Root Cause - Opening Hand

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.

It has been a while that I was wanting to write about this: mulligans. When I started playing Magic the Gathering, we used to have a house rule where you could mulligan freely, but you should have some "sportmanship" (or something like that) and stop when you get a viable hand. Even without such rule, you're allowed to mulligan more than once in Magic the Gathering. But, in Android: Netrunner, you only have one shot.

We play a game where the starting hand plays a huge role - there's a reason why the strongest Runner currently is the one that has the biggest starting hand in the game. So, it makes sense to say that your ability to know when to mulligan and when not to mulligan also plays a very important role in your competitive career.

There are some obvious situations that I won't lose too much time on them. For example, a Corp player doesn't want to start with 5 agendas in his hand, and a Runner doesn't want to start with 3 copies of Plascrete Carapace when playing against a Haas-Bioroid deck. The problem starts when a hand's quality is not so obvious.

You'll reap what you sow.

The only way to have a good hand is to have a deck that is able to produce good hands. A lot of people don't seem to worry about that when designing a deck. Sometimes, I play with someone else's deck, and when I draw the cards, I ask "should I mulligan?" to the deck's owner, and the answer I get is a "I don't know... what do you think?". Of course that some hands will be a little more tricky to know if they are good or not, but you have to know what sort of hand you want when you're building your deck.

All decks have some key cards that you want to see in your first hand, and your first step is to identify which cards play such role in your strategy. As I mentioned in a previous article, there are two sorts of Runner strategies: you either want to make the early game as long as possible, or bring the late game as fast as possible. Depending which strategy you're taking, you will need an appropriate set of key cards (in this context, whenever I talk about a "key card" I'm talking about a card that you want in your initial hand).

Designing your Set of Keys

In the early game, you want cards that give you fast resources (meaning cards and credits, not the card type Resources), while late game oriented decks want cards that become stronger as the game progresses. In most cases, you want a mix of both, as a contigency plan, but always focus on the cards that fit your strategy better.

Here are some examples:

Early Game
- Armitage Codebusting
- Diesel
- Stimhack
- Sure Gamble

Late Game
- Cyberfeeder
- Kati Jones
- Personal Workshop
- Wyldside

If you look the most popular decks, you'll see that they mix those card. Criminal players use Kati Jones and Desperado, and Shaper players use Sure Gamble and Dirty Laundry, but this are not "mistakes". They still evaluate their initial hand based on their game plans, and while (for instance) Sure Gamble can be seen as a key card to one deck, it might not be to another.

These are the key cards of my current decks:

Leak/Denial (early game)
3x Dirty Laundry
3x Sure Gamble
2x Account Siphon
2x Vamp

Wyld/Shop (late game)
3x Daily Casts
3x Sahasrara
2x Wyldside

As you can see, I have no problem mulligan'ing a Sure Gamble while playing a "Noise/Shop-like" deck, but I definitely want to start with one while playing Whizzard, Master Gamer or Reina Roja, Freedom Fighter. It is all about context.

Short-Term vs Long-Term

To make the best of your first turns, you want the Corp to have as defenseless as possible, so you can access more cards. You do that by outpacing the Corp's economy, denying them credits, or by building your rig faster than your opponent can handle, with your own economy and fast card draws.

The important thing here is to watch how the cards in your hand work together. For example, I used to play a deck where Sahasrara was definitely a key card, but a hand like this...

1x Sahasrara
1x Femme Fatale
1x Parasite
1x Liberated Account
1x Datasucker

...has to be mulligan'ed, because the synergy between the cards are very poor, even considering that Sahasrara is there.

A lot of people, in this case, would take a credit and play Liberated Account - and most of them still won't agree that this would be a bad move after reading this article. While I see that you're trading a few early game clicks for a better mid/late game, you have to consider the opportunity cost of those clicks: playing a Liberated Account rather than facecheck a single face-down cards in the Archives is one thing, playing a Liberated Account rather than facecheck R&D when the Corp have only 5 credits is a completely different thing.

You must see the context, and the context is that, in your first turn, you are in an advantageous position, and it is your best interest to keep the game that way. When you decide not to explore this, the Corp player has more time to set his or her game. You might think that "but when the late game comes...", but the tomorrow might not even come because you gave the Corp an advantage today. Sometimes, an early scored Astroscript Pilot Program/Efficiency Committee is enough to lose the game.

So... ahm... what's your point again?

Feel free to leave a comment, either to ask something or to call me dumb. I'm aware that this is probably my most confusing article until now, and I'm sorry about that. Knowing when to mulligan has a lot of intuition involved - as become more experienced, you'll know when you have to mulligan -, so it is hard to put it into words. But I like to think that one player or two will get what I'm trying to say.

See you guys in the True Colors review!

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. This is his current deck list.