thenetrunnerproject

[thenetrunnerproject]

For about three months, I had my own personal "Noiseshop" deck. It was the first I had really built from scratch, using mechanics I'd picked up on through playing one of the core decks, and while it was probably terrible, it was mine.

You know the drill: stack up the viruses, particularly Parasites, on a Personal Workshop, then pay to install them as needed. It lets you pop a Parasite directly on to a piece of ice as you encounter it (a particularly neat trick back in the pre-Clone Chip days); and it lets you save the money on your bag o tools till you need it. Making a run on R&D? Don't install Medium til the run's already successful, otherwise you're just wasting cash which you might need to save your life.

In hindsight, of course, it was a terrible deck. I used far too much influence on carrying all three copies of Personal Workshop, and I was so obsessed with the gimmicky goodness of the deck when it worked that I couldn't notice that most of the rest of the tools were, um, lacking.

But it was mine.

[thenetrunnerproject]

Dinosaurus (rhymes with "rhinoceros" – don't listen to the liars, they just want you to fail) is objectively the best console thematically.

It is a small cuddly dinosaur which has been hacked by a child genius into a high-powered computer.

More than that, it's fairly strongly implied that it's from a range of toys designed by the Jesus of NBN himself, Jackson Howard. (Look at the art on his card for evidence)

And when you look at how it interacts with the game text – always the richest part of any thematic breakdown – it's even better. After all, this isn't a general purpose computer Dinosaurus has been adapted into. It's a weaponised tool, suitable for one thing and one thing only: fucking up ice.

And look at its little face! Aw.

[thenetrunnerproject]

…is the runner in the card art trying to pick a starting Pokémon?!

[thenetrunnerproject]

Local school suffers widespread network outage

Jepsen Middle School was forced to send pupils home early Wednesday, after a total network failure left teachers unable to load up any lesson plans.

Although the cause of the outage is still unknown, national cyberpolice say that signs point to an outside actor, possibly even a hacking attack from one of several runners known to have an interest in the education sector.

"If this was a targeted attack – and I'm not saying it was for sure, mind you - then whoever did it was good," said cyberdetecive Joshua Box. "There's very little evidence of any of the school's standard issue ice having been broken or bypassed, while the external firewalls on the establishment report no unusual traffic in or out of the network.

"Beyond the circumstantial evidence, there are only two things pointing to the unauthorised access theory: a modified "Dinosaurus" brand entertainment robot found inside the school building on Wednesday afternoon, and a brief statement posted on the school net on Wednesday morning," Box continued.

The statement, obtained by Channel π News, appears to be a sensiload of nothing more than a young girl saying the words "School sucks, I'm going home" into the feed. The file is so created as to be impossible for a viewer to remember the young girl's face after the stream ends, with just the name of the runner accessible by short term memory of anyone with an appropriate neural interface jack: according to users who have experienced the sensiload, it is signed "chaos theory".

"Naturally, if this youngster did hack into the school network, causing thousands of credits worth of damage, just to get out of school, her parents should give her a stern talking to," said Box.

Do you have any information on the child hacker? If so, drop us a vid at our lockbox on the SanSan Grid, accessible through all good encrypts.

[thenetrunnerproject]

A meta is a funny thing, isn't it? Snitch comes out, and it's great! Because it lets you face-check like crazy in the early game, save in the knowledge that you'll never hit nasty ice without the kit to break it.

And then gradually the meta shifts. Because sometimes, you want to face-check that nasty ice. In fact, you almost always do. Because if you're running blind, you're likely trying to force the corp to pay, rather than just wasting a click on a bounce. And snitch doesn't do anything like that.

On top of that, the birth of rush strategies on the corp's end signifies the coming death of big rig running. You need to get your rig up ASAP, and you need to run before then. Realisticially, that means "get your sentry breaker out, then run blind", because everything truly nasty can be broken with a sentry breaker.

And Snitch falls out of favour.

Until Au Revoir…

[thenetrunnerproject]

I'm gonna run three copies of Muresh instead of Plascrete Carapace in the next criminal deck I build. I will. I can do this.

The current meta almost makes it make sense! It's a lifesaver against NEARPAD NBN, letting you ignore the first DRT at your leasure. It negates an entire identity, Argus, almost singlehandedly. And if you have three on the table, then a double scorch is surviveable – with a full hand.

Except… oh no. The benefits don't stack, because "prevent the first" isn't the same as "prevent one". Which means… I've actually been open to a scorch all the time?

What could possibly go w+++++++ERROR USER DISCONNECT

[thenetrunnerproject]

Emergency Shutdown.

Great card. Really useful. Love it.

