ANR - Crazy Decks!

Break the Meta! (hack the planet!)

Okay. So that's a bit of a silly start to what I hope will become an interesting platform for discussing what can be done with Android Netrunner deckbuilding!

If you do not know what Android: Netrunner is, check out the Fantasy Flight Games page for this awesome Living Card Game (LCG) Here! Watch the Video tutorial and go get started in playing this amazing game.


But describing the game is not what my purpose with this Blog is going to be. Rather, as I stated above, I want to break the Meta. Challenge people to think about deck construction in a new, different way.

Will these decks work? Probably not. Most of these decks will probably fall flat on their face and be not very competitive.

So whats the point you ask?

To make you think. To make you look at cards you might normally disregard and toss to the side as useless or extremely situational. To shake things up in a way that might provide you with tricks to make your more competitive decks have an edge over the rest of the players out there. To prepare for when more cards come out that could make these decks ...work.

To start this journey of expanding our ideas on how to make cards work for us, lets start by getting a description of the current Meta.

First. What do I mean by Metagame? 

As the Urban Dictionary link above expands on, Metagame (Commonly referred to as 'Meta') is the "The Highest level of Strategy"

So for Android: Netrunner, this is what is considered the understanding of deck construction of the most popular and strategically sound, consistent, and strong deck types.

Lets take a look at some of those.

First off, we have the Corporation. Meta for the Corporation as of this posting (Jan 2014) falls into a few major types, with a couple of subtypes in there.

Corp Rush

This could be Fast Advance, Never Advance, or just Always Advance (far less common). The most common Fast Advance decks use tricks like Biotic Labor, San San City Grid, Trick of Light, or Autoscript Counters - or a combination of the above. The Goal of these decks is often to be able to trick out an agenda in one turn. Relying on 3/2s and 3/1s as their agenda composition, they will use the listed cards above (and others) to get the ability to install and score an agenda directly from their hand, without giving the Runner time to steal it out of a remote where it is most vulnerable. 

Never advance decks use similar methods, but rely on a large amount of assets as well, causing the runner to be unsure if its worth running on the card that was just installed - is it worth paying to get through all that ice just to see a PAD Campaign?  This is a mini shell game - a bluff to be able to have a full turn to advance and score. 

And finally Always advance is similar to Never Advance, in that everything that goes into a remote server gets Installed, Advanced Advanced. Many of these will be traps, relying on the same bluff against the runner as Never Advance. 

Rush is the main Corp Strategy because you are aiming to put pressure on the Runner, forcing them to make tricky, or even better, bad decisions in their runs. When you are sitting at 4 or 5 points and could conceivably win with one more Agenda, the Runner becomes a little more desperate and may make mistakes, or may have no choice but to run your server for that card sitting there, draining them of credits, taking damage, or any number of unfortunate events. 

The Rush deck type will probably always remain a very strong contender - giving your opponent less turns to win is a lot of pressure upon the Runner and in tournament situations can lead to a lot of mistakes being made.

Tag and Bag

Some corps don't want to deal with Agendas and scoring. They'd rather blow up the building that the Runner is hiding in, and just remove the threat in the first place. Tag and Bag decks are always going to be strong, because even at 4 influence, Scorched Earth is just a strong card for killing the runner. Tag and Bag relies most often on finding a way to Tag the runner - through Snares, SEA Source, Midseason Replacements, Data Raven, or other, and then dropping Scorched Earths on them to kill them. Two at a minimum, with recursion tricks like Archived Memories, or Project Atlas counters to search or other methods to be able to deal with cards like Plastecrete that will protect the runner. 

The second method is Net damage. Most favored by Jinteki of course, these decks rely on traps and surprise to catch the Runner in a mistake to finish them off - such as a double advanced Junebug into a couple Neural EMPs. With Net Damage being mostly death by 1000 cuts, its harder to pull off and relies more on the Runner making mistakes.

Runner Decks

The Runner Decks have a variety of different types, but by far the most common at the moment is the Andromeda Aggro deck - A deck designed to be consistent, fast, and effective. Andromeda's base ability allowing the runner to see upwards of 18 cards (baring duplicates) in a draw and a mulligan means the Runner is most likely going to see what they want. Stuff this deck full of fast running event cards that punish the Corp, reward the Runner, and  help deal with threats of Ice without having breakers on the table  gives this deck type a lot of power. No matter what your opinion of Andy's overpoweredness or not, the current  Meta is dominated by variations of her fast running deck.

Okay! Thanks for taking this overview tour with me. Next up, we'll start breaking this meta!