Taking the Temperature
Taking the Temperature
Just some quick thoughts from the past few weeks.
Due to a special request, I’m taking a brief hiatus from my blog sabbatical and writing in the run-up to Worlds. At this point I’m mainly focused on getting reps with what are very likely to be my final deck choices for San Francisco.
If we look at the results from the Worlds Showdown, a few things stand out to me. I’m not going to do a full meta breakdown, you know where to go for that, but rather comment on some of the more surprising and salient features of that tournament.
NBN Is Finally Getting the Respect It Deserves
After the Bellona ban, I noted that it was likely that players would incorrectly overcorrect away from NBN. Look- Bellona was a very strong card that definitely added significant percentage to NBN (particularly Reality Plus), I’m not denying that. But when considering the play patterns of NEH and Azmari, it basically does not matter much; in fact one could argue that circumstantially Degree Mill can be better.
I know that in this particular tournament AgInfusion had a better win rate than any other corp, but I can explain that with…
People Decided To Play Crim
And AgInfusion absolutely wrecks most criminal lists that I’ve tested with. The main baseline advantage to playing Criminal is that you gain percentage on HB. A separate advantage is that you can maximize your lucksacking. What do I mean by this? Well, as has been recently noted by the community, Criminal cards are highly situational. But if the situation lines up correctly, you gain massive percentage. If you have a lot of practice with Criminal and your opponent shuffles their Corp deck in a way that the Agendas are mostly near the top, they basically can’t win.
You might read this to mean I don’t think the above linked-to Mercury deck is good.
That is absolutely not what I mean, despite the author writing:
I am not quite convinced this deck is actually good.
The deck looks excellent. I will explain why I think they have this cognitive dissonance/tension.
If you want to play chess-like Netrunner, what you want is a deck like “Boring Lat” that gives you the tools to attempt to deduce the correct plays and inevitably win when you make the right decisions.
If you want to play poker-like Netrunner, what you want is a deck that just maximizes your odds of winning the random access lottery even if you haven’t been able to deduce exactly what your opponent is up to, or you don’t have the tools to win the long game.
If you’re someone who’s used to trying to maximize your inevitability, then the Lat deck will seem awesome and the Mercury deck will look like a sewage. But in some metagames and tournaments, if you don’t have the reps for finding the perfect line with Boring Lat against your opponent’s Earth Station, A Teia, or Ampere deck… then going for the high-variance approach may not only allow you to get lucky and spike the tournament, it might also give you better overall baseline percentage than trying to “play chess”.
Do I recommend picking Spark Mercury if you want to win Worlds? Probably not- the more rounds a tournament has, the more likely you are to run into people who happen to shuffle their agendas to the bottom and then just Djupstad you or have you go meet Sundog.
The other noteworthy result is my man 419 showing up in THREE spots in the top cut, including one deck that went 4-0 in the Swiss. I mentioned in my last article that I think 419 had been incorrectly forgotten, not noticing that Chouxflower had written a really nice decklist explaining how to build reg crim and using 419 as the template ID. Angedelo’s list is very close.
If you want to take the HB (Sports, PD, Asa) players to the cleaners, this type of thing is what you should be doing. I’m not a skilled Crim player, and I’m much more concerned about NBN and AgInfusion, so I will likely not be sleeving up Sable, Mercury or 419 for Worlds. Operative word being likely.
Shaper Isn’t Going Anywhere
2 Lats, 2 Arissanas and 3 Kits are there to remind you that Trick Shot will still wreck your day. I’ll stick my neck out and report my overall metagame impressions.
In my testing, Shaper is:
Decidedly favored against most Weyland builds.
Slightly favored against most Jinteki builds. Punitive forks still get ya sometimes.
Slight underdog to fast HB decks, but really depends on the exact matchup and card choices on both sides.
Even or slightly unfavored against Azmari combo.
Noticeably unfavored vs. [REDACTED]
Massively unfavored against nothing. There is no deck in the format against which Lat and Arissana are less than 40% to win. Feel free to correct this impression in the comments.
The benefits of playing Criminal do not outweigh the benefits of playing Shaper in an even field, but they may outweigh the benefits of playing Anarch if HB is 25% or greater of the metagame. Worlds is likely to be very interesting.