Editor’s note: This text has was originally posted elsewhere for a specifically-Netrunner audience. It has been lightly edited and re-presented here for an audience that is presumed not to have the good fortune or good sense to already be a Netrunner enthusiast. It should still hopefully be of interest to said audience, inasmuch as anything as I say is of interest to any audience. If you are interested in a general introduction to the game, please consider perusing this recent Lotus Eater post.
OLD FRIENDS AND OLD DOUBTS
I booked my flight to the 2024 Netrunner World Championship about 9 days before the event itself. I wasn’t so sure that I was going to go. Despite vowing in 2022 that I would never miss a North American Worlds so long as they were being held, I couldn’t quite bring myself to actually pull the trigger. It was being held in the most expensive city in the continent in a country that I do not especially like and the idea of spending so much time and money and effort on a children’s card game1.. it started to seem a bit silly to me. It wouldn’t have been feasible to go at all had a friend in San Francisco not offered to host me. Even that wasn’t really enough—she ended up insisting that I come and that I stay for a week to hang out and work and play DDR and so on. Anyway, between her encouragement and the steadily-growing premonitory sense of fomo, eventually I bit the bullet.2
My procrastination led to flights that were slightly more expensive than had been planned for and far more inconvenient than was necessary. So it goes. I booted up Lorelei and the Laser Eyes for the first time on the flight from Toronto to Vancouver and played it voraciously for the next 5 hours.3 The game recommends that you play it with a notebook open next to you and it turns out that this is less a suggestion and more an absolute necessity. Having no scrap paper on hand, I found myself scrawling notes on vomit bags to the great (if polite) confusion of my seat-neighbour. I eventually arrived in Vancouver for a 6-hour layover—my just desserts for having procrastinated booking a flight for so long. Naturally, I started jamming games of Netrunner on j-net for some last-minute and desperately-needed practice.
I hadn’t really decided what decks I was bringing to the tournament yet—I had barely even decided that I was attending at all—so I was running facefirst into the humble horde of j-net randos to help finalize the decision. I played against a very skilled and very unorthodox player, Diogene, who I knew from Montreal. He reminded me that two of the identities4 that I was considering playing were in fact rotating soon, meaning that Worlds 2024 was my last chance to play them in the standard format. This warning/encouragement embedded itself in my mind like a splinter and ended up being an important determinant in my choice of decks. I also spoke to a girl in the airport who was on an even longer layover than me. She was on the way from Korea to see My Chemical Romance in Las Vegas by herself. She didn’t really influence any of my Netrunner experiences over the weekend but I’ll see if I can get her into it the next time.
After some more j-net grinding and an extremely expensive sandwich, I eventually made it to San Francisco. I stayed up late with the friend who was hosting me, an old friend from grad school who had recently started a postdoc at Stanford. We talked about research and anime and living in the states while I idly put together decks for the next day. The first day of the tournament was the Crown of Servers tournament, a team tournament that is meant to serve as a light-hearted prelude to the main tournament. It’s also the last chance to stress-test your decks before the main event and was going to be my primary source of testing before the main event.
I made it to the hotel where the tournament was taking place an hour before things were scheduled to begin. I found a place that served breakfast burritos, a food that I seldom see anywhere outside of the United States. It was pretty good. The man working there pointed to a wall full of awards and told me their salsa was famous. It tasted Just Fine to me but I don’t know anything about salsa or even about breakfast burritos. I grabbed an iced coffee and headed to the tournament.
As I descended the hotel staircase into the underground hollow where they kept the nerds and undesirables, I was once again overcome by doubt. Why was I here? It is entirely irrational to spend my very limited funds on a trip to an Admittedly-Paradisesque City in God’s Most Foresaken Country so that I can play a children’s card game. I had barely even practiced so I had no real notion that I would do well. It all felt very foolish and very silly and not in the good way. But, thanks to a wealth of professional expertise and personal experience, I can tell you: these doubts are stupid. There is basically nothing more valuable than community and interconnectedness and a sense of belonging. Spending time with passionate like-minded others for the purpose of play with few (if any) ulterior motives… this is what the enlightened few call “The Good Shit.” It is a balm to one’s soul unlike any other. So, naturally, these doubts evaporated within minutes of entering the aforementioned Nerd Hollow.