Have an issue with the art.

Because of all the games of netrunner

played in all the countries of the world

in all the languages that it's translated into

in the real world, on octgn, on jinteki,

I do not think anyone has ever used Emergency Shutdown on Data Hound

[thenetrunnerproject]

"My enhancements are guaranteed for life, and well worth the risk."

That's what he tells them. "Risk". It doesn't take a hypersmart Runner to look up the histories of Joshua's former customers, and find that "risk" has nothing to do with it.

You use his enhancements, they will find you. They find you, they will try and kill you.

Why do you think he guarantees them for "life"? Because the average lifespan of an unaware runner with Joshua's implants is considerably less than the duration of the corp-standard 90-day warranty. It's cheaper this way. No sad relatives trying to get a refund.

You get what I'm saying.

He sells them out.

All of Joshua's enhancements – every one he's sold since I've been monitoring him – contains a CyberSolutions tracker chip. You power up the enhancment, you power up the chip. You power up the chip, your location gets sold to the highest bidder. And that's most likely whichever corp you're running on right this second.

How do you think he keeps the price down?

I don't think he was always like this. My guess is he was forced to turn narc, that some corp sec tracked him down and put the squeeze on him. "We know what you've been selling, and we know who you've been selling to. You work for us now, or your block gets scheduled for urban renewal." That sort of thing. I've seen it happen before.

By all accounts Joshua was a real free spirit, so I can't imagine he's taking well to corp control. But he's controlled. There's no doubt about it.

And yet.

The runners keep coming.

Not just the dumb ones, too. I've seen the top tier buy their stuff from him. Andie, Kate. Even Noise. Ji never-seen-a-narc-he'd-piss-on-in-a-fire Reilly!

I think I've worked out why. I think I've worked out how Joshua's bucking the system, how he's chomping at the bit, how he's turning Adam.

He's being the best he can be.

Joshua's enhancements are so good that runners are going into his shop knowing that they'll be tagged the minute they turn them on, and they don't care.

I've seen Noise plug in a data leak reversal, put on a plascrete carapace, turn on his enhancements and just dare Jinteki not to act.

In the end, that's all we can do.

Be the best.

If you can't do that, go get a job. The corps need you.

[thenetrunnerproject]

It's Medium but for HQ!

Except it costs one influence less.

Can we interrogate that? It tells us a little about the relative assumed power levels of R&D multi-access versus HQ multi-access, after all. And what it does tell us fits with what we can work out from scratch.

With a small number of virus tokens on, the two cards really are largely interchangeable from a deckbuilding point of view. You have to play differently (HQ multi-access is a far more interactive style of play, requiring keen observation to work out when the corp is agenda flooded and when it's likley to be holding back a trap, while R&D multi-access is almost entirely a numbers game), but each is a viable strategy for putting pressure on centrals.

But the difference between the two is what happens with a large number of tokens. A Medium big-dig is a viable game-winning strategy in and of itself: if you can get enough tokens on a Medium, quickly enough, and then access R&D, you can access enough cards to win.

The equivalent can never happen with Nerve Agent. (Unless you're playing against Cerebral Imaging). Ultimately, it's always possible for a corp to prevent you scoring agendas from their hand, because they always have the chance to play after they draw – at least until Laramy Fisk drops. Of course, sometimes they'll just be forcing you to steal it once it's installed, but that's what "central pressure" is supposed to do.

And so Medium fulfils two roles in a deck – central pressure and potential victory plan – while Nerve Agent only fulfils one. Which means it's slightly less valuable in deckbuilding terms, and so costs one less influence to splash into other decks.

QED

[thenetrunnerproject]

No-one plays freelancer, because by and large, the ability to trash resources quickly and cheaply in a deck focused around tagging is not worth it.

There are two situations you'll be able to play Freelancer. The first is if you've managed to fight the runner hard enough to land a precious tag on them that you know they'll clear immediately.

If that's the case, it's inconceivable that the best use of one of your three clicks – and 49 card slots – will be to trash two resources. If you're playing that sort of game, the tag will almost certainly be better placed going for a scorch kill. If you can't kill with scorched earth, then one of the b-tier tag punishment cards might come into play – but even then, there are better ones that Freelancer.

If you're playing a game where the runner has, reluctantly, decided to float their tags (or even a game where the runner is joyfully floating their tags), then they probably won't have any installed resources to trash anyway.

And then, the real reason why Freelancer is a c-tier card: it only lets you do something that you can already do without it. Viewed this way, Freelancer isn't a tag punishment card at all. It's an economy card, with an incredibly specific useage situation.

