24.05 Meta Snapshot: The Runner

What to expect from Runners 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.

Let’s start with the Runner.

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Know your enemy: The Runner

Runner is extremely good at the moment, both due to the general slow-down of the Corp economic base—which allows for control and combo runner builds without particularly pronounced weaknesses—and specific issues with defending against high impact run events and Deep Dive.

These Runners all exert different very strong deckbuilding pressures on the overall shape of your Corp deck, so you’re not going to be able to tune your Corp to be optimal against all of them. Get a read on what you’re struggling the most against so that you can either make some deck changes or pay more attention to practice in that matchup.

My personal take is that Seb is the best runner by a mile—but Seb can also be quite difficult to pilot and I know the deck extremely well, so I’m gambling on nobody else being able to make him live up to his full power and resorting to good old familiar Criminal and Shaper.

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Siphon Seb

Punch holes in ICE and remove the Corp’s ability to win the game.

Key Cards

• Transfer of Wealth

• Arruaceiras Crew

• Tsakhia “Bankhar” Gantulga

• Privileged Access

• Ashen Epilogue

• Audrey v2

• Gourmand

How do I beat it?

Above all else, ICE HQ on turn 1 so that you don’t get immediately Transferred and put into a hole that you can’t escape from. Seb does not care about points scored or stolen early, he cares about putting you in a position where you cannot win the game. In general, don’t bother with scoring unless it’s actively helping your board position. Instead, focus your effort on putting Seb into a position where he cannot win the game by trashing key resources, icing Archives to make Privileged Access harder to land, and building up to a total lockout from centrals—ICE at least two thick! Then—on about turn 15—start pushing agendas in the remote.

Keep in mind how many Crew and Privileged Access have been used, and be aware that Ashen Epilogue will be coming at the end of the stack. Because Seb has a defined number of ICE that he can trash in any one game, and a limited amount of money that he can steal with Transfer of Wealth, a high-value slow econ asset like Regolith can fund taxing these limited resources out. This can be hit or miss because sometimes Seb will just happen to have Crew and Charm ready to contest, but he’s generally not great at interacting in the early game so you can often get away with it.

Realistically, tag punishment is only going to win you the game against good Seb players if those players massively overextend themselves—so feel free to spend those tag punishment cards for tempo if it helps to build a lockout state. If your deck does not have sufficient ICE to build this lockout, I am sorry to say your only avenue to winning is a combo kill or attempting to rush to 7 points, and Seb is really good against both of those strategies.

Tech

If you are playing in the factions that possess run event tech—Transport Monopoly in Weyland, Proprionegation in Jinteki—strongly consider playing those tech cards. Kessleroid is good tech if you’re Ob and can search it out early. Flyswatter is nice everywhere else to deal with Audrey. Jinteki has Semak-Samun which is really annoying to break and demands to be Crewed while being awkward to reduce to 0 strength.

From-zero economy options like Predictive Planogram—amazing when Seb floats tags, which is most of the time—are extremely valuable in this matchup for bouncing back from ToW without spending a turn clicking for credits. It also makes “ducking” ToW—by rezzing cards to go below 3 credits—more viable as an option.

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Dive Sable

Ignore ICE with one-off tricks and Deep Dive on a six-click turn for 5-7 points.

Key Cards

• 3x Deep Dive

• S-Dobrado

• Swift

• Boomerang

• Malandragem

How do I beat it?

Play cheap ICE that you’re able to rez on centrals while also quickly pushing agendas in the remote. It’s noteworthy that Inside Job has rotated—the most accessible bypass tools now only affect centrals, so your early econ assets and jammed tempo-positive agendas only have to worry about Boomerang and Malandragem. Offworlds, Seamless, and dirt-cheap gearchecks are your best friends. ICE like Logjam that can withstand Boomerang comes at a premium for the remote. At the end of the day, your primary goal is to “win first”. Sable will be able to stack enough bypass and pseudo-breaking tools to force a dive through essentially no matter what, and it’s valuable to try and assess before every click you spend if it’s going to help delay her dive turn or push you forward towards your win-con.

Otherwise, flatline her. She can’t afford any Steelskins or Stoneships due to spending 15 influence on Deep Dive so her only option for defending against flatline threats is The Class Act. Her draw sucks—the best she’s got to refill her hand is Lie Low and The Class Act—and she doesn’t have the money to get away with playing TCA repeatedly like reg Criminal can. Chip damage is good, forcing her to slowly draw back up and having a decent shot at trashing the Dive out of hand. Keep in mind, though, that with 3 copies this will only delay the Dive, not prevent it.

Tech

Assets make Sable sad. Anemone and Angelique Garza Correa make her sad. Measured Response is, unfortunately, unreliable unless you’re the person pushing to 4 points—it’s entirely realistic for a Dive Sable to go from 2 points to 7 in a single turn, and she can just avoid running until the dive turn unless you’re going incredibly fast.

Other considerations worth making are re: agenda suites. If you can afford to not run 3 pointers—like certain Nebula lists—that will lower the ceiling on how many agenda points a single Deep Dive can find. Similar to Seb, Transport Monopoly and Proprionegation can be valuable force multipliers if you can stack enough ICE on R&D. Along these lines, rush decks that run Manegarm or Anoetic Void might consider installing those on R&D, once the remote is secure enough. It’s soft to Pinhole, but those sorts of decks will be running lots of juicy Pinhole targets anyway so there’s a chance it buys you a turn or two. Note that I’m saying to protect R&D because Maintenance Access will make a well-defended HQ only as well-defended as Archives is, for the dive turn. I haven’t tested LEO into Dive Sable so I can’t say this for certain, but the ID ability is probably useful for this too.

