1.1 Efficient play
Netrunner is about bluffing, managing hidden information, reading the opponent, taking chances, making a daring run at the last moment. Perhaps more importantly, though, it’s a game about resource management. This is an aspect of the game that many players struggle with when starting out: you have a lot of resources like clicks, cards, and credits, and you need to use them to the best of your ability. And they usually interact with each other in ways that make finding the optimal line tricky.
A lot of Netrunner is about finding that line that gets the most out of your cards in terms of resources. I’ve seen very good players argue that optimizing the way that you generate value is enough to get you to the top tables of tournaments already; the rest is mostly details and you only need it once you’re good at resource management.
Before we go further, a word in advance: it is very hard to understand what optimal play looks like if you play suboptimal decks. A well-built deck has plenty of economy and draw cards that, if used correctly, allow you to constantly feel like you’re being efficient, rarely pick suboptimal options, and always be flush with resources. If you play a deck that isn’t optimized this way, you will feel disincentivized from developing good play patterns: for example, you’ll click to draw less often than you should before you’ll get used to not finding the money you need by clicking to draw. If you want to understand what efficient play looks like, look at good players playing top-tier decks, and play them yourself.
Clicks and information
One of the most basic pieces of advice that you can receive is “plan your turn”. It should be obvious, yet it can be easy to forget in the heat of the moment, until you pay heed to it so often that it becomes automatic. What it means is: at the beginning of your turn, start thinking about what your whole turn is going to look like. If your planned turn contains no hidden information, think about it until you have the whole turn in your head. If there may be some surprises in it, then plan as much as you can (including possible responses to uncertain outcomes), and all else being equal, take actions that will reveal new information first, and reassess after you see that information. When reassessing, apply the whole planning process to whatever’s left in your turn.
That was a bit concise: let’s look at some concrete examples. As the Corp, you have five credits, a Hedge Fund in hand and a piece of ice that you want to install protecting R&D. The first thing that comes to your mind when your turn begins is that you want to install that piece of ice: the Runner has a Conduit on the board and you need to protect from it! You install the ice, then see that you have the Hedge Fund in your hand… and you cannot play it, because there was ice protecting R&D already so you spent money to install. Maybe you could click for a credit to get to a total from which you could play the Hedge Fund, but it feels awkward and inefficient and you’d really prefer to avoid that. Surely you could have thought things through?
Ok, let’s wind back in time. You know what to do now: you play the Hedge Fund, then install the piece of ice on R&D, paying for it, and smile at your opponent from your eight-credit throne. Then you realize that you have one click left, and no clue what to do with it. It doesn’t look like your hand is holding anything worth playing now, so you click to draw, and you find… a better piece of ice. This would have been much better at protecting R&D than the one you actually installed. You feel like you got a worse deal for no good reason. Surely you could have thought things through?
Ok, back once more. You start your turn, and look at the Hedge Fund and the piece of ice in your hand. You know a turn where you use both of these cards is probably going to look good, but you know that you can easily spend a click to draw a card, and it would likely be a good move. You have mentally allocated your three clicks (hedge, install, draw), but in order to get as much information as possible, you start your turn by clicking to draw. Then you see a good piece of ice, and decide to spend some time to plan things again. Isn’t this one better for R&D right now, actually? Yes, it is. You play Hedge Fund, and install the card you just drew. That’s a good turn.
The main takeaways here are:
- Your turn is a whole window of opportunity where you get to have a say in how the game turns out. You don’t play clicks, you play turns.
- You don’t lose anything by thinking first and acting later.
- Information about uncertain outcomes should be acquired sooner rather than later.
The most obvious action that gives you information about uncertain outcomes is drawing, which tends to be done at the beginning of the turn. Other things also involve uncertainty, especially running. That doesn’t mean that you want to always run at the beginning of your turn, because you may want to do things to prepare yourself for the run first. But all things being equal, if you have plans to run this turn, you should run before you do other things, because a run can yield information. Of course, these actions can constrast each other: do I draw or run first? In those cases, understanding what’s best can be tough. But that only emphasizes how important it is to plan ahead in order to decide how to structure your turn.
It’s common to feel awkward about taking time “off” to plan your turn: it may feel like you’re slow-playing and making your opponent wait. But taking time to assess the situation and then playing your whole turn with a plan in mind makes you take a lot less time taking individual clicks (which can be very time-consuming, especially when you didn’t plan ahead and only realize mid-turn that you messed up!). You play better (which you deserve to take the time to do) and often save time as well.
