Netrunner: Blood & Water Review

In this series of articles Marc and Chris, our resident runners of nets, review the latest expansion for Android: Netrunner. In these articles Marc and Chris will introduce their favourite cards from the newest pack and then give a whistlestop tour of the rest of the cards. There are a lot of card names mentioned in these articles. If you don’t recognise a particular card, or need a refresher about what it does, we recommend either searching for a card on NetrunnerDB or installing this Chrome plugin to let you quickly look up what the cards do. Without further ado, let’s jack in…

Pack Summary

This is a great pack with very interesting cards for every faction. A lot of the cards give power boosts to interesting/underplayed gameplans, such as advanceable ICE, decks where Runner’s accumulate tags, HQ control, and Jinteki fast advance. While this means this pack isn’t likely to be the favourite pack of super competitive players, although there are some powerful cards in it, it’s great for those who love deckbuilding and trying unusual combos.  

Alice Merchant: Clan Agitator

Anarchs, as their name suggest, are masters at destruction. Noise trashes cards from R&D, Whizzard trashes Assets and Upgrades, Edward Kim trashes Operations, and there are multiple ways for the faction to trash ICE. Alice: Clan Agitator follows this trail of destruction with her ability: whenever you make a successful run on Archives, the Corp must choose one card to discard.

This leads to really interesting plays, and promotes good Netrunner practises, such as thinking about Agenda density. Agenda density is a concept that refers to R&D (Corp’s draw deck) and HQ (Corp’s hand of cards), and corresponds to the number of agendas in these servers divided by the total number of cards in those servers. Thinking about which server has the highest Agenda density allows the Runner to make runs that give them the best probability of stealing an Agenda. Alice’s ability is interesting as it allows you to mess with the Agenda density of HQ. For example, the Runner might not know this but the Corp has 1 Agenda in their 5 card HQ. If a runner runs HQ, they have a 0.2 probability of stealing the Agenda. However, if you’re Alice, you are able to run Archives to force the Corp to discard a card. If you’re now able to run HQ, you have a 0.25 chance of getting the Agenda. This doesn’t seem like much, but manipulating and thinking about these probabilities is how you get better at the game.

The disadvantage of running Archives is that it often doesn’t get you closer to winning the game. Therefore, when I’ve been playing Alice, I’ve tried to build decks with cards that give you a benefit to running Archives, such as Temujin Contract, Datasucker, and Dirty Laundry. Alternatively, using Alice with the card Maw not only synergises with your ability but also gives you a reason to check Archives regularly, to see if you’ve hit an Agenda with Maw’s discard ability. Against Corp decks that run a lot of of ICE, Alice’s ability may as well read “The Corp has to protect Archives with 2 decent pieces of ICE”. However, that’s two pieces of ICE that aren’t protecting remotes with Agendas in them!

Here is my current list, give it a go and let me know how you get on!

Shipment from Tennin

On the Corp side, one of my favourite cards is Shipment from Tennin. If the Runner didn’t make a successful run on their last turn, the Corp can place 2 advancement tokens on a card. Why is this a big deal? Well, if you’ve got an Agenda that requires 3 advancement tokens on it to score, the Corp can score the Agenda on the same turn as they install it with Shipment from Tennin: Click 1 – Install Agenda, Click 2 – Play Shipment from Tennin, Click 3 – Advance, Score! Scoring Agendas on the same turn as they were installed is called, in the parlance of Netrunner players, ‘fast advance’ and is a very powerful strategy. This is because you don’t have to waste money on building a remote server to score out of, allowing you to instead build up defences on your central servers (HQ, R&D, and Archives).

