Who are TAI Breakers?

Team profile

Jul 18, 2024

Founded: July 2023

Members: 22

Mission: WORLD DOMINATION! (we do have players across the globe, but our willingness to travel great distances and endure obscene timezones to play competitive Netrunner probably defines our “call to arms”)

Notable Performances: Intercontinental Champion 2024, multiple AMT and National winners 2023/24, multiple Top 16s at ACC, APAC and EMEA Continentals in 2024

Notable Decklists: SnaRH! (2023),Do Not Put Down Your Deck (2024)

Foundation

We started out as a small group of AMT grinders, spurred on to find like-minded testers by the very short window between the release of The Automata Initiative and APAC Continentals in 2023 (with the very unimaginative server name at the time of "Continentals Testing".)

The team grew considerably leading up to—and immediately after—Worlds 2023, largely due to Izzy and Council helping put eager free agents in contact with us. Around this time, the team name “TAI Breakers” was born from a combination of commemorating the set that brought us together, our efforts to “break” the meta, and a self-inflicted burn about barely missing top cuts (a curse we still carry to this day!)

By Jan 2024, we numbered 16 players and had mostly considered our doors closed to further recruitment, until several members of the Unband testing team parted ways. This left several dedicated grinders—some with close personal ties to existing TAIBs—without a home, and the rest is history.

Testing Process

Most of our process has been poached from other teams like QtM and Unband.

Most deck ideas begin life as individual discord threads, with dedicated channels providing spaces to dump working decklists and discuss ideas that haven’t quite solidified yet. The thread creator usually shares a decklist with an indication of flexible slots, an idea of how competitively viable the idea is, and some general notes on the goals and playstyle, with replays and stats if possible. From there, the team jumps in to ask questions, give feedback, suggest changes, or generally question the sanity of the deck and team.

Most of our testing is done online due to our multinational nature, though there are some hotspots of meatspace testing in Italy, Singapore, and Australia.

Our dedicated statistician, xdg, also harvests data from Cobra and Aesop's Tables to analyse trends in the meta, providing raw data spreadsheets and handy summaries to the rest of the team via discord.

Applications

At 22 members, we’ve already grown larger than we ever expected, so while we’re not currently looking to expand, we don’t believe testing groups should “hoard” their knowledge. We encourage the community to reach out to any of our members on Discord if they’d like help or information on starting their own testing group, or if you just want to chat about that player’s decks!

Roster

aksu
AlPi
ArminFirecracker
AugustusCaesar
Baa Ram Wu
coldlava
Gathzen
HaverOfFun
IonFox
J0N4LD
Jai
koga
profwacko
rohit
rubenpieters
sebastiank
The King
ThePromethean
Vale
wowarlok
xdg
xiaat

If you are part of an existing testing group, or if you are trying to get a new testing group up and running, then The Surveyor would love to publish a profile of your team!

Send a message to kikai.noraneko on discord.

The Surveyor