Cards are good, really
It’s very easy to look at your hand and think that some cards would improve your position if you played them, and it’s equally easy to look at what’s in play and think that the cards you have installed would bear fruit if you used them. It is a little bit harder to look at the unknown top card of your deck and think “yeah, this is good, I should get it”. Yet it would often be the right instinct!
If your deck is good, it probably has good cards in it, and acquiring more helps. If you’re lacking money, you’re likely to find some by drawing; if you’re lacking breakers or a win condition, drawing is the only way you’ll ever find them. Spending precious time to draw cards is necessary to acquire more options so you can keep choosing the most efficient plays every time, but it isn’t immediate to look at your board and envision how it can be developed with resources other than those you have available right now. As a consequence, a lot of beginners try to use what they already have: make a lot of runs, maybe costly ones with small or dubious payoffs, spending a lot of money to use their breakers rather than drawing into cards that will help them develop an economic advantage.
Remember that drawing into a money card tends to be way more efficient than clicking for credits. For example, if you click to draw and find a Sure Gamble, and then spend a click to play it, you have spent two clicks to gain a total of four credits. If you had spent those two clicks clicking for credits, you’d be worse off by a significant amount. Even if you don’t find Sure Gamble (or a comparable economy card) immediately, it takes a lot of digging before clicking for credits becomes optimal instead. If you draw three cards and then find a Sure Gamble and play it, you’re still breaking even compared to clicking for credits – except you have also acquired two other cards which are hopefully beneficial. In a well-built deck, clicking for credits is often the least efficient way to acquire money: the one that converts clicks to credits at the lowest rate. Whenever you’re clicking for credits, take notice of that as a potential weak point in your planning: it probably means that you made some mistake down the line that forced you to do something inefficient.
Of course that’s only true if you have the 5 credits needed to play Gamble as soon as you draw it. If you are below that threshold (the card’s “floor”), then you probably need to click for credits to reach it, and the whole proposition starts looking a lot less efficient. So drawing cards is good, but it’s only actually beneficial if you stay above the credit total needed to actually make use of them. If you have Sure Gamble in your deck, you should always try to keep at least 5 credits around. Likewise, it’s not helpful to try and draw into a breaker if you wouldn’t have the money to install and use it in case you found it.
On the Corp side, things are a little more complicated, because drawing into agendas can sometimes be harmful, especially if you’re flooded. However, in case of flood the best option is often digging for money, ice or other tools that can help you get out of this bad situation. It is sometimes correct to just click for credits to power up your ice, but only if that gives you a relative certainty that you’ll be safe that way and you have reasons to feel like drawing is risky at the moment.
Maximizing value
Some of your cards generate value for you, by giving you cards or credits or similar things. Some others allow you to spend that value, by making runs or keeping the Runner out or helping you get points. You are trying to maximize value all the time, which means you want to generate the most value you can, and you want to convert it to tangible benefits at the best possible rate.
The puzzle of how to best squeeze value from your value cards tends to have very simple solutions in theory, while hard to balance with other aspects of play in practice. For example, you want to install Regolith Mining License in a remote server that is protected by ice, and you want to get all the value that you can out of it, so you don’t want to install an agenda over it before you’re done with it. Verbal Plasticity allows you to get at most one card extra card draw per turn, so you’d better try to click to draw every single turn so that gains from it are maximized. Smartware Distributor wants to always be charged at the start of your turn or it does nothing. Generally speaking, everything that can be done up to a limited amount of times wants to be done that number of times, and everything that can trigger up to once a turn wants to trigger once a turn. But in practice, the flow of the game may require that you do otherwise. Sometimes you have a perfect window of opportunity to score an agenda, so it’s fine to let the Regolith go because those points are more important; or you need to take the whole turn to get through a Brân 1.0, so you forgo clicking your Smartware. Oftentimes you will be compressed into having to choose, for example between your Plasticity and your Smartware. While understanding the basics of how to get the most value out of your cards is easy (and you should, as an exercise, go through all the cards in your deck and think of how to best do it with each of them), making these calls when things are a little fuzzier is where you really show your skill.
“Spending” value, or converting it to other kinds of benefits (often points), is mostly about how to score agendas efficiently and how to run at the right time for the best payoff. These subjects are complex enough that I’m dedicating whole sections to each, just to explain the basics.