Preparing for Summer Showdown

Short update. And... is it a runner meta?

[Preamble: One AI generated image included. Text 100% human generated, as always. This blogger is grass-fed and ethically raised in a cage free environment.]

It’s very likely that the first tournament I play in this season will be the CTK Online Summer Showdown.

Already 77 people have signed up, it’s low stakes and a great way to see what the meta is like out there. I haven’t received my physical copy of Elevation yet, so that’s an additional bit of convenience.

As mentioned last week, I’ve already started playing with the new cards on Jinteki.net

What have I tested?

Corp:

1. The PD list I posted last week. It’s fine. It can get wins, for now. I suspect it will not be playable within a few weeks, as new runner synergies start to become more defined.

2. A few iterations on NBN Synapse Global, just going all in on stuff that tags. Result: unplayable as built. Maybe someone will find a good list, but right now it’s looking like Nebula is a better bet if you want to be doing standard NBN things.

3. Railbirded some Zwicky games. This ID is strong. I need a promising BANGUN list if anyone has one, please ship it my way.

4. Zero motivation to play any Jinteki ID whatsoever, I simply do not find anything the Corp has available to it compelling at the moment, with the possible exception of A Teia. AgInfusion rotating is a bigger, deeper tragedy than I could have foreseen. Charlotte, LaCosta and Anoetic Void are still S-tier cards, so don’t let me be a Debbie Downer: the Corp has strong options, it just feels to me like it’s lacking some type of proactive threat.

Runner:

1. Spark of Inspiration feels like a dead end now that Kit rotated. The Spark into Lobi/Orca thing just doesn’t feel good enough out of any other ID. Maybe someone that has a lot of experience with Captain Padma can make it hum. This is the only Shaper I’ve tried, since I prefer it when figuring out the econ for a faction doesn’t require excessive “durdling¹” and right now all I see are mentally taxing order-of-operations puzzles I don’t need when I’m simultaneously trying to figure out what my opponent is doing. But for those of you who love fiddling around with cardboard until the click-math works out in your favor, knock yourselves out; I’ll be here with my Fermenter.

2. Baz. I mean, the flavor text was an imperative and I obeyed. Haven’t gotten a ton of games, but the basic play of “they rez ice, I free install Boomerang” seems pretty great. If they don’t have much ice and you’re playing with a blank ID, you should be winning anyways. I don’t know how many hardware and resource cards you need to really be worth playing this ID over Sable, but it should probably by close to 30% of your deck.

3. Phoenix. Best new ID in the game, makes me genuinely excited to sleeve up Anarch cards. Protip: 3x Bankhar, just do it. You want it early and consistently.

I’ve been winning significantly more Runner games than Corp games and my impression right now is that the Corp’s feasible strategies are somewhat constrained.

This is contradicted by the data-driven results reported by The Surveyor this week on a 37 person tournament online [EDITED: originally published as “in the UK”], where Corp win rates were quite high for Weyland and NBN. If I had to guess what this is about: no one paid attention to me when I said that

\(M_r = \{4, 4, 8, 5, 3\}\)

is the new magic number set for this meta. Your runner deck and runner gameplay have to be constructed around Measured Response until said card gets pushed out of the meta by people being super savvy about it.

Thou shalt know it.

The winning Corp deck:

https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/067a12b6-7263-4a4e-b8ba-f2b4243dff4e

It makes a LOT of money, forces the runner to find the right solutions to early gearchecks, and then makes them very dead when they are very poor. Classic Weyland, love to see it, not surprising to see this succeed week one.

AugustusCaesar also played Weyland, minus the Measured Response:

https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/433717bc-3378-4479-bf1d-434aec9d39f3

Corps dont feel great to me, it was very hard to find anything that would beat crim (either my MuslihaT here, or even some Baz/Sable angles). This was enough to take it down with only 1 loss, but entry into TAI Breakers gives you a permanent curse to always exactly bubble out of every tournament where possible, so that was my ultimate fate at Sunrise.

I think he’s right.

As a corollary, I think Deep Dive has become an extremely brutal card for most Corp factions. The list of things that kept (or tried to) Deep Dive in check last year were:

• Border Control

• AgInfusion

• HB click-taxing builds

Since those things no longer exist, there’s a huge incentive to play this win condition.

Need Deep Dive independent proof of runner edge?

https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/5400a3d9-6d0c-4261-b9aa-e08bf53c5ace

Yeah, that’s Sebastião Souza Pessoa taking down a 37 person tournament. It’s got 49 cards too. The (in retrospect) obvious idea of putting Account Sippy Cup Transfer of Wealth in Seb is brilliant and I wish I’d thought of it first. I hope see more of this going forward.

I hope to get in another ~10 games before next week, but for now, that is all.

1. This word has an interesting etymology, it basically appeared spontaneously in the MtG sphere almost 20 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/xwu3e/etymology_of_the_term_durdle/