24.05 Meta Snapshot: The Corp
What to expect from Corps at your next Megacity Championship
Elevation dropped just over a month and a half ago—long enough for the dust to begin to settle and for archetypes to form themselves into some semblance of a tier list. If you haven’t been playing netrunner—or crawling NRDB—as much as I have, I am hopefully going to be breaking down the big threats that you have to watch out for going into a Megacity Championship, and your priorities in those matchups.
Last week I wrote about the Runner, this week I’m going to turn my attention to playing against the Corp.
Know your enemy: The Corp
The most competitive Corp decks are each asking the same question of the Runner in a different way—can you contest early without compromising your mid-to-late-game?
Generally speaking, the Corp doesn’t threaten must-trash turn-1 assets the way that it used to, but Cohort Guidance Program out of AU Co. is very close. To keep on top of the board—as well as tools to interact with gearcheck ice—the Runner needs early access to both fast-burst econ—e.g. Gamble—and slow-burn econ—e.g. Fermenter.
Similarly, against Seamless Launch Nuvem—the best “honest” scoring deck—you’ll need to be able to challenge an early never-advance remote push and you’ll need your slow-burn economy to survive Measured Response come the mid-game.
Nebula has gotten a fair bit worse as everyone’s figured out how it plays, but the hot new thing is False Lead Kill Nebula. Again, you want early interaction to delay False Lead scores and deny econ, but will need long-term gas in order to handle Oppo.
Oppo-EotL AU Co.
Damned if you run, damned if you don’t
Key Cards
See How they Run
End of the Line
Oppo Research
Mindscaping
Reaper Function
How do I beat it?
Trash the Cohort Guidance Program as a number 1 priority, and make sure that you won’t totally die to Oppo Research afterwards. Use some burst econ and put Fermenters down so that you’ve got enough money to long-term manage the board. If you’re teched for assets—Solidarity Badge or Azimat—you might be able to trash the entire board, but you’re probably going to need to prioritise trashing key pieces only. This plan is complicated by how certain numbers of facedown cards on the board can, and often do, represent kill combos, but broadly speaking you’ll want to trash known cards that provide an economic advantage and AU Co. counters before checking unknowns. AU Co. can’t kill you below certain credit thresholds, or without a certain number of facedowns.
Priorities
Priority (rezzed) assets
Cohort
Bladderwort (that can credibly fire damage)
Phat
Unrezzed servers (if the Corp has enough credits to threaten See How They Run into End of the Line next turn)
(rezzed) Bladderwort (that’s unlikely to fire)
Unrezzed servers
Moon Pool (if there’s facedowns in Archives or multiple unknown unrezzed cards)
Reaper Function
Moon Pool
Phat
Be aware that players of this deck are liable to try and trick you into stealing a Fuji—or stealing up to 3 points in general—if they have an excess of credits, in order to land a full Oppo on you. This is bad news if it happens—don’t let them get rich!
The agendas will concentrate in Archives. Be very careful when attempting to force Spin Doctors by running Archives. It’s useful mostly to shut off the threat of Cohort and Moon Pool advancements, but it’s entirely possible for the Corp to leave just enough agendas in there to set up for a kill next turn. Generally, just run the Spin itself, and leave directly running Archives for either bold early plays or desparate late plays. If you’re going to do this, make sure you have a click spare in case Moon Pool shuffles them back and places counters on a tabled agenda.
Tech
Stoneship and No Free Lunch are pretty great tech cards. NFL protects you from See How They Run into End of the Line. Steelskin is close to mandatory this meta.
“Reg”enesis AU Co.
Scoring a 4/3 is pretty great.
Key Cards
Regenesis
Hostile Architecture
The Holo Man
Hansei Review
Hybrid Release
How do I beat it?
This is a scoring deck.
Trash the Cohort as a number 1 priority. Take damage from Semak-Samun or Hostile Architecture if you have to. This build is a lot worse at killing runners without having Reaper Functions and the threat of Oppo Research into EotL, so you can play a lot more aggressively—especially with checking Archives to shut off Regenesis plays. You can also worry way less about hitting other centrals.
