After a whole month of spoilers, we finally know everything and, personally, I can actually start to work again in the afternoon, although I’m sure cricket, chess, cycling, puzzles, and erm, snooker will distract me again. NISEI and the community have done a great job of announcing the new cards along with pieces describing combos and synergies, even if they were only partially revealed at first. Therefore, in this article, I aim to take a step back and take in the bigger picture and I mean more than just matching up artwork. Get out your crystal balls, it’s time to see what the introduction o ..read more

(There are just so many new cards in System Gateway, but thankfully Baa Ram Wu from my local meta has offered to help. Without further ado, I pass you over to him with his sideways look at deck building in Anarch.) Looking for ruthless efficiency? Keep on walking! Looking for ridiculous multi card combos that may just ‘do a thing’… well then, you’ve come to the right place. Here’s some inventive/insane/dumb ideas you ‘could’ do with the new anarch cards. Cookbook Ok, so lets quickly skip past the ‘Grimoire as a resource’ comment and jump straight into some synergies! My mind is immediately tak ..read more

With 7 new IDs entering the game in one product, one for each faction, System Gateway will hugely change the meta landscape in the coming months. They offer new ways to play and build decks so it will be interesting to see how they compete against each other for our collective attention. Reign & Reverie was the last box to put a new ID for each faction into the card pool simultaneously and it took a little time for people to realise Liza’s terrifying potential, so we may be playing with new ideas within these cards for some time. Now that I’ve got my excuses in for why I’m wrong six months ..read more

Nothing gets the Netrunner community (and my blog) revitalised like new cards and, with NISEI’s System Gateway and System Update, there is plenty to get excited about. Previously, I wrote a blog diary for every single card in Uprising, but with even more cards on the horizon, this time I’m going to take a more laid-back approach. In the hope that committing to posts now means that I will actually follow through on that promise, here is my plan for articles over Spoiler Season: 9th/10th March: Review of all the new IDs in System Gateway. IDs are some of the most game-defining cards in the ..read more

NISEI’s second World championship took a step closer to cyber dystopia and happened entirely online two weeks ago. Iwas an amazing event, regardless of the situation, and while I was unable to compete, which helped makes it feel like most other World championships, the coverage was brilliantly executed, and I loved watching every minute. Usually I would do a post-mortem of such a large tournament to analyse the new meta. However, this year I am going to pass. Firstly, my statistics writing limit at the moment is being reached elsewhere, but mainly because I’m not sure players are too bothered ..read more

Last time, we looked at the set of Continental Championships focusing on what IDs were represented during the three weekends. This time, just in time to hopefully throw a spanner into the plans of those competing in Intercontinentals tomorrow, we will try to answer what decks did well. The two bar charts below show the win rates for the most popular Runners and Corps across the three tournaments. Note that these are more volatile than the frequency charts from the last blog post. We need to keep in mind the number of players representing that ID, for example, Adam and CtM both have win rates a ..read more

The last few weeks we have been spoiled with top-level Netrunner. Despite, or perhaps due to, the inability to host large events, NISEI has organised back-to-back-to-back Continental levels on consecutive weekends. With four or five streams in various languages, we’ve had as much of the best Netrunner commentary available as we have ever had. My sleep pattern is kind of getting back to normal after accidentally waking up early and staying up late for the Asia Pacific and Americans Continentals respectively. I took part in Europeans/Africans and had fun coming in the top half playing new versio ..read more

The 2020 European/African Championship is done and dusted, which means I will soon write another meta breakdown for the tournament. However, I want to wait until the trilogy of Continentals are over to get the full set of data to analyse. For now, we will take just a little glimpse back in time and see how our thoughts about Titan held up. From the ID breakdown, it seems that the top players had teched their list to beat Titan and Asa, which was the most represented Corp on the day. Thirty Leela had overtaken the previously dominant 419, so have we seen the end of Titan? The short answer would ..read more

It’s the day before the European and African Continental Championship, deck choices are locked in, for better or worse, so I’m using my pent-up excitement constructively. In the build-up to the tournament peoples’ thoughts have been turning to Titan and what can be done to counter this meta defining deck. A common criticism thrown at Titan is that it’s a coin flip. Hand the deck to a relatively low skilled player and they could beat a better opponent just by luck. I wanted to test this the best I could by looking at data. As multi Scrabble World Champion, Nigel Richards, says, you bag your opp ..read more