Shipment from Tennin is a very strong card for a fast advance strategy as it’s so cheap. Scoring a 3 advancement Agenda with Shipment from Tennin costs the Corp 3 credits, while using Biotic Labor to accomplish the same costs 7 credits! The downside of such economy, however, is that you can’t play it if the Runner made a successful run on their last turn. While this play restriction is a downside for the Corp, it is not a downside for the game in general, as the card can be countered by clever play within any game, and doesn’t rely on the opponent having certain cards to beat it. This leads to a strong card that encourages fun, interactive games. As a Corp you can mitigate the downside of the card by including beefy ICE that the Runner can’t easily get through or include traps in your deck to scare the Runner from running while they aren’t set up. Thankfully, Jinteki have these kind of cards coming out in practically every pack! Some Jinteki IDs, such as Potential Unleashed or Personal Evolution can sometimes cause the Runner to sit back and get setup before running, and Shipment from Tennin goes well in these decks to get the Runner into a “damned if I do, damned if I don’t” situation.

Due to the comparatively cheap influence cost, I’ve also tried it in other factions. HB has very taxing ICE that the Runner can’t reliably get through, which has synergy with this card. I’ve had some success with this deck based around that idea. I’ve also tried it in an NBN deck, but I haven’t found their ICE to be quite as taxing. Perhaps a deck that forces the Runner to run with Shipment from Tennin, only to get tagged with Hard-Hitting News would work well; try it and find out!

Bug Out Bag

I haven’t chosen Bug Out Bag because I love it and plan to include it in lots of decks. I’ve chosen it because I want to understand what its purpose is. An interesting thing about it is that it draws at the very end of your turn, after you have to discard cards down to your maximum hand-size. This means you can have more cards than usual in hand on the Corp turn. The main advantage of this is for meat damage protection against heavy hitting cards like Boom! and Scorched Earth. This sounds great but it’s harder to use than every other form of damage protection, as you have to trigger it pre-emptively and even then doing so can be tricky. Achieving 0 cards in hand deliberately will usually involve playing all of them, which will not always be possible given the existence of unique cards. Against net damage decks it can act as a recovery technique, drawing cards after interacting with hand wiping cards, like Psychic Field, without using any clicks. Whilst this interaction is nice, it’s so situational that it probably isn’t worth including in decks for this alone.

So, can it be used as your draw engine instead? Criminal doesn’t have many good sources of card draw and often players will import draw from other factions. Unfortunately Bug Out Bag has the same disadvantage for being your draw as it does for the damage prevention, in that it can be hard to trigger. However if you build your deck around cheap, non-unique cards it can be achieved semi-regularly. Even in this scenario it has the problem of being expensive. When Diesel draws 3 cards for 0 credits and no restrictions, why would you want to draw 3 cards for 3 credits and having to try and trigger it? So for small draw amounts it’s inefficient, and you’d be better getting your draw elsewhere. But Bug Out Bag is unlimited in the amount it lets you draw, and that leads to its own possibilities. A Bug Out Bag with 9 credits on, lets you have mid game versions of Andromeda starting turns, where you play a card every click and still have a full hand. Seeing 9 new cards is great as it means that the odds of you finding the cards you need is high, regardless of if you are missing a breaker, or light on economy. Drawing more than 9 cards for this also has its place, if there is one card you desperately need you might not mind having to discard others if you find it and hand size increasing cards can prevent you having to discard excess. This is still expensive though, and you have to consider whether you’d be better off running card tutors and cheaper draw cards.

Fortunately Bug Out Bag has three excellent combos that in my opinion push it into be worth experimenting with. The most obvious one is with The Noble Path, which triggers the Bag’s condition when played and allows for a no damage run. This can have a lot of value against Jinteki ICE like Cortex Lock and Neural Katana. Even better is Severnius Stim Implant which converts excess cards into additional card accesses. The unlimited card draw from Bug Out Bag is a great way to provide this and forms the basis of my most successful deck with Bug Out Bag (Here). Importantly, Severnius is able to trigger Bug Out Bag as well as profiting from its draw. Often leading to a Severnius run with 3 accesses one turn, the firing of the Bag, then a Severnius run with 5+ accesses depending on how rich you were when you set it up. This alone would be a good combo, if it wasn’t made even better by the interaction with Fall Guy. Fall Guy can prevent the trashing of Bug Out Bag, but still allows the draw, allowing the same Bag to fire multiple times. This gives a good power boost to using the Bag for normal draw, and a massive one for using a highly charged one with Severnius. The upcoming rotation of the early cycles means that this combo will be short lived, but it’s an interesting interaction whilst it lasts.   

