The Mind Behind the Server

This is the second part of a two parts article about strategy planning. If you missed the first part, you can find it here.

Last month, I discussed how strategy planning works for Runners. I presented concept from management science (some people don't consider it a science, but I won't debate this today) and how they should be applied to deck building and gameplan, which are basically a matter of managing your resources - card slots, credits, clicks, etc. Today, I'll talk about those concepts for Corps.

The framework of the thought process is pretty much the same. Your goal is to win the game. Your objective is to achieve a game state where winning the game is as close as possible to an unavoidable consequence. Your strategy is to follow a gameplan that will lead the game to such state.

Basically, what you're doing as a Corp player is using well timed pressure (which is your objective) to score agendas (which is your goal). You cannot expect to keep the Runner out of your remotes forever and neither to flatline them every single time. I have written an article talking about this before, so if you're new to the game and missed it, you can read it here.

Be aware that this old article is about strategies, and not objectives. It is easy to get confused when one writing says that "Jinteki trust on flatlining" and the other says "flatlining is not reliable". So, again: your objective is to score agendas; your strategy is to force the Runner to take safety measurements (like drawing cards before guessing if a remote has a Project Junebug or an agenda) that will make them unable to steal the agendas you're trying to score. It is not that you want to flatline the Runner, but that the only way to make the Runner scared from getting flatlined is to actually create a situation where the Runner will get flatlined. It is like educating a child.

Learning from the Best

There are a few good case studies in the Corporation side of the game when it comes to strategy planning and defining objectives. One of them was already mentioned by me a thousand times before: Geoff Hollis' article about work compression. At that time, people were trying to play Jinteki as their mission in the game was to flatline the Runner. Hollis, as opposed to most players at that time, decided to ask himself not "why I'm not flatling the Runner?" but to move one more step back and ask "what if I'm not flatling the Runner because that's not what I'm supposed to be trying in the first place?" Once he realized that his objective in the game should be to get into the match point, his deck started to work. He changed his deck, but more important, he changed his mindset.

A second great example is the evolution of Tag n' Bag decks. When Jackson Howard was released, everybody's reaction was pretty much the same, that the NBN asset would allow you to play more copies of Scorched Earth in the same game. But some people didn't agree with that, and Martin Presley found the problem. Using the Runner's fear of Scorched Earth to scoring your agendas fast (a.k.a. "rush") is a better strategy, therefore, you need something faster than Howard.

Including Anonimous Tip and the Snare! + False Lead combo made Presley's "supermodernism" deck a very popular choice between Weyland players, and it is arguably the strongest Scorched Earth archetype in the current meta.

It's simple until you make it complicated.

Fantasy Flight Games recently published an article similar to this one, by Jens Erickson - but there was a crucial difference that I want to point out. Erickson's article focus on the question "what does your deck do?", which is basically ask yourself what is your strategy. What I'm saying in these two articles is that you must ask yourself a more complicated question: "why do you want your deck to do that?". Without knowing the "why?", moving to the "what?" is a waste of time. And I'm sure Erickson knows that.

The key thing here is that we had different objectives when we wrote our articles. Fantasy Flight Games articles are made to show new players that designing your own deck is not complicated, that you just need to grab some cards with synergy and enjoy the game with your friends. They're trying to sell their product, like any business in the world is (and should be) doing.

My point is exactly the opposite. What I'm saying here is that building high level competitive decks and gameplans is complicated. Why do you play the decks you do? Why do you run the servers you run? Why do you think Sure Gamble and Hedge Fund are so good that you don't even need to think before including them in your deck? Trusting your guts can only lead so far. To get into the top, you need to know why your guts are telling you the thing they are telling you.

I know it is not easy to do that. To look inside yourself and to question things that were always obvious to you - like "every deck must have 3 copies of Sure Gamble!!!" - is basically accepting the possibility that you suck at your hobby, and no one wants that.

I remember reading once that knowing something and knowing that you don't know something requires the same amount of knowledge. You need to smart to realize how ignorant you might be, and that's why we take a lot of time to learn the game, get good at it, and then realize we suck as start "relearning" everything, but with the right mindset.

I don't want to play Nietzsche here, but the truth is... you are your worst enemy. You only stop learning when you start to believe there's nothing to be learned, that you're never wrong, that the only reason you're losing is because of "cheap decks" and "bad luck".

To sum it up: to understand your own mind, you must keep it open.

João “Hraklea” Almeida is a brazilian amateur card game player, the responsible for the Android: Netrunner league in Porto Alegre - RS -, in partnership with Lojas Jambô, and the writer of Root Cause, a series of articles about playing Anarch.