It may as well read: If the runner has two or more resources installed, and you want to trash at least two of them, and the runner is tagged, then gain a click and four credits.

Would you run that card? No. No you wouldn't.

(That said: the reasons why Freelancer isn't precisely an economy card are worth drawing out. If you wouldn't have the click and four credits required to trash the resources, for instance, then it can be useful for enabling you two do something you wouldn't otherwise be able to. So if you're a corp which wants to run on empty while still enabling tag punishment, that's worth it).

[thenetrunnerproject]

Help me out:

Is the effect of this card that the executives "retreat" off to their pool, thus being shuffled inside the deck?

Or is it that the executive retreat is a time and place where they mentally refresh themselves, represented by a whole new set of possiblities in your hand?

I prefer the less cyncial approach, because my attitude to Netrunner is always that each side thinks they're the good guys. But at the same time… there doesn't seem to be that much work getting done in the image, does there?

[thenetrunnerproject]

There's two ways of looking at this card.

One is that the ability to rez ice on demand is hugely powerful.

It protects you from a siphon or vamp intented to keep you too poor to rez the ice. It lets you rez NEXT ice as it's placed, thus boosting the strength of every other piece of NEXT ice on the board. It lets you rez illicit ice and take the bad pub on your turn, potentially giving you time to clear the bad pub before the runner can exploit it. It even lets you rez the god-awful Weyland Ice that can only be advanced when rezzed, and potentially make a bad thing good (you will not be able to make a bad thing good).

The problem with all of this is that only the first of those abilities is actually any good, and then only against a small subset of decks.

The other way to look at this card is that lowering the rez cost of ice by three is worth losing the surprise factor of the ice. That's a very Weyland approach – walls and walls and walls again – but it's conceivalbly true.

What's more questionable is whether a 4-cost upgrade is worth it for that. You have to install and rez at least two pieces of ice after Amazon Industrial Zone in order for it to pay off, and even then it only pays off as a two-credit click; you need three to really turn a profit. But that either means building a mega glacier, or having your AIZ in your opening hand. And… no.

[thenetrunnerproject]

So here's a thing:

Have you ever heard of dual use goods? They're things which have both a civilian and military use. For instance, the ability to build extremely high-powered lasers is very important for… I don't know, Physics? This was a bad example. But it's also a potentially deadly weapon. You know, if you point it has someone and hit "incinerate".

As a result, many countries have export controls on dual use goods. If you make these things, you can still export them, but you need to get a license, and you have to be careful not to ship them to the baddies.

(Aside: just to prove that cyberpunk really is just 2015 with more neon, software is increasingly classed as a dual use good in the real world. Spyware exports, for instance, now need a license, to prevent countries from spying on their citizens.)

((You know, the bad countries. Not the good countries. They can spy on their citizens all they want.))

So: Metaphor. There are dual-use cards in Netrunner.

For instance, Qianju PT lets you lose a click at the start of your turn to avoid the first tag you take that turn. It's… not great. But it works fairly nicely if you're planning to Siphon someone in a bit, saving you two credits. Of course, it costs two credits and a click to install, so… yeah, not great.

Qianju PT can be made much nastier with Adjusted Chronotype, letting you keep that click and still avoid the first tag each turn. Suddenly you're a tag avoidance machine. Sort of. Look, bad example, but that's not the point of this.

The point is a nice little play you can try with Power Grid Overload.

Unlike most traces (at this point in the game), Power Grid Overload isn't binary. The amount you beat the runner's link strength by is the value of the hardware you can trash.

Why's that important? Because it means you have the opportunity to make a little information play. Boost the trace by enough that the runner can, if they want, prevent you trashing anything, at the expense of losing all their money. And then watch what they do.

Say they shrug, and let you trash the Qianju. That tells you they're probably not planning on using it much: that it was installed for a mostly civilian use, and that it's just not worth the cash to keep on the table. But if they throw money at the problem in a desperate attempt to keep their bike alive… well, then you know they're planning something combolicious.

But…

None of that matters, really. Because let's be honest, if you're playing Power Grid Overload, it's so you can trash someone's Plascrete Carapace before double scorching them to death.

Netrunner

[thenetrunnerproject]

The Underground Expressway

…towards the end of the 21st century. In 2085, Jack Weyland complained about how one of his clones was spirited away by a "runner with no apparent goal other than the destruciton of the economic system which has made this hemisphere great." The network grew, and around 2131 it was dubbed the "Underground Expressway" (a name rarely used by Jinteki corporation employees and affiliates eager to downplay the similarities between clone labour and slavery).

