It’s time for the Democracy and Dogma edition of the Meta Snapshot. I’ve held off on this for a while because…well, as it turns out there’s not much to talk about. If you want an idea of what decks are the best, or the most popular, last month’s article will give you almost the same overview.

With one exception.

There’s one deck that’s defined the last month, and the core idea – most of the deck in fact – was running around on Stimhack and NetrunnerDB the very night that DeDog was spoiled. I’m talking, of course, about Bio-Ethics Lock IG. There are two main versions – one that simply aims to grind the runner out with an impenetrable board state of Bio-Ethics Associations and Hostile Infrastructures, and one that aims to accelerate the process with standard Jinteki kill combos like Mushin No Shin, Cerebral Overwriter and Ronin. Various tweaks include Tech Startups, Sensie Actors Union, Caprice (or not), Ronin (or not) and basically anything to help you have more assets and draw more cards.

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This beast is interesting because we haven’t seen a deck have such a drastic and immediate meta warping effect since…I want to say DLR Val, but I’m not sure even that qualifies. It seems like half of all the forum posts around, on any topic, are variations of how this deck is anti-fun, anti-Netrunner, anti-happiness, pro-puppy-kicking. Meanwhile, three-quarters of the other posts are defending it and the rest are arguing about which Anarch cards should be on the MWL.

Look at the reaction – we’ve had Archives Interfaces being slotted, 3x Employee Strikes going into Whizzard, 2x Paricia in Shaper decks, Net Shield, Feedback Filter, who knows what else. Along with Temple NEH, we have officially hit Peak Asset Spam (TM) and runners need to adapt.

On the other hand, Political Operative dropped, went into a lot of decks very quickly and promptly didn’t cause the world to end. Palana Glacier is still good, HB Glacier is kinda pretty good but arguably less well positioned, NEH doesn’t care.

All of which to say – YOU WILL SEE IG AT TOURNAMENTS. Now, which runners can help you out?

Unsurprisingly, Whiz stands tall (or wide) at the top of the list. Let’s look at this list, featuring 2x Employee Strike. There’s an e3 Feedback Implants in there, but the author says in his writeup that a 3rd Employee Strike would be a better idea. Put simply – this deck is well tuned to beat IG and will help you carve up a large percentage of other decks too.

Noise has an OK chance, but is highly dependent on getting early Imps and Deja Vu’s. Hacktivist Meeting is disruptive but has the Noise issue where you can also play into their plan!

Another extremely effective approach is Indexing spam and Film Critic, to get past the nonsense in R&D and to deal with the self-protecting agendas. This deck conspicuously doesn’t have Film Critic, but what it DOES have is 3x Indexing. It also leads us nicely to the major trend on the Runner side of the board, which is…

APOCALYPSE

IN

EVERYTHING

Why? Because it’s an absolutely ridiculous card that can completely, irrevocably destroy a horizontal deck and at the very least will cause an unmatched tempo hit to a glacier Corp. It’s not surprising that so many Runners are slotting it these days. After all, why use Whiz to trash SanSan when you can just trash EVERYTHING?

Naturally there is one caveat to this, which is that Hostile Infrastructure very much exists and will cause you to take 30 net damage if you do it wrong. My best advice here is to clear them out first. There’s also an issue with IG in that when you hit Archives, there’s a chance that Shocks will take the Apocalypse out of your hand. For those of you looking at the Shaper lists and wondering what Bookmark is doing there, now you know!

Happy running, and good luck with the upcoming regional season!