The primary kill threat is only active if Phat is left rezzed on the field. The corp can easily cash-in the counters with Hybrid Release, and even bring a face-down from Archives onto the field at the same time. Otherwise, it’s your usual Sting! lines.
Hostile Architecture is a spooky card, but it’s extremely expensive for what its effect actually does, and it doesn’t combine well with Reaper Function—which is also far too expensive. Remember that Hostile is probably on the field whenever you’re checking remotes, and remember that it’s only once per turn! Running on remotes early in the turn when there’s unrezzed cards is usually a good way to mitigate this card’s effects. I recommend against trashing an unrezzed Hostile, unless you are absolutely swimming in money.
Keep in mind that Moon Pool activated at the very end of the Runner turn can dump the appropriate agenda into Archives for a Regenesis score—the 6 credits for this play is a big threshold, though. Similarly, keep in mind that The Holo Man can be used for scoring tabled Fujis if the runner has, or will have, more than 9 credits on their turn.
The agendas will pile up in Archives even faster than in the Oppo version, and there’s no particular deterrence against checking—unless Phat is rezzed—so running Archives early and often can be profitable for taxing Spin Doctors and making Moon Pools less good.
Tech
Kill tech is less relevant because this deck doesn’t aim to kill, but Steelskin is still nice to have because you will be taking damage, and Stoneship can smooth out some tough turns.
Seamless Nuvem
Two credits per turn is a lot of credits.
Key Cards
Seamless Launch
The Basalt Spire
Off the Books
Measured Response
How do I beat it?
Learn to recognise when the corp is pushing to score an early Basalt or over-advanced Off the Books, and do everything you can to crack the remote in that window. If you’re also able to deny them early Anthill value then that can be very useful, but less realistic.
You can get away with facechecking ice quite freely everywhere other than HQ—because of Winchester—but Maskirovka means the econ denial effect of this can be pretty minimal, so YMMV.
Once you’ve exerted some early pressure, you need to be setting up enough boardstate to either fully lock the remote before the final push, or to deliver a multiaccess win-con on centrals—e.g. Deep Dive—while also staying safe to Measured Response. The Measured Response threat is extra dangerous if the Corp has a Basalt scored. All of the best Runners right now have a lot of these answers, but, as far as I can tell, none of them have the entire picture—early interaction plus longterm econ/remote lock/centrals wincon/surviving MR—that would make the matchup simple. Nuvem’s just really fast.
Variants
Some builds use Eminent Domain and Biawak, or use Plutus as a longer-term econ source that hides in the remote for a while. I don’t think these are as good, because every good runner right now has efficient answers to Biawak—Revolver, various bypass tools, Audrey, Crew + Charm—and demands that the Corp wins the game extremely fast.
Builds running Oppo, Public Trail and EotL are also pretty good, so if you see yellow influence keep in mind that there’s that threat, but on the other hand there is far less of a Seamless threat so you’re under much less of a clock.
Murder on the Dancefloor
False Lead is a really messed up card.
Key Cards
False Lead
Oppo Research
Touch-ups
1-3x End of the Line
How do I beat it?
Facecheck extremely aggressively early to deny econ, and to deny early False Lead scores. They might Tsarevna you, or drain you of 3 credits with Mestnichestvo, but this is ultimately fine. They will probably score a False Lead at some point! You just don’t want them to get it basically for free right at the start of the game.
Once this initial spree has happened, and ideally you’ve had some burst econ to make sure that you’re not also totally broke, you need to be very conscious of a large number of things, including:
the current Threat level
and where the Threat level will be if you steal an agenda
how many credits the Corp has
Big Oppo > False Lead > Touchups EotL costs 12 credits, with two clicks spare for econ on the Oppo turn
how many clicks you have left to clear tags from ICE
how many Events you have in hand
Touch-ups can be played calling other things, but realistically they’re always going to be calling Event ...
Ultimately, it probably just comes down to stealing a ton of points in one turn so they can’t kill you afterwards. If you’re a Deep Dive deck, this is easily achieved, although the Corp will probably burn a False Lead to stop the Dive. Reg Crim will have a field day—you’re great at facechecking and at building up large quantities of multiaccess with The Twinning. Seb has kind of a rough time, given the deck can kill from a single tag! But the lower event density means it’s certainly viable to just play around Touch-ups, and, like with other Nebula decks, trashing ice and trashing operations out of hand is extremely useful.