Loki

The Norse god Loki is a trickster, and the same can be said of his namesake ICE. Its subroutine is tricky, in that by forcing you to shuffle your grip into your stack to pass, it effectively does damage that can’t be avoided with damage prevention cards. Its Mythic subtype means that this is more likely than usual to fire as it needs an AI icebreaker to break it. However the mischief is only just beginning as Loki can copy subroutines and subtypes from other rezzed ICE. Whilst gaining the subtype means that it can be broken by non AI breakers, you can make Loki into whatever the Runner wants to break the least. Tricky! And yet there is more, as Loki only copies subroutines and not other ICE text, this means that any Bioroid that is copied can’t be clicked through! On the negative side it can’t copy strong “on encounter” effects, such as that on Data Raven. But if you’ve built decks with Loki in, presumably you’ve designed the ICE suite to match, so this isn’t a big downside. Its strength of 3 is a little low, but this is probably for the best as I suspect it would be too strong with a higher strength, and there is still plenty of ICE with lower strengths whose subroutines are stronger when copied by Loki. With its high influence cost it probably will be a HB exclusive ICE outside major jank, but I think a decent percentage of HB decks could benefit from its inclusion.

Faction by Faction

Anarch

Jarogniew Mercs have a lot of similarities to one of the most popular cards in the early days of Android Netrunner, Plascrete Carapace. However the difference in design makes for a more interactive card. Plascrete Carapace is a hardware card that prevents 4 meat damage and is typically used as protection from Scorched Earth. As hardware it is difficult to trash and will often remain in play until fully used or the end of the game. The Mercs also has 4 counters to prevent meat damage when installed normally. However, as a resource it is vulnerable to being trashed if the runner has tags on the Corp’s turn. Fortunately it has built in protection in that it can’t be trashed whilst there are other resources in play. This means that a Corp trying to win via meat damage will have to telegraph this ahead of time by removing the other resources, or do enough meat to use up all the counters on Mercs. This alone is more interactive than Plascrete Carapace, but Jarogniew Mercs has another trick up its sleeve. It is powered up further by any tags that the runner has when it is installed. This means that it is great damage protection for decks that don’t clear tags (“tag me” decks in Netrunner parlance) which are usually very vulnerable to meat damage. However, the ability to trash it after all other resources are gone means that determined Corp players still have a way to play against it. An excellent piece of design that makes me a lot more interested in the “tag me” style of decks.

Criminal

Māui has one big problem, and it’s the existence of other Criminal consoles. Getting extra credits for runs on HQ is useful, especially for runners that like focusing on HQ such as Gabriel and Silhouette. But Desperado can get you credits on any run, and if you are focusing on HQ, the extra accesses from The Gauntlet would almost always be more valuable. Keros Mcintyre, like the last packs Rubicon Switch, is adding to the list of cards that are very useful for a derezzing heavy strategy, most likely played out of Los. Giving the Runner a discount on the first derez done every turn can give a lot of value if you’re doing it every turn, but it requires a deck to be built around it. Still, if Tech Trader is anything to go by, getting money from doing things you were going to be doing anyway can be very powerful. I’m (Marc) currently testing Keros and will report on my findings during the next article, so stay tuned!

Shaper

Shapers also have a new console in Daredevil; a console that in the art looks like one of those bike racing games you see in arcades! Whenever you initiate a run on a server with more than two pieces of ICE protecting it, you draw two cards. From my (Marc) testing, this is a really good console. I’ve built a really fun Nasir deck, that uses Faust as it’s main breaker, and drawing two extra cards can make all the difference about whether the Dark Lord can get you into the server or not. As the console is only 1 influence, it can be used in other factions very easily. Criminals have very few cards that draw you more cards in faction, and I’ve found that Daredevil in Criminal is very good. My only negative about the card is that if it becomes popular, then it will push Corps towards decks with very little ICE, a play style I find very boring to play against.

