partial credit on this one.
1. R+ tempo hell / tagging. I tried this last night. It’s solid, but Amani Senai is kinda garbo against a quick Paricia and +1 link. I got slightly flooded and the agendas came in the wrong order and it was still a potentially winnable game. I believe R+ can probably be tuned to be generally strong against Shapers. The problem is everything else.
2. Rush. Clot was in Sokka’s August tournament winning list, but a lot of people have dropped it. Score 4 points as fast as possible, then Big Deal and prey they just didn’t slot Clot. As a bonus, this strat is proven to be quite good vs. reg Hoshiko lists.
3. Play a trap deck and hope they faceplant the wrong stuff a little too often. PE, Thule, and NEH are the best IDs if you want to try this route.
Ehhhh, sort of. I was right about R+ being a solid choice (it won the event), and I was half-right about traps, only PE broke into the cut. Same with rush decks like PD , Sportsmetal and Outfit. The big miss here was neglecting the allure of AgInfusion (and A Teia). My general mindset is that if people are Shaper Bullshitting you shouldn’t be trying to make the game go long, but clearly that’s a misunderstanding from ages long past2. The viability of glacier is predicated not only on how efficient the doom rig is (something Shaper is still basically the best at), but on how SUSTAINED the runner-side econ can be. In the past, Shapers were basically INVINCIBLE going long because they had tools like Rezeki or Magnum Opus. But these days, the green faction is allowed to run out of easy money. The best tools runners have for recursion are DJ Fenris (on Steve) and, uh, Ashen Epilogue and ain’t nobody spending two influence pips on that that ain’t called Hoshiko or Esa apparently. Maybe they should? Actually, there is another option which is to run Fermenter and use Simulchip for recursion on those bad boys, but Simulchips are a really precious resource for Shapers. Nonetheless, quite a few players opted to spend some influence on Fermenter (unverifiable humblebrag: I was playing Fermenter in Lat before it was cool).
The other big miss was obviously Asa, and thus we now finally arrive to the title of this post which is that motorcycles are big game.
Specifically, NSG has now (unwittingly?) created a convention, solidified in my mind that if they put a motorcycle on a card, it must be capable of gaining you clicks.
Basically, Swift and Hannah are hot shit, because if people are going to be playing tags, Ikawah Project, or booping you with Ag’s ability you’re going to need a fucking speed bike3 for the bonus clicks.
Last week I also hinted that I might be reconsidering my position on Trick Shot but I’m still not at the point where I think it needs to be banned. It’s fucking close though.
I think the metagame is healthy/interesting, but after worlds it has become pretty clear that the Criminal faction needs a little something; although maybe I’m simply not good at reading minds. I find Nykride’s write-up feels essentially correct. If you combine the increasingly accepted conventional wisdom that Crim cards are situational, it stands to reason you can extract maximum effect if your opponent’s bluffs and serious jams are obvious to you. Whiteblade has told us over and over again he can just read people. Notice that Nykride hates Pinhole, probably one of my favorite tech cards ever. I never have a goddamn clue if it’s a Rashida or a 5-pointer, so I often just let Pinhole figure it out for me, and I’m then very happy to use my Shaper or anarch doom rig to go fetch it. That’s how I win runner-side games, certainly not by using “theory of mind” or whatever. That requires about 10000 more EQ points than I have (WIS is my dump stat).
Still, hopefully the next set of cards NSG prints has something that nudges Crim up a smidge relative to Shaper… Nykride’s deck doesn’t have a single card from RWR. In the meantime, if you’re going to sleeve up Blue cards, make sure you do so in a way that gives maximum equity against Asa, since I expect that deck to be massively on the upswing. Since Azmari Combo underperformed at Worlds, the next few weeks might actually stand to be a really good time to sleeve Sable, even if you’re not great at soulreads.
