Summertime Madness
OP changes, Oracular precognitions, and ICC.
Changes to Organized Play
Metropole Grid discusses this in a lot of detail here:
If we look at their stated goals, I can boil it down to: more meatspace Netrunner opportunities, clarifying the tournament difficulty progression ladder, and increasing the stakes of online tournaments. I think all of those are good goals. The changes made support these things, and I think will make it easier for TOs to understand the REL they’re supposed to be using for any event. The infographic and renaming of things makes everything super clear.
The structure also makes it pretty clear: the “most competitive” event of the year is The Circuit Breaker Invitational. It’s the only event you can attend by earning an invite. Yes, Worlds is bigger, “highest competitive tier”, and has a fancier name and the competition at the top tables will be brutal. But if we’re going to use an MtG analogy, Worlds should be seen like an awesome GrandPrix-type event, where the CBI is like the ProTour: you only get to go if you have done some serious winning.
The idea of a Megacity Championship also makes a lot of sense. In many places (and for some privileged people) national boundaries are quite porous. A lot of us “third culture kids” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_culture_kid) do not necessarily have a very strong sense of national identity, and despite recent global political trends, an argument can be made that the nation-state construct, while useful as a Schelling point for the construction of a shared identity for military coordination and social safety net purposes, is ultimately artificial and inherently erosive to human dignity. Anyways, back to children’s card games.
The other change that I think merits discussion is byes. So, MtG used to have byes at GPs if you had a high enough ranking as a competitive player. This was seen as necessary because Magic has such a high level of variance that to even have a little bit of a chance of allowing some degree of consistency of names in the cut, you needed to provide a few early round free wins at events with a large number of attendees. This was part of the prize structure for crossing the threshold into the ProTour “train” – and was intended as a justification for players to keep grinding.
Here, we see NSG implementing the bye system a bit differently. You don’t get a bye for any particular ranking, nor do byes come into play at casual events. Rather, the byes are there to incentivize participation at gradually escalating “tiers” of competitive events. You go to a District Championship, do well, then you get a single bye for the MegaCity Championship (the first tier at which byes apply). Byes are a big deal in terms of increasing one’s likelihood of making the cut, so while you can opt out of trying to ‘climb’ the tiers this way, it’s very statistically advantageous to do so1. The very best players might be able to show up to a MegaCity Championship without a bye and still crack the cut, but even they are much more likely to do so if their first round is instantly a win.
In the many tournaments that are now run using Single Sided Swiss, we expect the relative power of a bye will be lessened. That said, there are still no plans to require competitive events to be run as Single Sided Swiss, and first round byes will be equally valid in Double Sided Swiss events.
This is the only part of the announcement I don’t particularly like, because it does introduce a meta-gaming aspect which not all players will immediately understand: if you have a bye, you really want to “spend” it on a double-sided swiss event if you can, since it’s basically worth double. What this actually means is that if you have some foreknowledge through your social network that a specific Megacity championship is going to be double sided swiss, then you really want to grind the District championships to get a bye for that event. That said, NSG write they will be monitoring things, and if every MegaCity championship ends up being single-sided swiss, this is a non-issue.
Alright, let’s move on from tournament bureaucracy to some juicy stuff.
The Prophecy
Back in October 2023 I wrote:
Rosetta 2.0
I feel like there has to be a way to build some kind of end-game econ engine with this thing. I don't know if that's even remotely good or what, but maybe someone can give it a go? Corps are generally very fast in the current meta though, so dropping a 3 cost card that does literal nothing until you have other pieces and a spare click seems decidedly bad.
It turns out that Santa (and Muntal Bost) did figure out a way to use Rosetta 2.0 productively in Ayla thanks to the printing of Muse and Coalescence. Massive, massive kudos for turning me into a fucking oracle and for making binder fodder into a tournament powerhouse. Make no mistake ladies, gentlemen, gender non-binaries and agender orthogonals: SHAPER META IS HERE.
Is this broken? Well, I think it grabs any Corp trying to play “fair” Ice+operations Netrunner and shoves its face into the mud.
Santa writes:
“With NVRAM and hard mull you have a ~71% change of finding Rosetta in your opening hand.”
That’s as close to deterministic opening Netrunner as we can get- you start 70% of your games with your key card in hand which fetches all your other key cards. Even if it isn’t “broken”, I’m not sure the play pattern is healthy. I hope NSG keeps an eye on this- one more quote to cement the case:
“This deck should pretty much rip anything tier 1.5-2 apart, so long as it isn't something like Pharos/BtL glacier (this list is not built for that).”
To be fair, there are a lot of runner decks in the meta right now that rip tier 2 corps apart, that’s just the reality. Which brings us to…
ICC: Kikai’s Analysis and Decks
Head over to The Surveyor and check out Kikai’s analysis of the Intercontinental Championship if you haven’t already. It was a doozy of a tournament, with perennial crowd favorite William/sokka out in the early rounds, and some of the best current ANR players piloting to the best of their ability.
Kikai points out that the runner win rate in this event was a brutal 67%- this may reflect that the Jinteki corp bias was unsuited for the runner composition, or it may simply reflect a runner advantage in an open list tournament of the best players. At any rate, it’s rough for Corps out there: if you can find a “49% deck”2 you should probably just bring that unless you have a titanium grip on what the runner meta at a given tournament is likely to be.
In my own personal testing in the days leading up to this event I have been able to establish that yes, Jan Tuno’s (or qtm’s if it was a collaborative effort) Fascet Ob is really, really strong across a variety of matchups even if it didn’t perform particularly well at this event. The main strength beyond the usual Ob shenanigans is the ability to leverage an early Eminent Domain into a rezzed Archer and provide fodder for a possible second “surprise” Archer rez. World Tree afficionados need to watch out for this, as repeated program trashing can be a problem even in a world full of Simulchips.
The other discovery I made in my recent testing is that Kikai’s Steve Cambridge deck is very, very real. It’s not a super happy time for the Crim faction right now, but it turns out that if you import Bankhar, Strike Fund, and Steelskin into that shell, it lets you play those aggressive and conditional crim cards to brutal effect. I don’t particular love the Tremolo/chip package, but I’ll let someone else figure out if there’s a more effective card composition to use given then influence constraints. As a bonus, the deck is really, really fun to play3.
Jai’s Holo Man Asa won the tournament. Some version of HoloAsa has not left my personal deck rotation for months: it is consistent, strong, and gives ample possible lines so you can adjust your play depending on your opponent’s willingness to check remotes. Having never-advance and fast-advance options is massive advantage in a world of Shaper Inevitability Engines. Make them pay for not slotting the Clot.
The Other Thing that Happened This Weekend
I was unable to attend NANPC Philly due to other life commitments. A lot of incredible players from the DC/NoVA/Maryland meta made the trip- I’m sad I missed it. I’m keeping my ear to the ground though, so I’ll probably give some breakdown of that event next week.
Stay frosty out there!
There is also a cognitive advantage. You can walk around and scout a bit in the first round while everyone else is using up mental stamina to play.
A “49%” deck is a deck that has no positive matchups, but has a solid ability to win anything. This is a theoretical deck more than anything else, since it’s almost never actually the case that you can craft a pile that is even across the board, but when making a bad meta call punishes you very harshly, this is a safe choice, particularly if you think you have a great runner deck.
It really should have been named “Bankh Robbery” though.