WATERBOARDING YOUR FRIENDS
Herenow, I will briefly belay my saccharine narrative in favour of some good ol’ fashioned Deck Talk. Those interested in learning more about what and how I decided to play may read on, whereas the expedience-motivated reader may happily skim the paragraphs that follow. The discussion will be targeted towards those who are not familiar with Netrunner; I will focus more on overall strategy and theme than on minute details or specific card choices.
My goal for the Crown of Servers team tournament was to collect enough data to confidently finalize my deck choices for The Big Day. I knew that I would eventually have to simply make an imperfect decision—I really had not practiced much and nor was I especially in touch with the meta5 at that time—but I would be a lot happier if my decks were chosen with certainty, if not with great confidence in how I would perform. As Netrunner is an asymmetrical game—which is to say, you are doing something completely different from your opponent and you are using a completely different pool of cards—you enter tournaments with two decks: a runner deck and a corp deck. You will play both decks throughout the day, swapping back and forth between playing runner and corp. I do not know what it is like to prepare for other (single-deck) card game tournaments, but I know that, in Netrunner at least, this can be agonizing. Ideally, you have at least one deck that you’re certain you’ll be bringing, but I was not even afforded that luxury.
I had been honing one particular corp deck for months and was generally pleased with it. It abuses a niche identity named Nuvem to get extremely rich and make its servers extremely difficult for the runner to breach. When they inevitably over-extended themselves, the deck then either trashes the programs that runners use to access your servers or simply kills them (which is one of the ways a corp can win). This deck was ideal for me for a few reasons. First, it uses a very uncommon identity,6 which means your opponent is unlikely to know what your strategy is. Second, it is oppressive. For better or worse, these are the sorts of decks I favour, and I very seldom perform well in Netrunner tournaments where at least one of my decks is not mean as hell. I often rely on decks where I can control and constrain my opponent, limiting their options and punishing them when they overreach. The more uncertain I can make my opponent, the better I tend to do. However, the oppressive nature of this particular deck is a bit of a double-edged sword as it can sometimes encourage very slow play from my opponent. Uncertain players have a tendency to go into “the tank”, silently contemplating their actions for minutes at a time. Unfortunately though, these games are timed, and without getting into the minutiae of Netrunner’s tournament structure, suffice it to say that games that go to time are not ideal. Though it is acceptable to encourage your opponent to play at a steady pace (i.e., faster), I do not really have the heart to do so—at least, not well enough and often enough to ensure that the game will reach its natural end. Though I was confident that the deck would win the majority of the matchups I encountered at Worlds, I was not confident that my opponents would play swiftly enough to allow me to do so.
As for my runner deck, I was even less certain as to what I should play. Although I am usually filled with inspiration when it comes to deckbuilding, I had yet to create a runner deck that season that felt both competitively-viable and sympatico with my playstyle and personality. I had been tinkering with one particular deck—again, using a relatively-niche identity—that tried to exploit and control the corp’s economy, but it was just never quite fast or consistent enough. My preferred runner faction, Criminals, was by far the weakest of the three factions, and not having them as a viable option had left me feeling a little rudderless. That said, a friend in my local Netrunner community had recently found success playing one particular Criminal deck that seemed to shore up some of the faction’s weaknesses. The deck used the identity 419, a Nigerian scammer named after the section of the Nigerian Criminal Code that deals with fraud. This deck does all of the things that I want my runner decks to do: it pressures my opponent’s economy, it messes with the cards in their hand, and it messes with their cards on the board. I made a baby’s handful of changes to ensure that it could be as disruptive and aggravating as possible and played a few games. It didn’t feel great—Criminals were still woefully underpowered—but it felt familiar and fluent and I am reasonably confident in my capacity as a Criminal player.
