In the “So you wanna…” series we introduce each of the major and minor factions that you can play in Netrunner. These articles survey common themes, flavor, mechanics, and strategies that these factions employ, as well as a brief overview of key cards in the faction. “So you wanna…” will help you find the right faction to play and prepare you to compete against every faction in the game!

Meet The Anarchs

Anarchs want to watch the world burn. Or at the very least, to fight the power and stick it to the man. They understand that everyone hurts, but they channel their resources into making sure the Corps, as the powers that be, hurt more. That’s why Anarchs run, even if it costs them dearly.

Anarch features extensive in-faction trashing abilities. Sometimes, even their own cards get trashed, but that’s okay: Anarchs have a fairly easy time getting cards back from the heap. Anarch would rather destroy ice rather than have to break it multiple times, because their breakers tend to be inefficient or have hard limitations like fixed strength. And they’d rather trash assets and upgrades rather than have to mitigate their effects. Many of their card effects and IDs support this trashing strategy.

Anarch has the best barrier Fracters. They have many card effects that interact with the heap and with Archives. This combined with other damage mitigation makes Anarchs more resilient to getting cards trashed than other Runner factions. Let’s introduce some of the cards that make Anarchs the kings and queens of chaos and destruction!

Signature Cards

Parasite is a key card in the Anarch strategy of disruption. Stick this little guy on some pesky ice that is costing you to break, and let the clock tick down to its destruction!

The lower the strength of the ice, the easier it is to destroy it. However, Parasite has great value when stuck to ice of high strength: by lowering strength, you can more easily break that ice, and perhaps even force the Corp to waste a turn purging viruses to save their ice!

Speaking of disruption, Datasucker makes a fantastic companion to Parasite. By once again lowering strength, it can help Anarchs break high-strength ice. But not only that, by combining the two, you can instantly destroy ice if you can bring it to 0 strength in one run!

Datasucker also combines very well when paired with Anarch’s fixed strength breakers, such as…

Ah yes, Anarch breakers. Efficient, but with very hard limitations. Anarch features quite a few fixed strength breakers and Mimic is perhaps the most widely used of them all.

But with the proper support of cards like Datasucker, these weaknesses can be overcome. In fact, Mimic is one of the most efficient Sentry breaker for low strength sentries, so with Datasucker and Parasite on board, you can take advantage of this efficiency for higher strength sentries.

Take some brain damage, and take 9 credits for one run only. An Anarch gets the job done in unconventional and sometimes painful ways, but if the winning agenda is in sight, the damage is definitely worth the huge burst of money you can use during the run!

Perhaps the strongest general breaker ever printed, Faust is a highly unusual card: an AI with no restrictions on what it can break. At first glance, Faust looks like an unwieldy and painful card to use…and it is! However, in true Anarch fashion, breaking ice with your hand of cards is worth it when one single breaker is all you need to get into almost any server!

By itself, Faust is not particularly exciting. But coupled with draw from cards like I’ve Had Worse, and Wyldside, along with trashing support and cards like Datasucker, a Faust-powered Anarch is an extremely scary hacker to contend with.

Watching The World Burn

An Anarch realizes that what you don’t know can definitely hurt you, but if you hurt them more than they hurt you, you make out ahead!

Anarch gameplans revolve around destruction and disruption. If you trash the Corp’s important cards, they will be unable to enact their game-plan while you are free to run in to trash cards and steal agendas.

As opposed to the Shaper who looks to outscale the Corp in the econ game, or the Criminal who aims to capitalize on an early head start, an Anarch seeks to disrupt the Corp plan at each turn and destroy their hard-earned board state. An Anarch who is busy trashing by paying trash costs is often quite poor, so strong Anarch decks tend to look to friends in other factions for economic support.

Having a gameplan primarily based around disruption means that the Anarch has to identify what the Corp is up to early, to be able to judge what the highest value targets are. Get familiar with all kinds of Corp strategies so you can learn how to burn them to the ground!

A strong Anarch player knows when it is worth it to trade one hard-earned resource for another. For example, repeatedly using Faust to break ice with a very large number of subroutines is not a sustainable strategy. You will run out of deck eventually.

Instead, use Faust to protect yourself when “face-checking” unknown ice, and to break weak ice, then use Datasucker tokens to combo with Parasite on a run to trash some ice. You might have to sit around waiting for some piece of your trash combo, but your cards are a hard-earned resource, so go ahead and click to draw or gain a credit if you need it!

Playing Against Anarch

Playing against Anarch is tricky, since their plan is to counter your play with trashing and disruption. Having a backup plan is often the number one most important strategy when dealing with a raging Anarch: your plan A is often going to be disrupted, so avoid going all-in on a single big piece of ice, or relying too heavily on a key asset! Build an ice suite that is flexible and not too-costly, and have a plan for recovering your important assets and upgrades.

Anarch’s built-in limitations are many. Anarchs have a hard time keeping financially solvent while busy trashing, instead relying on bursts of econ and sometimes just clicking for 1 credit. Their breakers are somewhat restricted or clunky to use, so having a variety of ice at varying strengths makes running your servers that much more challenging.

Try punishing the runner when they’re poor, or giving them far too many targets to trash while staying financially solvent! Cards that trace the runner and tag them when they’re poor, or building a wide range of efficient servers with taxing ice and assets, can take advantage of Anarch’s less efficient and less resilient econ.

Am I An Anarch?

Do you like smashing problems to pieces rather than circumventing them or efficiently solving them? Do you enjoy disrupting the economies and scoring plans of Corporations, then kicking them while they’re down? Are you willing to take some hurt to dish out your own?

Anarch is a relatively advanced faction for newer players, but for those wishing to take the Corps down in a blaze of glory, you might be an Anarch!

The winning runner deck from Worlds 2016 features the Anarch runner Whizzard. Look for a special promotional reprint of it soon!

We hope you enjoyed this introductory article on the Anarch faction. Here at Levy University, your educational satisfaction is guaranteed, or your credits back!

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