Reverse Engineering - The Elephant In The Room

Hello, and welcome to Reverse Engineering, a blog about the deckbuilding that dare not speak its name. It’s a subject that raises a lot of ire, and one of my goals with these articles is to try and calm those waters, turn the subject in a productive direction, and learn whatever can be learned.

Know Your Role
I’ve seen it happen personally: Top tier players are truly innovative, coming up with new concepts and synergies that other players may not be prepared to counter, sometimes even that the designers of the game didn’t expect. Real trendsetters at that level are few, and I think everyone respects their process and would do that if they could.

Below that grandmaster level, we have a lot of competitive players who may not create brand new archetypes, but they know how to build strong decks and identify what cards will support their core mechanics. Journeymen players may struggle with from-scratch deckbuilding but can modify and pilot decks with reasonable skill. Lastly, there are casual and novice players who rely on preconstructed lists with little modification, if any.

I flatter myself to think that I can be competitive from time to time, but I’ve made some decks that just didn’t click. This blog will focus on experiences I’ve had and ideas I’m working on that will try and get me over that hump to the point where I don’t have to use so much of other people’s lists as starting points.

The False Continuum Fallacy
Let’s deal with the elephant in the room first of all. The word “netdecking” elicits a lot of strong reactions. Frankly, I think a lot more people do it than will own up to doing it, and I suspect that a lot of the controversy comes from cognitive dissonance. It’s okay. This is a safe space. I’m Grimwalker, and I netdeck.

The word means different things to different people. On the basic level, one can, “A,” just take an existing decklist, build that deck and you’re off to the races. Then there’s changing a little, a few cards, or more and more and more until “B,” where the deck is unrecognizable even to its original creator. This is the fallacy of the False Continuum: just because there isn’t a bright and clear dividing line between A and B, you can’t just say B is the same as A. People may mean anything on that spectrum when they say “netdecking.”

I think what people truly disdain is just off-the-shelf copying of a list. Someone sits down across from you with a deck that they just pulled off the internet, it’s kind of lame when your deck is something you’ve been working on and invested your own creativity in. I once tried to take the pulse of how much customization people think you need before you’re not committing that sin, and the responses I got were all over the map. Copying decklists verbatim is for newbies, and players with some pride resent the implication. And because there’s no agreement, no real border at which you’ve crossed from netdecking into respectable deckbuilding, it all gets tarred with the same brush.

Cognitive Dissonance
As if the controversy weren’t enough, I myself am of two minds on the subject. On one hand, I have a creative writing background, so the very notion of plagiarism is anathema to me. But, on the other hand, I’m also an amateur cook. And in that realm, there’s no shame in making someone else’s recipes if you can do it well—and quite a lot of expectation that if you’re going to go about making new creations, you need to start with the basics. I was in the shower last night thinking about this metaphor and I dreamed up a recipe for a Loaded Potato Soufflé, which I could never do if I hadn’t made several different classic soufflés from tried-and-true recipes.

So, that’s how I’m choosing to look at it. If I take a recipe from Food Network or Alton Brown and I can make a tasty dish, that’s entry level cooking. Being able to come up with my own variations on recipes, that’s still amateur, but it doesn’t mean I’m bad at it. Actually taking raw ingredients and knowing how the magic happens to come up with something new; that comes with a lot of practice. I’m a better cook than I am a deckbuilder, so we’ll see how it goes. (Don’t worry, this comparison ends here. I respect you all too much to turn the remainder into a torturous string of food puns and overextended metaphors.)

There is value in off-the-shelf netdecking. Learn the meta. If you play the decks you’re likely to face, you will increase the skills you have in reading your opponents, anticipating their moves, and knowing what they are less able to handle. If you hear about an Exile list or a Kit-Paintbrush thing or some crazy story about a frightening Project PsychoAres deck making the rounds, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to find out how it ticks. Just play the bloody thing: nobody has the time to build everything from scratch or to comb through the OCTGN logs to count every card that hit the board and guess at the rest.

But that’s not primarily what this is about. We’re going to be reverse engineering, hence the title of the series. My goal—and I think what the goal of netdecking should be—is to become a better deckbuilder and player. To move up from that journeyman stage into being a true master of the game. Grand-masters are few, and that’s a bit outside my reach, but I have ambitions, and I’m not afraid to netdeck a few lists if they are fun to play or I see something I can customize. Maybe I change a lot. Maybe I change a little. But the important thing is that I’m not chasing some naïve belief that somebody else built a perfect deck and I’m going to somehow find and use THAT, or just stealing the decks that won the last tournament.

Twenty Minutes Into The Future
More than any other game I know of, Netrunner is a game of piloting skill as much or sometimes more than deckbuilding: so that being the case, if you’re a skilled player, then why not play a deck you built? Honestly, the goal of this article series is to one day stop writing this article series, or, if I’m to the point where I’m only netdecking to keep abreast of the meta, to help others to get past that stage of the learning curve themselves.

So, in conclusion, I’d like to just repeat the core concepts I’ll be coming back to in future editions: There’s more to netdecking than chasing the flavor of the month, and playing what wins just to get tournament swag. I like to win as much as the next guy, but I want to take pride in my work AND win. There’s more to netdecking than just copying and playing a list verbatim; it’s profitable to take decklists apart, put them back together, and make aftermarket modifications. When I say “I shamelessly netdeck,” I’m not talking about a brazen disregard for elitist concepts, I really mean, what I do with lists I find online is something that I don’t feel bad about. I hope you’ll agree, and we’ll learn some things.

We are blessed with a community of players who are extremely creative and love to show off what they’ve built. For what other reason could there be than to inspire others to take that list, share ideas, try it out, and learn new things? In the past couple of months, FFG has published sample decklists for Double Time, Honor & Profit Jinteki, and Honor & Profit Criminal, complete with spoiler images suitable, one imagines, for printing out, slipping into a card sleeve, and taking for a test drive. So let your hair down, leave your pride and judgments at the door, and let’s get better at the game.

Coming Next: “ATTACK OF THE CLONES” in which I report back after next month’s Chicago Regional, and the decks I played.

Grimwalker has been a middling player of Game of Thrones for a couple of years and has been playing Netrunner for almost a year, and if he could just make top 8 at a regional this year, he would be so happy.