The other Shaper card this pack is Mass Driver, a card that I love the theme for! You have to spend a lot of money to break an ICE, but doing so lets you breeze through the next ICE; just like how rockets have to exert a lot of effort to escape the Earth’s gravity, but once they do can use comparatively little fuel! In terms of where Mass Driver is most useful, it’s definitely in a Kit deck as her ability allows her to make ICE into Code Gates. However, the price to install and use Mass Driver makes it very unwieldy, and the only time I would install it is as a last resort if the Corp has built a server that is difficult for Inversificator to get into. Actually, it might be fun in an expensive-Shaper-breakers-that-have-weird-effects themed deck, alongside Ankusa! Hmmmm…….

Neutral Zone

Mass Commercialisation is a fantastic card, an economy card that only works well in certain types of decks, so it is very useful, but won’t become ubiquitous like Hedge Fund or IPO. Its best with decks that already like advanceable ICE, so as with Red Planet Couriers last month, will most likely be played with Tennin and Builder of Nations.

Whampoa Reclamation is another interesting piece of card design. With card rotation looming on the horizon, various cards are being printed to control agenda flood, as the main card currently used to do so Jackson Howard, will soon no longer be available. Instead of a burst of 3 cards cycling from Archives to R&D, Whampoa provides a slow and steady control, allowing 1 set of movements from HQ to Archives then Archives to R&D each turn. As with Jackson, this doesn’t have to be used for cycling agendas and can also be used to recur other key cards from Archives. It’s a less powerful card, which is a good thing as Jackson was so good it was overused, and between Whampoa, Special Report and Preemptive Action, it looks like dealing with agenda flood will still be possible post rotation.

HB

Warroid Tracker seems like an interesting addition to the HB toolkit, acting as a disincentive to trashing cards in its server. It feels well balanced as it’s not so punishing that you can’t trash something if necessary, but the cost is high enough that it is a real consideration. Saying that, it can get a little ridiculous if there are multiple Warroid Trackers in a server, and especially ridiculous when the thing you are trashing is a defensive upgrade such as Ash or Caprice. Thankfully, those two cards are rotating soon, so this combo won’t terrorise the card pool for long.

Jinteki

A 5/3 agenda has to have a good ability to be included in a deck over smaller agendas. Fortunately Obaktoa Protocol has a very strong one, 4 net damage is a hefty cost to pay if you know it’s coming, and as a surprise it often means that the agenda simply won’t be stolen due to that annoying side effect: death! Expect to see it in a high percentage of Jinteki decks, especially paired with other cards that add damage such as Ben Mushashi and Prisec. Whilst the Obaktoa Protocols ability is a strong one, the new Jinteki ice, Mirāju, occupies an especially interesting design space. Redirecting the runner if they break the sub is a great way to encourage the sub to fire. The sub itself is an interesting one on HQ as you may be able to prevent agendas being stolen by shifting them to R&D. However the cost of rezzing it multiple times can add up and risk becoming more of an drain on your economy than ideal. It is also a liability to have protecting R&D if the Runner can access multiple cards from the server as the shuffle effect is mandatory, meaning that the Runner can let it fire to see fresh cards from the top of the deck.

NBN

NBN get some very strange cards in this pack that I’m not sure how best to use. Escalate Vitriol is an agenda that, if you score it, gives you money based on how many tags the Runner has. This can be a large pay out against Runners who are not clearing tags, or who have just gained a large amount of tags from a Midseasons or a Hard Hitting News. However, if you are building a deck based around profiting off a runner who has tagged, this effect is weaker than many tag punishment cards that can decide the game such as Psychographics,  BOOM!, Scorched Earth, Exchange of Information, and The All Seeing I. In addition to being a less powerful effect, it also has to be scored before use.  However, it doesn’t have to compete against these cards, as an agenda it has to compete against the other available Neutral and NBN cards to account for the required agenda slots. If you are wanting to include 4/2 agendas in your deck, Explode-a-palooza, Corporate Sales Team and NAPD Contract are going to be better choices in the majority of situations. However, perhaps having a single copy in your deck as a counter to “tag me” Runners is the best way to play it.

