24.09 Meta Review

A look back at the 24.09 meta

With all the big standard format tournaments of 2024 in the rearview mirror, and with a new banlist update being announced, it’s time to take a look back at the meta that was. We analysed the results from 2967 games of netrunner across 13 of the biggest events of the year, and this is what the numbers tell us about 24.09.

It was (still) Corp favoured

Overall Corp win rates for 24.09 were at 52%—both in Swiss and in the Top Cut. That’s only slightly lower than we saw in 24.05, but there is more of a story here.

If we look at how those win rates developed across the season, we see Corp win rates start out strong at 56% at Australian Southern Nationals, and 58% at East Anglian Regionals and NZ Nationals. Given that the 24.09 banlist update only impacted the Runner side of things, it makes sense that we would see an immediate improvement in Corp win rates, which were around 53% at the end of 24.05.

But as the season goes on, we did see those win rates start to decline. At the World Championship Corp win rates dropped four points to 52%, and then at UK Nationals they dropped a further three points to just 49%. A surge in popularity of Lat—the most successful runner ID of 24.09—goes some way to explain this decline, but Lat was similarly popular at both AMTs, where Corp win rates held strong, so it’s not exactly that simple.

While the runner meta was quickly “solved” and homogenised on Lat, the Corp meta stayed varied. It had to. Corp players had to come up with new ways to find wins at every tournament, and win rates rose as new decks emerged and then fell as Runner players found answers. These answers were always a matter of learning the proper play pattern, though, and not in switching around card slots, which means that each Runner adaptation was an incremental power increase, rather than a compromise to a less popular archetype. Learning to beat End of the Line R+ never came at the expense of forgetting how to beat EAzmari. So, while Corp win rates ebbed and flowed, it was mainly on a downwards trajectory.

It was (still) a Shaper meta

Fun fact, there was more Lat (33) in top cuts across all of 24.09 combined than there were Anarch (28), and twice as many as there was Criminal (17). If you wanted to win tournaments in 24.09, then Shaper was where it was at.

Lat and Arissana both held on to the same win rates in 24.09 as they did in 24.05, but Lat exploded in popularity, whereas only the most dedicated frog enthusiasts stuck by the street artist.

Interestingly, Sable performed better in 24.09 than in 24.05. This might be explained by the drop in popularity of RH, but there are other threats (such as AgInfusion) that have kept the symphonic prodigy in check. Ultimately, as I’ve said before, there really has been very little reason to play Sable instead of Swift Lat recently. The play patterns are very similar, but the Shaper cards are just better.

Hoshiko dropped in popularity, and also dropped a percentage point from 24.05 to 46%. By the time the Worlds Championship came around, people had mostly given up on Turbine Hoshiko, but expectations for Crew Hoshiko were high. Ultimately, these expectations didn’t amount to too much—although exactly why is still an open question.

Esâ has gone from being a highly specialised ID with a straightforward game plan—apply central pressure, sabotage, run archives, win—to one of the most technical decks in the format. Modern Esâ list require some intense management of limited breaking solutions, and this has polarised xir results—with some players getting extraordinarily high win rates (75%+) while others lose almost every game.

NBN was (still) unpopular, but (still) successful…

… albeit, significantly more popular than in 24.05, and also significantly less successful.

Players still preferred to play HB over anything else, and mostly that was okay (53% win rate). It was certainly a better proposition than playing Weyland (50% win rate). But the highest performing players were playing NBN (55%). Most of these players—including the World Champion—were playing R+ (53% win rate). Fewer players chose to play Azmari—due to it’s problematic matchup into Lat—and while the Azmari win rate did decline as the season went on it still had the best overall win rate (62%) and the best total cut conversion rate (1.63x) of any Corp ID other than the much less popular NEH *

* we don’t have enough data points to reliably report on NEH, but it seemed to perform incredibly well for those few people that played it

AgInfusion (57%) performed well, as was largely expected at the end of 24.05, but the breakout hit of 24.09 has been Asa (57%)—primarily fuelled by the Jukebox Asa build that was unveiled by the Logic Bomb testing team at their World Championship tournament debut, and which was the only deck that could boast a favourable matchup against Lat (54%).

Ob, PE were still on the radar this meta, and it’s interesting to note that both IDs trended upwards as the season progressed, but both are also down a percentage point compared to where they were in the previous meta. That’s nothing compared to PD, though, which has suffered a terrific fall from grace—dropping five whole percentage points to 51%.

The best Corps were trying to tax your clicks

The most severe example of this is Jukebox Asa—which uses everything from Ikawah, and Luminal, to MCA Austerity Policy, to Pulse and Active Policing, to create a click advantage. You could make an argument that the most successful versions of R+ also attack the runner in a similar way by forcing them to spend clicks to clear tags. You could even make the argument that AgInfusion is doing something similar by forcing the runner to make repeat runs against the scoring remote, but given the length of a normal AgInfusion game I think that analysis is a bit of a stretch. Asa and R+ games are much shorter, which is how they amplify the click advantage that they create.

Azmari also highlights this point. Although there are only a small handful of cards in the deck that indirectly create a click advantage—Ping and Unsmiling for tags and net damage—this advantage is really forced home because the games are so short that every click is vital.

I also think that the best Corp decks of 24.09 were shifting the mental load of playing netrunner onto the Runner side of the table. The emphasis is on the runner to figure out how to defuse the Jukebox Asa and Loud PE board states, just as it is on the runner to navigate the lethal remote setups of R+ and Azmari.

Conclusion

A number of things have conspired to put Shaper on top this year. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the Shaper cards in Rw/oR were pushed. Specifically, I think they were designed to bridge the gap between engine building—which Shaper has always done—and early aggression—which Shaper has historically lacked. This finally cured the weakness to rush strategies that all Shaper decks have had (I think) forever.

There has also been a running joke that the best Rw/oR Criminal cards fit better in Shaper decks. It’s less obvious to me that this was an intentional design decision, but the impact on the meta has been tangible—and made all the more obvious because those Criminal cards that don’t just play better in Shaper are support cards for a highly specialised game plan that doesn’t really apply outside of Mercury.

When the banlist team banned Bellona, they significantly reduced the threat of asset spam, which was the one archetype that Shaper was having to tech against. This left green decks with a bunch of new powerful tools to play with, but without a natural predator, without any strategic deckbuilding trade-offs to make, and really without anything to hold them back at all. The decision to not ban Trick Shot ahead of the World Championship, I think, made it certain that we would crown a Shaper World Champion.

And yet Corps keep winning games. In fact, Corps keep winning most of their games. Ask any player how they have been winning their Corp games and they will probably struggle to explain it, but they will almost certainly complain that it’s been hard work, and they will definitely tell you that trying to choose what Corp to play in 24.09 has been even more painful than it was in 24.05.

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The COMPLETE 24.09 meta analysis is available here