1.2 Scoring patterns
The mechanical rules for how the Corp scores agendas are very simple. You put them in a remote server, you advance them a bunch of times by spending clicks and credits, then you score them and get points and beneficial effects. And when you get to seven points you win! However, the actual dynamics of how you should go about scoring an agenda aren’t always obvious, and are worth some discussion.
First of all, agendas come in different shapes and sizes. Disregarding the text on the card, we will mostly focus on them based on their stats: their advancement requirement and their point value. So we will talk about 2/1s, 3/1s, 3/2s, 4/2s, and 5/3s. These are by far the most common “statlines” in agendas that see play, and this is the standard way to refer to them.
Lowest risk
There is a very basic rule of thumb for how to go about scoring agendas, and while it’s often correct to break it (and at some point, we will look into how and why we might want to do that), at the same time it’s useful to always keep it in mind and look at it as your “default” option even if you end up doing something else. There isn’t a commonly agreed-upon name for it, so I’ll make one up: let’s call this the rule of lowest risk . It says two things:
- When trying to score an agenda, you want to put as many advancement counters as possible on it on the turn when you score it.
- If there’s anything else you have to do in order to score the agenda, you want to do all of that on the turn right before the one when you advance it.
As the name says, this rule minimizes risk. Why is that? That’s because installing and advancing an agenda takes some of your resources, and if the Runner steals the agenda from the remote server where it is installed before you score it, some of your investment has gone to waste. That sucks, and is part of the risk of trying to score an agenda! But work that we do on the turn when we actually score the agenda can’t be taken away from us, because we have secured the returns from it: therefore, we try to do as much work as possible on that turn. Doing everything else on the previous turn minimizes risk in a different way: during every turn that the agenda sits in a remote server, it’s particularly vulnerable to attack. Therefore, we want the agenda to sit there for as little as possible! By doing things this way, we minimize the time during which the agenda is vulnerable. So this is just a way to play efficiently around risk.
Applications
Let’s see how this applies to the most common statlines for agendas:
2/1s like Hostile Takeover are very easy to score. You just install them in a remote server, advance them twice, and score! There is no need to let them sit around for the Runner to steal them, so we just don’t let it happen. Scoring an agenda in the same turn as it is installed is called fast advance (shortened to FA), a really important concept in Netrunner. 2/1s can be fast advanced “naturally”, but a lot of cards allow the Corp to fast advance bigger agendas, such as Biotic Labor or SanSan City Grid. A deck that can reliably fast advance many of its agendas (often just called a fast advance deck) can care a lot less about the Runner’s ability to get into a remote server protected by ice. Fast advancing is also sometimes called “scoring from hand”.
3/1s like Superconducting Hub and 3/2s like Longevity Serum take more effort. You have to install them in a remote server, usually protecting it with ice: this is called a scoring remote. For most Corp decks, the scoring remote is the only remote server that you will care about protecting with ice during the course of the game. Often, it will just get shortened as “the remote”. You don’t advance the agenda on the turn when you install it: you let it sit there unadvanced, then advance it three times and score it on the next turn. This is called never advance (NA for short), because you “never advance” the agenda before the turn when you actually score it. This is a lot less safe than fast advance in some ways, but still feels much safer than pre-advancing an agenda for an important reason: if you don’t advance the agenda beforehand, it’s impossible for the Runner to tell that the card you installed was advanceable! So it could be any asset or upgrade in addition to being an agenda. This obfuscates what your plans are, and reduces the expected payoff of running the agenda for the Runner: they get very little out of running a scoring remote with something like a Spin Doctor in it, so they might just consider not running it. If your deck can NA often (sometimes with the help of cards that allow you to NA bigger agendas, such as Seamless Launch), you can keep jamming cards into the remote and trick the Runner into making bad decisions because it could always be an agenda that you’re trying to score, but it could also always be something else.
4/2s like Offworld Office are significantly harder to score than 3/2s, because they can’t be naturally never-advanced. You install-advance them (IA for short) on one turn, then score them on the next. This means that you have a click left over on the turn when you install them, giving you the opportunity to protect them better with a piece of ice or an upgrade, or maybe deal with another problem at the same time.
5/3s like Send a Message are big and somewhat clunky, while also carrying obvious benefits to scoring them. You will need to install-advance-advance them (IAA) on a turn, then score them on the next. This means that the remote server will have to be fully ready to safely score a 5/3 in (you can’t bolster the server in the same turn as you install it), and then you have to dedicate an entire turn to scoring it! But if your deck has a plan to score 5/3s, that’s probably because it will be worth the effort…
These are the most common scoring pattern for a reason, and I hope I have conveyed why people usually try to score agendas this way. But there are many, many reasons why a different play may be optimal in some context. We’ll look at those cases another time, but start looking out for some on your own :)