Nonetheless, the network even used terms previously used by the system built around guiding free slaves to the north: the apartments and eateries where clones would rest and recuperate were called "stations" and "depots" and were run by "stationmasters," and the "conductor" was responsible for moving them from one station to the next.

For the clone, running away to ChiLo was anything but easy. The first step was to escape from the manager, whether they were based in a Jinteki facility or hired out to one of the many small or medium enterprises built on clone labour. For many clones, this meant relying on their own resources.

Money was also needed to alter the appearance of the runaways – with so few base models available, anyone looking too similar to a Tenma or Nisei line clone was bound to attract suspicious eyes. Until proper documentation was obtained, it was best for newly freed clones to radically alter their appearance, to avoid attention.

Vigilance committees were created by Jinteki in some of the larger towns and cities of ChiLo, designed to…

[thenetrunnerproject]

RUN CHAOS THEORY

THEY’VE FOUND YOU

I wonder how she explained this to her parents?

The canonical use of Big Brother seems to be to make the tag from scoring Breaking News stick around. After all, if you really care about number of tags, you’d be running Midseasons. And if you land a Midseasons, two more tags won’t do Al that much.

Maybe that’s why I don’t see Big Brother around much.

[thenetrunnerproject]

Positional ice breaks my heart.

I want to love it. How can you not! It lets you make fun ice even more fun (yeah, that Janus now ends the run if you click through it! Yeah, you can't spend a credit on that pop-up window!). It lets you stare the runner down as they try to calculate whether they have to break it, as they work out what effects it will have further down the line, when they don't even know what they're about to hit.

But.

There's the obvious problem: you have to get it into position. That means, in the early game, it's useless. A dead draw, a wasted hand slot. You've got to install another piece of ice first. And realistically that other piece of ice is going to be part of a subset of your full ice suite, narrowing your options further.

And then you have to make sure the ice stays in position. In a meta with Leila, that's a huge ask; once that chum is rezzed, you can be sure that the card behind it is going to be bounced ASAP. And Parasite still exists, to boot.

But it gets worse. Most positional ice is cheap. That's the trade-off, after all: the ice does nothing on its own, but you save money. Of course, by the late game, that's not the most pressing problem. When you want to save cash, in the early game, you can't put the ice in position; and when you can finally install it, you have the cash to just rez a normal piece of ice.

Sensei has these problems and more. To really be efficient, you want to make the most of the fact that it is one of only pieces of ice that affect the whole server behind it, not just the next piece. So you want to wait even longer before putting it down... Making the three-credit rez cost even less of a plus side.

And yet.

Nothing feels so good as watching a runner's maths fall apart, becuase they know you can't afford to rez anything nasty, because they know everything except that last piece of ice, because they can afford to walk through almost anything you could rez that they can't break… and then you flip this up.

Still. When does that happen?

I want to love you, sensei. But you're flaky.

[thenetrunnerproject]

Trick of Light was born after a Jinteki asset designer went up to the operations department and complained that no-one ever springs her traps.

"We spend all that money advancing Project Junebug, and then it just sits there in a remote server, being ignored. Can't we do something about that," she complained to… let's call him Bob.

And Bob thought, and went away, and did whatever the people in Jinteki's operations department do, and came back with what the asset designer (let's call her Alice) had asked for.

"Here you go," said Bob. "This will let you re-use all that investment on a different project. That way, nothing is wasted!"

And Alice was happy, and Alice went away, and used Trick of Light whenever a trap failed to be sprung.

Alice is an idiot.

What Bob built is undoubtedly powerful. It can be used to complete agendas before any runner can even hope to access them; two trick of lights can finish a Nisei Mk II in the same period it's installed in a server. That's brilliant.

But unsprung traps are more brilliant still. Because next to an unsprung trap can be an unscored agenda.

In Personal Evolution, a Clone Retirement with two advancement tokens on it is a clickless, free Neural EMP. A Philotic Entanglement with two on it is one that can be activated when it hurts the runner most, potentially causing fatal damage if timed correctly. Alice should have thought about this.

(Jinteki corporation is not responsible for any damage, fatal or otherwise, inflicted on a runner due to their possession of stolen goods at the moment of philotic activation, and will continue to pursue all available legal avenues against any runner discoevered to have attacked a Jinteki server, regardless of their health or lack of)

What's more, once the corp pulls the trick a couple of times, the runner will realise they have to start checking traps even if they've been down for multiple turns. And the more times a runner checks traps, the more times a runner hits traps. And the more times a runner hits traps, the fewer runners there are attacking Jinteki's servers.

Bob's invention is good. But don't let it blind you to the power of leaving Alice's assets in play, or you won't make it to middle management. Just like Alice.