Root Cause - Anarch 101

Root Cause is a series of bi-weekly Android: Netrunner articles about deck building, strategy and tactical decision, for new and mid-level Anarch players. It was named in honor of Sam "Root" Groves, the character from CBS' show Person of Interest.

This week, Root Cause is making its first birthday! It is almost unbelievable for me that I'm still writing for CardGameDB.com and people still support me. Thank you, guys!

Today, I will talk about something that I should have talked in my first article. I won't try to hide the reason why I did not wrote about this before: I didn't know it back then. This game is so complex and all the seven factions play so differently that getting to the point where you fully comprehend your faction takes time, even to someone who has been playing the same faction for two years, like me.

I recently saw a guy asking for help to play Anarch. He was a good Shaper player, but he had problems understand how Anarch was supposed to be played. I don't blame the guy, it is complicated to move from one faction to the other. I still can't play NBN and Criminal that well, for instance. So - what's the mindset you must have to be a good Anarch player?

We all know the standard speech about the 3 Runner factions, but let's look at it again, just to make sure we're at the same place: Criminal is "early game oriented", Shaper is "mid game" oriented, and Anarch is "mid game oriented". Everybody already have read that somewhere. That simple separation explains a lot of the current meta.

The Best at the Worst.

If you follow the competitive scene, you will realize very fast that most top tier decks spend most of their influence with Anarch cards. Now, think about the concept of the mid game - it is the phase of the game where the Corp has its servers safe, because the Runner doesn't have its icebreakers yet. The Anarch faction is the best faction on handling disadvantageous situation by design. Anarch is intended to be the strongest faction during the best Corp phase in the game. It makes total sense that everybody loves our stuff, doesn't it?

Now, think about what was said in the last paragraph. Read it again if you need to. Anarch is the best faction in the game in a situation where the Runner doesn't have icebreakers. There's your mindset: "icebreakers? I don't need them, I shine at mid game!". We don't need Special Orders, we don't need to have one fracter + one decoder + one killer in our rig, we don't need to fear "face-checks"... We're Anarch!

YEAH, BABY!!!

Ok, ok, I'll calm down...

I'm not saying that you should hate your icebreakers. There's a reason why Corroder, Mimic, Yog.0 and Knight are as popular as they are - they're good at what they do, and using them will often increase your chance to win. But you don't need them as Shaper and Criminal do.

First, Anarch can win by running any server in the game. HQ? Nerve Agent. R&D? Medium. Archives? Data Leak Reverse. That's just one example of how you can force to protect all its servers at the same time. There's no safe server against Anarch. Second, we can destroy pieces of ICE. Demolition Run, Imp, Parasite, and even Caissa pressure with Rook, Knight, and Pawn/Zhade combo. More servers to protect means less pieces of ICE per server; pieces of ICE getting trashed means less pieces of ICE per server - which means less need for icebreakers.

Mea Culpa

We usually have this instinct of using influence to solve our faction weakenesses. Criminal has bad icebreakers, so let's take out of faction ones. Shaper has bad consoles, so let's take out of faction ones. Anarch has bad drawing and bad economy, and we keep trying to solve this out of faction cards. How about embracing your flaws and make it part of your strategy?

I love Vamp. I love Data Leak Reverse. I love Joshua B. How do I handle the tags? I used the simplest method there could be: I don't care about them. My deck's economy sucks, so what do I do? I make my opponents' economy sucks too. I can't draw cards fast, so I make sure my opponent will get punished by spending his or her clicks drawing cards rather than doing something else.

I'd been raged a lot in BoardgameGeek about how Djinn sucks compared to Self-Modifying Code and how Wyldside sucks compared to Mr. Li, but you know what? The people who called me a whinner were right. I didn't need a solution to the flaws of the factions I play - all I needed to do was to make them part of my playstyle.

OverKnight

For the curious, here's the current deck list. Enjoy!

Identity:
Whizzard: Master Gamer (What Lies Ahead)

Event: (14)
3x Deja Vu (Core)
3x Sure Gamble (Core)
2x Account Siphon (Core) â– â– â– â–  â– â– â– â– 
2x Emergency Shutdown (Cyber Exodus) â– â–  â– â– 
1x Scavenge (Creation and Control) â– â– 
2x Vamp (Trace Amount)
1x Quality Time (Humanity's Shadow) â– 

Hardware: (4)
3x Plascrete Carapace (What Lies Ahead)
1x Deep Red (Mala Tempora)

Program: (17)
2x Datasucker (Core)
1x Nerve Agent (Cyber Exodus)
3x Parasite (Core)
2x Medium (Core)
3x Rook (Opening Moves)
3x Knight (Mala Tempora)
3x Overmind (to be released at Honor & Profit)

Resource: (10)
2x Data Leak Reversal (Future Proof)
3x Armitage Codebusting (Core)
3x Joshua B. (Cyber Exodus)
2x John Masanori (Opening Moves)

João "Hraklea" Almeida is a brazilian amateur card game player, and the responsible for the Android: Netrunner league, in partnership with Lojas Jambô, in Porto Alegre - RS. He also plays A Game of Thrones LCG casually and Magic the Gathering "pauper" competitively.