I’m not really 100% that this deck is “good”, but it’s certainly scary, and you need to know what’s going on in order to stand a chance. In this meta, that’s a tier 1 deck right there!
Prav
There’s a popular build of Pravdivost that’s doing a similar thing but usually isn’t running False Lead, but is running Orbitals and Tomorrow’s Headline to tag the Runner on the Corp’s turn and Chekist Scions to try and shellgame out tags. It doesn’t have the economy, or central defense, or inevitability of this list, and heavily telegraphs its kill plays by having to pre-advance agendas on the board. Just play a good Runner, deny econ, check advanced remotes if the corp has the money to kill you, pressure centrals with a good win-con and you should win. Tech like Stoneship or Gourmand / Cuppelation is even stronger here. If you’re forced to float tags, consider fixing your hand so you’ve only got one event in it (and 5 cards) so Touch-ups + EotL will whiff.
Tier 2
I’ll be going through things more briefly here. These decks are worse than the decks described in Tier-1, but they aren’t terrible, and I anticipate that some amount of people will bring them to competitive events.
Reg Nebula
Protects centrals with mid-range ice and fast advances. Weak to ice destruction, aggressive facechecking, and multiaccess. Identify if they’re on Kingmaking + Nanomanagement or some of the various tricks that depend on Nebula being flipped to score 2-pointers, because the Nanomanagement build can score 2-pointers while unflipped for 7 credits while other builds can’t.
LEO Construction
Protects centrals, pushes some Offworlds with Skunkworks, then attempts to close with a 5/3 score backed up by LEO’s ability. Gets some equity into Deep Dive and Seb via the ID ability and the focus on having sufficient central ice. Loses horribly into reg crim because it can’t go fast enough. Their HQ will almost certainly be full of un-pushable 5/3s.
Bladderwort Ob
Worse version of Hostile AU Co. Picks up bounce-back econ with Svytagor Excavator and can do some cute things with Slash and Burn + Phat but only being able to run one copy of Phat and not having Cohort or AU Co. draw is a huge bottleneck.
Aggressively forcing Spin Doctor uses means they can get away with less nonsense. Trash the Bladderworts, trash the Hostiles when they get rezzed, trash the Svyatogor Excavators. Keep Lamplighter in mind when you’re running on ICE. Once you’re at Threat 4 you have to worry about Measured Response but they’re probably going to be too poor to score if you’re managing assets well.
Scoring Ob
It’s viable, I guess? Anthill is egregious in Ob, and it’s a decent home for Humanoid Resources. If you’re exactly Seb it’s annoying to have Kessleroids put in front of you, but if you facecheck aggressively and keep in mind nasty tricks like ZATO that could be going on it will be fine.
Zwicky
There’s no reason to play this over Nuvem. The ability to gain 2c per turn is clearly far better than the card draw, but people are doing it anyway. It’s not totally unplayable—Weyland has good cards—but just play Nuvem. Pressure their money, they won’t have enough to credibly threaten Measured Response or the other kill stuff they’re on—especially if you trash Plutus. This is the usual home for Greenmail + Biawak, but, as I’ve said before, every good runner has efficient answers for Biawak so it doesn’t really matter. Just keep it in mind when running unrezzed ice.
PT Untaian
If you can challenge the remote repeatedly for low cost, particularly with pseudo-breakers like Bankhar and Botulus or ICE destruction, PT struggles immensely because it can’t do anything without a functional remote. Being dragged through advanced Mestnichestvo repeatedly hurts, but often they just don’t draw it.
This deck loses hard to Seb because of Transfer of Wealth—the whole draw of PT-U is that you don’t need to ice HQ much because you’re passing agendas direct from R&D into the remote. If you lock up the remote, and also have powerful run events on HQ, that’s really bad for this corp. Reg-crim probably also does well into this.
Hopefully this gives you some idea for what to play as Corp, and, most importantly, helps you to prepare for playing your Runner games.
If you already know how to reach me I'd be happy to talk further about the article, individual decks or matchups, and the meta as a whole. See you at Megacity Sheffield in a few weeks!
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