We’ve recently been exposed to the first onslaught of spoilers from Order & Chaos, the upcoming deluxe expansion. I thought it’d be interesting to take some time and look to what these cards suggest about the future of the game and how the factions will expand. We’ve seen the first two deluxe expansions broaden the purview of each of the factions, strengthening their mechanical trends and deepening their thematic scope. What does the latest information tell us about where Anarch and Weyland are going? How will the remainder of the Lunar Cycle mesh with Order & Chaos to fill out the game.

For the record, if you want a gallery of the spoiled cards, you can find it here

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Anarch Identities:

We only have one ID (officially) spoiled so far, Edward Kim, and he’s an interesting one. Operations have for a long time been powerful because of their stability- they make your hand and RnD more resilient, they’re reliable and they’re fast. Imp has always been available to mess with that, and anyone who has been on the end of having their Biotic Labours or Scorched Earths Imped out from under them knows how strong that can be.

So far Anarchs have not really gotten an aggressive ID- you can make aggressive decks with all the existing ones, sure, but the more subtle effects of the identities do not mesh well with blitz gameplay. Edward, I think, does. Trashing operations, particularly economic ones, will slow the corp down and allow your aggression to continue. With cards like scrubber on your board, you can threaten centrals pretty well without needing multiaccess, you can ‘dig’ with multiple runs and leverage on-successful run cards like Desperado and Haemorrhage rather than needing to spend money and time setting up a slow game viral suite.

Anarch Gameplay

Anarchs have been developing a strong theme of ‘resource diversity’ over the past couple of cycles and I think what we’ve seen so far clinches it. While Criminals and Shapers tend to accrue and spend credits to do things (and to a very limited extent clicks), Anarchs can take brain damage or tags as well, a theme that seems supported in the glimpse we’ve had so far. But we also see Wanton Destruction (which lets you spend clicks as part of a run on HQ to make the corp trash cards at random), which makes me think Anarch is really going to be pushing the boundaries in terms of manipulating all of these non-credit elements of the game to their benefit- tags, brain damage, hand size, clicks, bad publicity, MU and so on. Appropriately, I think we’ll see Anarch decks that take a chaotic melange of all of these resource trading cards and turn them into synergistic engines or simply decks that can make the best of anything- being poor, being hurt, being on the front pages, being marked for death. The Data Leak Reversal/ Joshua B combo is just the tip of an iceberg that is about to be revealed.

Viruses:

Hivemind and Virus Breeding Ground (plus Incubator in the pack immediately before Order & Chaos) are the things I suspect everyone was expecting to see Anarchs receive eventually- virus token manipulation is coming and it’s not taking any prisoners. As with any multi-card combo, virus bombs are going to be expensive and slow to trigger, plus be somewhat telegraphed. My housemate is a lover of the chaos-dunk archetype- doing nothing until you can fire off a turn where you access about fifteen cards with Medium and all nighter. We think that these cards may just invigorate that archetype, incubating a Hivemind with a couple of mediums out then trashing ten odd cards with a Demolition Run on R&D, with a followup run to see a fresh ten could let you see half an opponent’s deck, even on a bad day.

Being able to turn on run-dependent viruses like Chakana and Deep Thought without having to run might also spark the possibility of a Shaper control deck, hitherto not a particularly viable playstyle, so I’m looking forward to that. In any case, it feels like viruses will give us the avenue to genuine runner combo decks that ‘go off’ in the same way that jackson-shutdown decks do. That the virus mechanic is inherently interactive goes a long way to making me excited about that prospect. Combo decks without the possibility of interaction have never been great fun to play against, but this mutable, fragile style of doomsday clock seems like it would be both enjoyable and skill-testing to play.

Virtual/Reality:

This is more speculation than anything else, but I’m expecting to see two new tutors to arrive on the scene. Nasir Meidan‘s quest for the virtual resource shards suggests that Shapers might get a Virtual type tutor- one that Anarchs will eagerly splash to get those Virus Breeding Grounds or Xanadus online early.

Anarchs on the other hand look well placed for a location tutor. Anarchs have always needed some kind of key to get Wyldside working smoothly and now we’re seeing a glut of locations like Duggars, Angel Arena and Sunrise Hotel (though I can’t find the spoiler for that one). To me Anarchs feel like the faction with the most thematic ties to locations- they’re the faction of the people, for the people and getting out there amongst the populace and leveraging their help seems to be a pretty Anarch-y thing to be doing. I’d love to see it be hardware, a jacked car or hopper or something. It would also let you splash a one of Personal Workshop, bringing that incredibly powerful tool without the crippling influence cost of having to run three of them.