My teammates in Crown of Servers graciously allowed me to choose my decks7 in order to best inform these decisions and so I chose to play the afore-discussed decks: Nuvem and 419. I would use these games to inform my final decisions for what to play in the main event. In the interest of brevity, I will summarize my experiences: 419 was fun and punishing, if ill-favoured in the late game due to the underpowered Criminal cardpool. I felt like I was smothering my opponents, which was exactly what I was hoping for. Nuvem was also fun and punishing but highly-favoured in the late game. However, as I feared, the combination of threats the deck presented did (understandably) give my opponents pause, and I found myself losing or tieing games on-time in which I was clearly favoured. I decided that, despite how attached I’d become to Nuvem, the threat of losing games to timeout was too much of a liability. 419, on the other hand, despite feeling like a relatively-weak meta call, was extremely fun to play. Loath to try to figure out a new runner deck the night before the tournament, I figured that I should just go with what I knew; I probably would do better with an underpowered deck that I knew and liked than with an overpowered deck whose lines and rhythm were unfamiliar to me. I had only played a few games with that particular 419 deck, all told, but it relies on a type of play that has long been second nature to me. It’d be fine, probably. Besides, I had to focus on choosing a corp deck.
Discarding the one deck with which I had practiced extensively felt foolish and risky but so did ignoring the experiences that I had had in Crown of Servers. If I stuck with Nuvem even after finding it wanting, I would only be setting myself up for regret. There weren’t really any other compelling candidates though, at least none with which I had practiced. So, as with my choice of runner, I chose a corp deck based on my nature: the Jinteki identity Personal Evolution, or “PE”, as it is usually known. Decks that use this identity are almost always trying to kill their opponents and usually trying to do so using traps.8 I hadn’t been playing this deck or anything like it in the lead-up to Worlds, but I have played them extensively in the past. I am, in fact, a bit infamous for doing so. I wasn’t so sure that this was the wisest decision—I really had barely practiced with PE in recent weeks—but I figured playing something this threatening in the tournament would give me a bit of breathing room to figure out exactly what I was doing. My opponents would either be passive enough to let me figure out my lines or aggressive enough to let me kill them without any especially sophisticated plays.
I jammed a few games with it against friends after the team tournament, pondered it while listening to billy woods’s aethiopes on the train back to my friend’s apartment, pondered it even further when I realized that I had accidentally taken the wrong train and had to double back and spend an extra hour in transit, and then somewhere around 2am landed on a decklist.9 I took a list that someone else had been using, changed a dozen cards without testing, and took comfort in knowing that both of my decks were at least oppressive, if not powerful. My opponents would probably all feel like they were drowning, even if they usually weren’t. This PE deck’s signature move is the use of a card called Mitosis, which presents two cards to your opponent. Are they traps? Are they the agendas necessary to win the game? Are they benign economy cards? Accessing the right card would mean being one step closer to winning. Accessing the wrong card would mean almost certain death, but leaving too many of them on the board allows the corp to assemble a combo that will end up killing the runner anyway. It is a Nightmare. As previously intimated, this is the sort of uncertainty that I love to instill in my opponents. I added in an uncommon card10 that made these threats even more pressing and another card that would enable the sort of ballsy bluffing and mind games on which I had built my reputation. I realized at some point that I had chosen the two identities that Diogene had warned me would be rotating soon after this tournament. In other words, this would be the final ride for both 419 and PE. That felt Right. Saddle up.
Happily, these choices all seemed to work out for me. My corp deck dropped only two (one) games in swiss. The first loss was in Round 1 to an Uber that was stuck in traffic. Did you know that San Francisco streetcleans its financial district on Saturday mornings? I didn’t. I had misunderstood what time I needed to be at the venue but left with plenty of time to arrive (and had been up for hours already). Sadly, the Anti-PE Cabal were successful in their sabotage of my first round. The deck went on to win every other game, however, until a final fateful match against a player by the name of Timmy Wong, who was widely known as the People’s Champion for nearly-winning Worlds twice. Though I had never met him, I knew him to be an incredibly skilled and methodical player. This was my final game of the day and its result would determine whether I made it to Day 2 of the tournament. Timmy, on the other hand, had made it to Day 2 regardless—I had been paired up against one of Netrunner’s legendary players.11 Needless to say, he utterly dismantled me. Despite landing an early significant blow against him—one that would have utterly confounded most other players—Timmy proceeded to surgically remove every card from me that he needed to win, always perfectly avoiding giving me an opportunity to kill him. It was a genuine pleasure to watch him play so scrupulously, so perfectly, and he was incredibly kind and gracious throughout. I was sad that I was not progressing to Day 2 of the tournament but there were far worse ways to go out. Other than my Round 1 loss and another-story-that-will-not-be-relayed-here-as-it-would-be-distasteful-to-recount, my losses were mine own, and the final deciding one had been against one of Netrunner’s folk heroes. I was pleased both with my deck choices and with the way that I’d played. For what else could I want on God’s green Earth?