Another 5/3 agenda, but Re-education looks like it might be good enough to make the list too. As with Loki, Reeducation, gets the runner to shuffle cards from their grip away, acting like net and meat damage whilst avoiding any damage protection cards. In addition, scoring Reeducation also refreshes the cards in HQ allowing you to filter what you want in your hand. Its best use is to trigger a kill by scoring it when you have more cards than the runner, reducing their hand to 0 then playing a damage card such as Neural EMP. This does require a bit of set up, but I find it an interesting new way for NBN decks to hurt the runner without relying on tags, and I hope it become part of a new archetype for the faction. While this does sound farfetched, I (Marc) have managed a kill with this card and Door to Door. It won’t work every game, sure, but felt amazing to pull that off once!

On the other hand I find it hard to imagine many players basing a deck around Traffic Analyser, the payout from winning its traces is only 1 credit so there would be little point in ever boosting it. Whilst the Runner may not consider it worth boosting link to break it, even then it’s only likely to gain you 2-3 credits, as it only fires when you rez ice in front of it. The only scenario I can see it being worth including is when running a deck using Aryabhata Tech to make all traces better, and with a Chimera or Mirāju in front of it allow it to fire more often. 

Weyland

Success is the third Triple operation that has been released in Netrunner, meaning that it requires three Clicks to play and therefore usually takes up the entire Corp turn. The other Wayland Triple was covered by Chris in our last pack review. Red Planet Couriers let you move all advancement counters from one card to another, potentially letting you score huge Agendas such as Government Takeover. Success also lets you manipulate advancement tokens. By forfeiting a scored Agenda, you can advance another installed card X times, where X is the advancement requirement of the Agenda forfeited. This means that, by forfeiting a 5/3 Agenda, you can score a 5/3 Agenda! Oh. Oh wait. That’s crap. No, where Success really shines is in an ID that I really enjoy playing, and that’s Jemison Astronautics. Whenever you forfeit an Agenda in Jemison you can place advancement tokens equal to the points that Agenda was worth, plus 1, to an installed card. So, let’s try this again! If you forfeit a 5/3 using Success in Jemison, you get (3 + 1) tokens from Jemison’s ability, plus 5 from Success, giving you 9 in total and letting you score a Government Takeover from zero advancements! There we are, that’s better.

Chris discusses a few of the nuances of playing Triple operations in his review I linked above, and I recommend reading it. However, there’s another interesting thing about this card, and that is how it’s worded. Usually, cards that add advancement tokens to cards “place” them. This doesn’t trigger abilities such as those on Hollywood Renovation or Oaktown Renovation. However, Success does trigger these abilities, because it uses the word “advance”. This lead me to construct this stupid deck. Now, although I have won every game I’ve played with it, this is by no stretch of the imagination a competitive, or indeed, reliable combo, so proceed with caution!

Meteor Mining has an excellent theme; you have access to a meteor and can either mine it for money, or drop it on an unsuspecting Runner. Otherwise I’m torn; I like the idea of making 5 cost agendas that are strong enough to warrant inclusion in decks, but meat damage kill decks are one of my least favourite deck archetypes. I personally find it a far more interesting card than BOOM! or Scorched Earth, and there may be interesting ways to make it work, possibly with Casting Call and Dedication Ceremony. Although I suspect that most decks that use it may do better with another agenda and doubling down on using BOOM!. I’ve (Chris) been trying it in an Argus deck lately, and have never managed to get the meat damage to fire.   

Standoff is bonkers, and I don’t use that term lightly. Upon scoring it you take it in turns to trash each other’s cards! This includes rezzed ICE and icebreakers, and if used to it’s full potential, it could have similar effects to Apocalypse. This makes it particularly good in Skorpios decks, to try and remove icebreakers from the game, locking the Runner out of servers. However this turn of events is likely to be rare, and someone will chicken out and let the exchange stop. As a 0 point agenda, it is also good for agenda sacrifice effects, such as rezzing an Archer or Jemison Astronautic’s ability.

See you all next time for Free Mars!