0.1 Introduction

You are reading jan tuno’s spike biased. All text in here is free and provided under CC-BY-NC-SA: feel free to share it around or to make your additions to it or whatever else!

What is this?

This is a strategy guide of sorts to playing Netrunner, the customizable card game currently developed by Null Signal Games (“nsg” from now on). It’s not a rulebook: for that, look at nsg’s Learn to Play guide, or to their Comprehensive Rules. It’s written from a spike’s point of view, for spikes.

Who are you?

I’m jan tuno, and I’ve been playing Netrunner since 2013, though I’ve only gotten interested in competitive play around 2021. I’ve been really bad at this game for a very long time, but now I’ve gotten to the point where I can confidently call myself a good player. I’m by no means a top player or a pro or anything like that – but I love to write and think about things from a theoretical standpoint, and I love teaching and mentoring, and Netrunner is a great place to let that instinct flow.

Dozens of people have helped me in writing this in many different ways, and I couldn’t possibly name all of them. Special thanks to millenomi and JuniperTheory for providing invaluable editing help.

I’m an absolute beginner, can I read this?

Yes, provided that you know the rules and have played some games, like a dozen. This is intended to start with basic concepts and work all the way up to more advanced stuff. It is divided in “parts” so that you can read a good chunk of it, take time to apply all the things you’ve learned to your play, and come back for more later on. If you’re an experienced player, you can skip some early sections, though I think reading more and more explanations of important concepts that you already know well can’t ever be bad for you.

Is this a guide to playing the game, or to deckbuilding?

We’re going to talk about both, and the intersection of the two. I think I find it easier to write about piloting than deckbuilding, so there will be a little more emphasis on the former, but the two skillsets reinforce each other, so we’ll have to get into both.

How many cards do I need to know to read this?

You don’t need to know anything beforehand. Ideally, this aims to be a “cardpool-agnostic” guide – teaching concepts that will remain useful even as the cardpool changes significantly. Of course, that’s an impossible thing to achieve in practice: changes in design philosophy over the course of the game’s development changed the way that people needed to strategize about the game immensely, and the way that you think about the game ultimately has to be deeply influenced by what the cardpool looks like.

There will be a lot of examples scattered throughout the guide: talk of single cards, but also analyses of full decklists. It’s recommended that you take your time to look up what every single card does on NRDB or a similar resource. (The most convenient way to do this is to install a plugin like AutocardAnywhere on your browser!) I know that’s very time consuming when you don’t know all of the cards yet, but it’s necessary to understand all of the pieces to something to see the bigger picture sometimes.

I will try to mostly talk about cards from System Gateway and System Update 2021 in the first part of the guide, and mostly limit myself to Standard-legal cards for the rest of it, but sometimes examples from elsewhere will be useful, and in that case I will use them.

Is there any specific slang I should know in order to read this?

Theoretically, no. I will be explaining any strategy concept or jargon as we encounter it, and whenever a new term comes up I will try to typographically emphasize it. In practice, some will definitely slip through, especially if you’re reading an early version of this. Apologies in advance. Do let me know if any part of it is unclear.

How is this guide structured?

This guide is divided in parts. The idea is that if you have started playing the game recently, you can read part one, then take some time off (a week? a month or six? your choice really) to try and get a feel of how useful the concepts I talk about in that part are or aren’t to you. Then if you want, you can go back to it and read more.

Ok, but what is a “spike”?