SUPERSYMMETRY
So it goes. A handful of the players from my local community had made it to Day 2 and so I was happy to spend Sunday cheering them on and playing in other side events. One of those players even made it all the way to the final four… before dropping out of the tournament to participate in an NBA fantasy league draft.12 We watched as a new World Champion was crowned—a fellow Canadian, for the third year in a row—we gathered at a bar to reminisce and say our goodbyes, to soothsay about the future of the game and to make plans to see one another at such-and-such tournament or perhaps at the following World Championships. I felt exhausted but happy, if a little melancholy and a bit dizzy (due to an unrelated chronic vestibular issue of mine). I joked with new friends as if they were old friends and well-wished strangers as if I was signing their yearbook. I wandered home in the pleasant San Francisco nighttime air listening to GOON’s God’s Only Option Now, wondering if I would make it to the following year’s Worlds (held in a to-be-determined European city) and whether the self-driving taxis would stop if I ran out in front of one.
I like to write these little deck write-ups as tournament reports because otherwise I might forget it all. My mind is like a steel trap, except for when it isn’t, and so it is good for me to write these sorts of things down, I think: to remind myself what I played and why; to remind myself what it felt like to be at the tournament and why or how I lost; and, most importantly, to remind myself why it is worth putting so much effort and time and thought and money into this silly little children’s card game. It’s so that I can hang out with all the great people from my meta, cheering their victories and jeering their defeats (and making confused sympathetic sounds when they drop out of the top cut). It’s so that I can meet new players from other countries who have completely novel perspectives on the game and are just as passionate and unorthodox as I am. It’s so that I can invest myself in silly little deck write-ups wherein I accidentally trap myself into using tripartite list parallel structure in the closing paragraph, despite finding it tedious and trite. And maybe, if I remember well enough, I can book my flights more than 9 days in advance.
Footnotes
It should be noted here for the uninitiated that “children’s card game” is just a fun little joke in card game communities. Netrunner is not really approachable for most children and I’ve only ever really seen two non-adults play it. That said, I did once see a guy on Facebook get really mad that people call it a children’s card game.↩︎
My apologies for the mixed firearms metaphors, especially given the geographical context.↩︎
Lotus Eater Game of the Year 2024 List coming soon.↩︎
“Identities” are what define the flavour and playstyle of your deck in Netrunner.↩︎
“Meta” is the shorthand phrase used in multiplayer games to refer to what strategies (or decks or characters or what have you) are currently popular, powerful, weak, etc.↩︎
Of the 203 players that played in the 2024 Netrunner World Championship, a total of 1 player played this particular identity. Could it have been me? Write down your guess on a piece of paper and let it blow away in the wind. It will find its way to me.↩︎
Team tournaments typically feature some sort of unique team-based deckbuilding constraint. This particular tournament had only the lightest constraint: each player on a team had to represent different factions. So, for example, if I played a Criminal runner, my teammates could not.↩︎
Historically, the other popular PE strategy has been to win through fatigue, dealing one’s opponent a “death of a thousand cuts.” Rather than killing the runner outright, you try to slowly burn through their deck, eventually ensuring that if they interact with you at all, they will die.↩︎
A close friend edited this post for me and noted that I should “add an endnote here that points out this sort of last minute thing is unfortunately not uncommon for you.” Let me state plainly that I categorically reject this accusation, both in Netrunner and in all other domains. And, on an unrelated note, please look forward to reading the Lotus Eater 2024 GOTY post on December 31, 2024.↩︎
This was the second Worlds in a row in which I played a card that I had never seen anyone else play. It always felt like a minor victory when my opponent would say “What is that?” and pick up the card to read it.↩︎
To clarify, you are usually paired against an opponent with the same record in the tournament (i.e., number of wins) as you. Occasionally though, you will be paired against someone who has done either better or worse than you. My luck was such that I was paired against an opponent who had a better record than me and was, as far as most were concerned, a World Champion.↩︎
It may surprise you to learn that this particular player is extremely passionate about Netrunner. I even thought that it was the thing he cared most about in the world. Turns out that it’s the second.↩︎