Notes on Streamed Games
One of the reasons this blog update is coming down the pipeline on Thursday instead of Tuesday is that I wanted to go over the streamed games, since I haven’t had time to watch them until now. Below are some thoughts/notes, don’t expect too much insight, just things that stood out to me from any given game.
[WARNING!!! SPOILERS FOR WORLDS 2024 STREAMED GAMES BELOW!]
Swiss R2 - AnalyzeChris (AgInfusion) vs RotomAppliance (Lat)
At one junction AC chooses not to rez a Spin Doctor in response to access (to nullify a Lat draw), and Rotom chooses not to trash it despite being very credit-rich (19). This sequence of choices was noteworthy to myself and the commentators. This showcases two good players opting not to play on autopilot.
Swiss R4 - Sokka (BtL) vs The King (Hoshiko)
Interesting game with a smidge of negative variance for The King (no random access luck; DeeR would later tap into this Karmic imbalance). Sokka’s deck and playstyle are clearly tuned to punish cards like Hoshiko, Pinhole and Dirty Laundry by double icing all centrals. Wall to Wall is an absolute beast of a card in this ID.
Swiss R5 - Aruzan (Arissana) vs. Booshy (A Teia)
Clutch purge to kill Physarum (and a single Fermenter counter). Blood in the Water plays really well with Data Loop, something that hadn’t really occured to me until watching this for some reason.
Swiss R7/R8 - Jai (Asa) vs. Timmy Wong (Ayla) ; iherdn3rfz (Ken Tenma) vs. tzeenchling (Asa)
Two games showcasing the power of Asa against very different threat profiles. If you want to learn to play Asa, watching these two games would be a good starting point. The decklists use slightly different sets of “power cards” though, with Jai’s leaning on Holo Man, whereas Tzeechling’s leverages MCA Austerity Policy.
R9 - DeeR (Lat) vs. Passive_Mult (R+)
This was probably the most exciting streaming game in the Swiss rounds. It ends on a clutch Deep Dive win (agenda on the last flipped card) after dodging Smiling Tsarevna damage which could have knocked the Deep Dive out of hand. If I’m not recalling incorrectly DeeR was floating a large number of tags and was probably dead on the Corp’s following turn.
R10 - Fi (Freedom Khumalo) vs. Rielle (PE)
Interesting game. Fi seems to have it in the bag but accidentally floats one too many tags (2) near the endgame and dies to double Mindscaping.
R11 - Maninthemoon (Freedom Khumalo) vs. Atien (A Teia)
Win-and-in (lose-and-out) game. A few observations: NGO provides an extra click tax in A Teia, since the runner in incentivized to check a double advanced remote because of the pseudo-bluff potential. Maninthemoon hits a Bacterial Reprogramming early, commentary notes this is not as bad as it seems for Atien (Bacterial generates a lot of tempo for the Corp, I can personally vouch that it’s seldom great for the Runner despite it being 3 points). Atien is playing Surveyor, and card near and dear to my heart, and this type of giant ice stack with Vovo feels like the near optimal place for it. Atien would have been in excellent shape if they’d seen more econ cards along the way, and Maninthemoon got away with some risky runs in the midgame to get back in the game.
R12 - turnleft25 (Arissana) vs. plural (Sportsmetal)
The run on the Cerebral Overwriter was a questionable play but turnleft25 had not seen a lot of agendas so I understand why that was checked. They still managed to win the game despite being saddled with a ton of Core damage.
That’s it for now! I will have more commentary on games next week and maybe some San Francisco stuff to showcase.
Nor did I do a called shot on Betrunner for who would win the whole thing, although a priori my money would have probably been on Jan Tuno, The King, or Jai this year although I wouldn’t have faulted anyone for just picking Sokka again.
Boomer brain strikes again.
Back in the old days, I really liked to play Tri-maf Contact in my crim decks because of flavor and art, although it was very easy for NBN Corps to just give you a tag and dome you for 3 meat. FFG Netrunner tended to associate vehicles with credit econ (see also- Kati Jones, although she’s in a hopper not a motorbike)