1.5 Deckbuilding 101

You want to build your first few decks. That’s a great instinct to have: competent deckbuilding is a huge part of being good at Netrunner, and while it’s not at all necessary to build your own decks to win big tournaments, getting at least some practice with it will improve your gameplay. It’s also, of course, a lot of fun.

Fundamentals#

Let’s start with the basics. You probably know all of the rules about deckbuilding already, so let’s talk about how those impact your choices.

First of all, you have a minimum deck size, which is usually 40 or 45: you must have at least that many cards in your deck. If you are already familiar with card games that involve deck construction, you may already know that it’s almost always correct to try and stick to the minimum. If your minimum deck size is 40, play 40 cards; if it’s 45, play 45. This is because not all cards are equally powerful, and diluting your deck by adding more cards will have the effect of lowering the strength of the average card in your deck. If you can have 40 strong cards, and have the opportunity to add some cards that are a little bit less powerful, refuse it.

However, Corp deckbuilding has some additional rules that complicate this. You have to put enough agendas in your deck to add up to a certain range of agenda points, and exactly how many points you need to include depends on your deck size. For example, a 40-44 card deck will have 18 or 19 points, while with 45-49 cards you need 20 or 21. This limitation alone means that, in Corp decks, it isn’t quite true that adding more cards will always worsen your deck. Say that you have a 40 card deck, with nine 2-points agendas. You’re usually not happy about your deck being so full of agendas, because that means the Runner is pretty likely to find them. So you can add four more cards, going up to a 44 card deck, reducing your agenda density in the process and making your deck better. If you added a 45th card, that would have to be an agenda, probably worsening your deck once again.

What all of this boils down to is: Runner decks use their minimum deck size, and Corp decks use their minimum deck size plus four. Occasionally there will be a good deck that breaks this rule for very peculiar reasons, but you don’t need to concern yourself with that now.

You also have the opportunity to “splash” some cards from other factions by using your available influence. It isn’t necessarily the case that a few big splashes costing a lot of your influence points or a lot of very small splashes are better: both options can be valid and have been seen at the top tables. However, you should be trying to spend all of your influence in every single deck. Whatever deck you’re building, it’s really unlikely that it couldn’t be improved with an import from another faction.

Staples and jank#

Evaluating whether a card is good or not is really hard. When new cards come out, everyone has all sorts of ideas about which cards are good and which are bad, and a lot of people end up being wrong.

However, especially with cards that have been around for a while, the community tends to have mostly correct opinions. One of the most frustrating parts of being new to Netrunner is that some cards are “staples”, meaning that they go into nearly every deck, while others are “jank”, and you’re not supposed to put them in your deck if you’re actually trying to win. So when you’re a beginner and ask opinions on a deck you built, you often end up being told “I know Verbal Plasticity looks good, but it simply doesn’t do enough; play Earthrise Hotel instead”, usually without some kind of proof or argument beyond “we’ve tried both cards a lot and we just figured out what’s best”.

It sucks, but those players are right most of the time, and if you want to play a better deck you can only follow their advice and try to get the best explanation out of them for why staples are staples and jank is jank.

Card classification: Corp#

Let’s briefly talk about the different kinds of cards that are necessary or frequent in a Corp deck. Each of these paragraphs deserves a whole essay: this is just a brief overview).

Agendas are required by deckbuilding rules. In most decks, your plan includes the possibility of winning by scoring seven agenda points. Your agenda suite should be optimized towards this plan: you should be able to look at the agendas in your deck and go “ideally, this deck wants to score two 2-pointers and a 3-pointer” or “this wins by scoring two 2-pointers in a remote, then scoring a 2/1 from hand and close by fast advancing with Biotic Labor”. Be wary of including too many small agendas! If you fill your deck with 3/1s, you won’t have room for a lot of economy cards or ice, and you will end up flooded often. Sometimes, it’s better to have a 3-pointer that you don’t plan to score very often, but can save space for more non-agenda cards.

Ice is complicated. Almost all decks play some, but the correct number can range from 4 to 20 pieces of ice depending on your strategy: if you plan on building big remotes you want a lot of ice, whereas if you want to spam the board with assets you’re definitely going for smaller numbers. You probably want to have a mixture of barriers, code gates and sentries, so that the Runner feels forced to install all of their breakers sooner or later. But an even more important classification for ice is between gearchecks and taxing ice. Gearchecks are small pieces of ice that tend to cost little, but require the appropriate breaker to get through. They are great in the early game when the Runner doesn’t have their board set up, but once the gamestate gets there they tend not to cost a lot to get through. Taxing ice may not gearcheck, but it tends to cost a lot to get through compared to its rez cost even when a breaker is out. Enigma is a great example of a gearcheck; Pop-up Window doesn’t gearcheck at all, but cost-wise it is pretty effective at making the Corp a little richer and the Runner a little poorer.