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Reg Crim

Money, breakers, and multi-access.

Key Cards

• Clean Getaway

• Cezve

• The Twinning

• Dr Nuka Vrolyck

• Mystic Maemi

• Paladin Poemu

How do I beat it?

Go fast and win before they have their rig up. The drip economy here is everything that Dive Sable didn’t have, so you have to take advantage of the fact that their win condition is a few turns slower. Once they have breakers installed, and once The Twinning is getting charged every turn from their drip economy pieces, it’s going to be very hard for you to win. They have very effective remote pressure in the mid-late game, while also being able to run centrals repeatedly with Cezve money, but they have to find and install a lot of cards to get there.

Assembling a kill will be more difficult than against Dive Sable. A lot of reg Criminal are playing 3 Steelskins or Stoneships, and assets can be hard to stick to the board—especially if it’s a Pennyshaver build—but, if you can develop threats that tax Criminal on both money and card draw at the same time then a flatline win can be achievable. Keep in mind how much burst economy is in the Criminal deck—with judicious use of Oppo/MR you might be able to wear them out. Measured Response, in particular, is a lot more viable to land into reg Criminal than Dive Sable, because they have less ability to go from 2 to 7 points in one turn.

Tech

You still need to worry about Boomerang, but most of the other bypass pieces are gone. Central ICE instead needs to be evaluated against how taxing it is vs 1x Cezve and the reg breakers—Curupira, Revolver/Carmen, Shibboleth/Unity. This is a difficult paradigm to be in—while other runner decks struggle into lots of cheap ICE that just ETRs, but against this runner deck you want to have more expensive taxing ice that ideally punishes early facechecks.

Scapenet deserves a shoutout as a tech card for Twinning that will either buy you several turns of lessened pressure or outright win you the game if you’ve sniped their last one. Few other tech cards exist.

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Control Magdalene

Hard to kill. Money, breakers, and Deep Dive.

Key Cards

• 3x Fermenter

• Self-Modifying Code

• Stoneship Chart Room

• LilyPAD

• Deep Dive

How do I beat it?

Just win the game fast. A flatline is incredibly hard to land because of the LilyPAD interaction with Mags—she ends up at 6 in hand on the Corp turn if the Mags install triggers LilyPAD—and Stoneship Chart Room. You’re going to either need to compress as many scores as possible in a small quantity of turns—DeeR says to score out by turn 8 or 9—or pull together something that will do at least 9 damage in a single turn.

Shaper is good at dealing with assets thanks to Azimat, and this Mags has a lot of money over the whole run of the game thanks to Fermenter, but there’s a liquidity problem in the first few turns that it’s possible to take advantage of. If you can land a small Oppo early, or place several must-trash assets on the board at once to tax out real as well as Azimat credits, you might be able to get Mags into the “scrappy” territory where she’s low enough on credits that she has to either pop Fermenter too early or she has to leave some remotes uncontested.

I don’t really know what you do as a reg scoring deck other than attempt to outpace the slightly slower econ. Gearchecking is substantially less relevant than vs Criminal—thanks to SMC and cheap limited-use breakers Propeller and Revolver—but it’s still possible to make it so that Mags cannot afford to run the remote every turn. This can create an opening, especially if you’re layering different ICE subtypes to force multiple SMC pops/breaker installs.

Tech

Mavirus and Flyswatter are very nice to have to deal with Fermenter econ and can buy you a turn or two.

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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.

Regular Hoshiko

It’s just money and breakers. Charging the Twinning using in-faction companions, and usually importing Clean Getaway. They might have Boomerangs, they might import some Stoneships to handle kill decks. It’s less good at everything than reg criminal is, but it’s nice to be able to play Bankhar.

Ryō

This is a deck that does not function without Bankhar. Play your ICE 2 thick after turn 1 if you’re icing a server, and be mindful of putting your ETRs on the innermost and your softer subroutines on the outer layer, and you’ll probably be fine. The ID ability is messed up and incredibly disruptive, but if it isn’t firing then the runner is losing a lot of value by not playing Seb or Hosh. It can’t afford to play any ICE destruction and doesn’t have the econ to support the money-and-breakers plan effectively.

Loup

Extremely specific hate for assets and sometimes combo if they’re running Carnivore. Similarly dependent on Bankhar as Ryō. Struggles into any Corp with enough ICE to afford letting Botulused ICE go. Demolisher often comes out for this—it’s not good in aggregate against a broad matchup spread, but it certainly helps you win AU Co. games. Not as good at neutralising wincons as Seb because it can’t afford to run ICE destruction.

Hermes Tāo

Conduit digs + Hermes bounces + Tāo’s ability = a ton of accesses and enough disruption to ensure those accesses keep happening. Be mindful of which servers you ICE—you might find that your rezzed R&D ice gets swapped to Archives and the unrezzed ICE replacing it gets bounced away. Unfortunately, Eru means that you will eventually have to ICE Archives at some point. Practice the matchup and learn the balance between how much R&D defense is necessary and how much you just have to rush points out of the remote.

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Hopefully this gives you some idea for what to play as Runner, and, most importantly, helps you to prepare for playing your Corp 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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Stay tuned for part two, coming next week