Root Cause - The AI Crisis

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 seems that the days of AI-only decks has come to an end. If Swordsman was not enough to kill those decks, Wraparound is the Coup de Grace that Corps needed to stop such strategy. But is it really enough to makes us stop playing AI breakers for good? Of course not.

AI breakers still can be used as supportive breakers. Darwin is good to facecheck weak pieces of ICE or even break them - like Ice Wall, Enigma and Paper Wall, Atman is good to punish specific pieces of ICE, Knight goes through Wraparound, etc. Just because you have to use the old fracter/decoder/killer "holy trinity", it doesn't mean that AI breakers are useless.

The Wooley Road

Anyone who follows Root Cause articles knows that I'm a big fan of Steven Wooley. Of course that he was not the first person ever to think about using program searches in his decks (El-ad David Amir had been played Test Run on his Anarch deck back when Cyber Exodus was news, for example), but he's probably the most successful case so far.

Just like Mac/Atman players have been splashing a Mimic on their decks in order to search for it mid-run whenever they find a Swordsman, we can do that too, but we need to get the searches from out of faction rather than the breakers - as we already have the best Swordsman breaker (Mimic) and the best Wraparound breaker (Corroder) in faction.

Which search you're going to use is purely a matter of influence. Special Orders is great because it is cheap, but Self-Modifying Code can pick any program you need: Djinn, Sahasrara, Medium... you name it. And, in an emergency, you can use to grab a Deus X - which can break a Swordsman, a Janus 1.0, or protect you against Snare!.

The Mid-Run Nightmare

We're all Corp players too, so we all know how installing stuff mid-run sour our milk (is that an actual american slang?). Again, we don't have this option in our faction, but we have what we want to install mid-run: Parasite. We already talked about Self-Modifying Code, but it is not the only option.

It is not because Jackson Howard "killed" (that's a moot point, I'm not saying it did) Noise: Hacker Extraordinaire that Personal Workshop is not strong anymore. Not only it gives you a huge economic boost, it also allows you to install programs and hardwares during a run. If influence is an issue for you, Clone Chip is there for you. At last, we should be getting Savoir-Faire this month yet.

Tumani Options

As the cardpool grows, the more AI programs we're going to get. But how can we decide which one(s) is/are the right one? Well... the only way to know the best support is to analyze the supported ones - whatever the weaknesses they have, you can solve through AI breakers.

For example, he classic Anarch rig main issue is that two out of three breakers have a fixed strenght, which makes you vunerable to stronger pieces of ICE. Knight breaker big stuff cheaply, so it is not a surprise that it is so popular right now.

But, while it seems to solves the issues from Darwin-only decks too, you'd need some sort of way to deal with Wraparound and Swordsman anyway, so don't bother putting these two together. On the other hand, Darwin (as a great weak-piece-of-ICE-breaker) has a good sinergy if you're also using high strenght icebreakers like Ninja or Faerie.

A second example would be that, if you play a Parasite recurrence deck, a breaker that is made to pass through badly protected server is perfect. Thanks to Fear and Loathing, we have Alpha and Omega for this job. Yes, they are expensive, so maybe it is time to dust off our Retrieval Run and give them a new try.

A new age has come.

I won't say that Mac/Atman decks are about to disappear, but I think that it is safe to say that things will keep changing and that adding AI breakers based on your rig will become more and more common that building a deck around AI breakers. Fantasy Flight Games had shown us that they know those decks were powerful, and there's no reason to believe that they won't release more Wraparound's and Swordsman's in the Lunar Cycle if things start to fall apart again.

So, what is your AI of choice?

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's aware that this article is too short, but the Spin Cycle is not helping to bring new issues to the table. He is currently playing Tag Floatting and Supermodernism.