Another important distinction is between ice that is spiky and ice that is flat: spiky ice punishes facechecks in some way, whereas flat ice mostly just bounces the Runner with little consequence. The click loss from Enigma is a relatively small downside to facechecking it, whereas facechecking an Archer may very well lose you the game. Flat/spiky ice are sometimes conflated with gearchecks/taxing, but the two distinctions are not quite the same: for example, Funhouse is a very taxing piece of ice that also doesn’t punish facechecks at all. What proportion of gearchecks vs taxing ice, and what spiky vs flat ice you want to include, says a lot about your gameplan as a Corp.

Economy refers to essentially everything that helps you stay afloat in terms of money. You will often rely on a combination of different economy cards, may they be agendas such as Offworld Office, ice like Pop-Up Window, operations like Hedge Fund, or assets like Regolith Mining License or PAD Campaign. Your choice of economy, like everything else, depends on your gameplan. While staples such as Hedge Fund are rarely skipped, a choice between Predictive Planogram or Regolith Mining License implies a tradeoff between a very small investment and a very large payoff. If you want to quickly get a small amount of money to protect your 3/2s with gearchecks, you may want the former; if you’re ok with spending some time to enable something bigger, the latter may be more interesting.

The rest is tricks. Some cards have near-universal utility, such as Spin Doctor; but usually, cards that aren’t ice or agendas and don’t make money are the ones that will guide your gameplan the most. Seamless Launch will lead you towards trying to never-advance agendas early and quickly; Urtica Cipher means you want to play guessing games with the Runner; the combo of Public Trail and Retribution hints at a gameplan where you try to permanently gearcheck the Runner. It’s easy to stock up on these cards, because they look like they’re the core of what the deck does; but usually, you only need a handful of these in each deck: they’re just the cherry on top of a solid engine built on good money and ice.

Some cards are tech: cards that are included specifically to beat a certain Runner card or archetype. For example, Crisium Grid is usually included to counter some specific Runner effect, and can be worthless in the wrong matchup.

Card classification: Runner#

Runner decks are similar to Corp decks in some ways, but not others. Economy is very similar: it comes in different forms, it’s important to have, and you always want more of it than you think you do.

An important difference is that draw is essential in a Runner deck. In Corp, you already get a mandatory draw each turn, and you don’t want to draw too many cards or you’ll risk flooding yourself with agendas, so whether and how many draw cards you include kind of depends on whether your deck really wants to get to agendas quickly or tends to look for a specific combo. Runners always want draw cards because they will be drawing often, and anything that makes you draw more efficiently than the basic draw action helps. Effects like Diesel and Earthrise Hotel are something that you want basically everywhere because of how universally helpful they will be, just like money.

Breakers are something you probably want to include. You don’t necessarily need many of them: oftentimes, a copy of each type plus tutor effects such as Mutual Favor is enough. You may want to support your breaker suite with pseudo-breakers such as Botulus or similar tricks like Inside Job.

Wincons are the way you proactively win the game. Your deck will usually try to build an economic advantage while responding to the threats the Corp puts on the table, but once you have built that advantage, you want to be able to efficiently convert it into a win. The most obvious kind of wincon is multiaccess effects, such as Docklands Pass or Conduit. You don’t necessarily need these early, you don’t need them in many copies, but you want to have them once your deck is in a position where it can start focusing on proactively trying to win.

Of course, like the Corp, you have miscellaneous utility cards and tech cards. For example, Paricia helps you deal with decks that play many assets, whereas Networking improves your game against taggy corps.

Numbers#

“I like this card, but how many copies of it should I play?” is a common question. It’s impossible to answer it conclusively, but here are some guidelines:

• 3x: if you include 3 copies of a card, that usually means that either it’s a card you’re always happy to see, or it’s so central to your gameplan that you really want it early. An economy staple such as Sure Gamble or Hedge Fund is always a good draw, so there’s often no reason to cut any copies; a card whose utility is more situational, or that is unique, is unlikely to warrant that much attention.
• 1x: if you only play 1 copy of a card, then it means you only need one copy and you’re not particularly concerned about seeing it early: it will show up at some point and it probably won’t be too late. Or maybe it’s a tech card that you think will give you an edge, but you can’t dilute your deck by playing too many copies of it. If you have a tutor effect that allows you to search your deck for a specific card, you also probably want that card in only one copy, because you have a lot of help finding it anyway.
• 2x: 2 copies is the middle ground. You will often play two copies if the card is important to your deck, like a breaker or a powerful console, but it’s not quite necessary to see it in the early game. This is also where a lot of cards sit if you feel like they’re important, but you would like to play them only once and you don’t want to draw dead too much after that.