If my suspicion is accurate, we’ll see Shapers tutoring virtuals, Criminals tutoring connections and Anarchs tutoring locations, one very thematic tutor for each of the factions.

Bad Publicity:

with Valencia Estavez partly spoiled, we have a runner who can guarantee bad publicity turn one. Obviously this is a godsend for those of us who enjoy the blackmail gamestyle, along with the ability to Planned Assault it we got in Honour & Profit, the Bad publicity wars look to be heating up. Synergising blackmail with on-successful-run effects that aren’t card based looks to be a definite strategy. Investigative Journalism is a simple way of getting yourself to 2 bad pub at which point you can start using it to power an economic engine, perhaps with haemorrhage giving you incidental benefits as well…

Unfortunately, Witness Tampering exists and I forsee if this kind of deck ever takes off, a simple splash of a couple of those will effectively hard-counter any strategy too dependent on getting the bad-pub rolling. Itinerant Protesters does show the potential for a bad-pub driven control deck and, as a side effect of all this bad pub manipulation entering the scene the prediction that NAPD contract will cycle out of consistent play seems to be likely to come true. Whether you’ll be seeing this kind of thing every time you go out for a few games though, well, it’s really too early to tell at this stage

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Weyland Identities:

So far we have Gagarin Deep Space, which promotes horizontal play. This one I am not currently so excited for because Weyland has the weakest asset suite of all the factions. Nevermind that Paywall Implementation and Gagarin Deep Space combine to effectively put a Popup Window in front of all your remotes, there’s just not a lot exciting to put in those remotes right now. Of course, that suggests that Weyland is going to be seeing a lot more interesting assets in Order and Chaos, so we shall see…

Ice is Nice

From the couple of ICE we have spoiled, there seems to be a strong mechanical theme in this set- advanceable ICE that has its rez cost reduced by a fair chunk each time you advance it. I really love this mechanic and I feel like it suits Weyland far better than the existing advanceable ICE- it lets you play big, beefy, scary ice that you have a slow but reliable way of getting online. Even more so, it provides weyland with an inherent defense against the existing counter to that strategy- shutdown all the things. No point shutting down an Orion (the Weyland ‘god’ ice) with four or five advancements on it- it’s trivial to get back online again. So far we’ve only seen this and Wormhole, both quite expensive pieces of ICE. I’d love to see some simpler, baseline pieces of ice that use this mechanic as that would really give Because We Built It an excellent boost. Speaking of boosts, Sub Boost isn’t really ICE, but it certainly changes the playing field. Sentries like Snoop and Ichi 2.0 become a lot nastier with an ETR attached, even if they do have to become barriers as well. In a ‘snipe the fracter’ strategy, you can put out your program trashers then turn them into barriers once they’ve done their job and killed the fracter.

We’re now also really starting to see the factions ICE identities solidify, how their ice develops over the course of the game. Jinteki ICE is mutable and mobile, HB ice is synergistic and strengthens other ICE. NBN ICE capitalizes on the runner’s gamestate (lack of a fracter, floating tags etc.) and Weyland ICE grows or depletes over the course of the game.

It’s (not?) all about the money:

Weyland has for a while really been a one trick pony. They kill you, and they make money with which to kill you. Interestingly, there are subtle hints of a more mysterious theme in Order and Chaos. The headliner quote of FFG’s reveal- ‘The real mission? We’re going to save the human race’ seems a little too closely tied to the Ender’s Game references of Space Camp and Glenn Station to be entirely coincidental. What is Weyland really up to? Is there something other than greed motivating this heavy handed treatment of those who try and interfere with Weyland’s agenda? Is the willingness to destroy perhaps motivated by a knowledge that the situation is so dire that any means justify the ends? I’m probably reading to much into it, but there seems to be an edge of fanaticism creeping into Weyland’s previously oligarchical theme and I’m curious to see where that leads, both mechanically and thematically.

I think the themes that began to be expressed in cards like Amazon Industrial Zone and Simone Diego (who, with the advent of these cheaper-through-advancing ICE, is beginning to look a lot more intriguing…) are coming to the fore as well. Weyland is about building things. Servers, ICE, systems of many parts. While this a core aspect of all games of netrunner, for Weyland it looks to be more than a way of holding on until you can biotic out your last 3 for 2 or get the astrotrain rolling. The Weyland game looks to be taking a strong turn towards playing a game where every card you’ve put on the table directly contributes to your victory, being part of a machine that feeds money in one end and gets increased benefits as that raw material is processed and refined by various cards. Weyland looks to be aiming to use ice to actually build the fabled impenetrable server, rather than just keeping all your fast advance tools safe. That’s pretty exciting.