Disclaimer: I didn’t go to Worlds. This is a breakdown from the stats, gluing myself to streams, and deep diving into NRDB and Meteor.

Firstly, congratulations to Wilfy Horig for a well-deserved win! Worlds was a fantastic event this year with a great variety of factions and ID’s, and was particularly exciting as the first Worlds post the new MWL. There’s a ton of exciting decks coming out of it, let’s have a look!

I’m using this spreadsheet for my data. Unfortunately I don’t know who to credit this to – FFGOP? Whoever it is, thanks very much.

CORP

There’s a few archetypes that stand out as the most successful. I’d say we have like…2 and a half “fair” decks, one busted combo and one degenerate grinder. The faction breakdown as Worlds progressed is quite interesting. At the start, we have Jinteki and HB far in the lead at 80 and 75 players respectively. Weyland follows up with 44 and NBN brings up the rear for once with 34 players. By day 2, HB comes out on top with 22 and Jinteki not far behind at 18. NBN has 9 reps remaining while all but 5 Weyland players have been eliminated. Finally, our Top 16 consists of 6 HB, 6 Jinteki and 4 NBN with no green to be seen.

A brief Weyland aside: On day 1, Titan is the 5th most popular Corp ID. The Atlas train is undoubtedly powerful but the strong Shaper turnout (with the accompanying Clot lock) meant that Titan simply couldn’t pull through. Skorpios and Gagarin are fairly well represented but fall victim to Sac Con and asset hate respectively. Ultimately, the reason for Weyland’s decline in this field is that they’re representing the same strategies as other factions but not doing them as well. Weyland needs a stronger faction identity because right now their color pie is just being a slightly crap version of everyone else.

THE FAIR DECKS

The best performing “fair” decks from Worlds, in my opinion, are:

Note that I’m taking a certain value of “fair” here – these are about as fair as a deck can get and still have enough teeth to win Worlds. Ultimately my condition is that they all rely on putting important cards in a remote that the Runner needs to interact with. CI has MCA, Jeeves and agendas; CTM never-advances behind Tollbooths and Data Ravens; Aginfusion chains Niseis. Each of them has a unique and powerful ability to punish the Runner for overextending and each can create incredibly strong board states where a win is almost guaranteed. Hence I say 2 and a half fair decks instead of 3.

THE COMBO

This deck has two paths to victory – a kill with Brain Rewiring and Contract Killer or scoring 7 points in one turn using Audacity and other CI tricks. It benefits from the “Butchershop effect” – as this is far from the only CI archetype around, it’s difficult for a runner to prepare and plan for and there are many shared cards with the fast advance or glacier decks.

THE GRINDER

As Dan says – sit there not losing until they run out of HP. Grind the runner down with net damage until they can’t steal Obokatas anymore. In my opinion the single most degenerate and unfun deck at Worlds – which is kind of a compliment too.

There are plenty of variations to all of the above that performed strongly, changing out small parts of the plan (for example Spags’ SEA Source CTM). The above decks are examples of overall strategies that performed strongly.

Another really interesting piece of data is the restricted card choices. GFI was out in front at 90 while Obokata was the second most at 69. By top 16, we had 6 GFIs, 5 Obokatas and 5 Fairchild 3s. Agendas matter and self protecting 3 pointers are a big deal.

The top two Weyland decks after the event were Skorpios at #37 and Gagarin at #44. Both do what those IDs do best – rush and asset spam. The nature of their strategies also require much more specific restricted cards than the generically useful GFI or Obokata in Hunter Seeker/Museum of History respectively.

RUNNER

Things are somewhat flatter on Runner side with Shapers representing just a hair under 50% of all runners at 113 of 233. Anarch still fielded 90 runners while Criminal dropped to abysmal levels – only 17, of which 8 were Geist (who’s basically a minifaction). So we really have 9 Crims – not great! The other minifactions had 3 Adams and 2 Apexes dueling for the click trackers and 8 Sunnys – one of whom even made day 2.

Shaper

The most successful ID by far was Hayley. Although there was plenty of hype around Smoke before the event many experienced players predicted she didn’t have the legs to make it through. That turned out to be the case pretty comfortably as only 3 of the initial 35 Smokes survived to day 2 with none making the cut. Meanwhile, Hayley made up 50% of day 2 and 9 of the top 16 runners in the cut. Like Geist, Smoke is great at breaking ICE but struggles more against other strategies. It’s only natural that Corps will pivot to those other strategies when strong glacier counters exist.

Nailing down a particular Hayley build is not easy as they’re designed as silver bullet machine guns with plenty of one-of solutions to various threats. The majority of builds were using the Tapwrm/Sac Con package for econ with either Laguna Velasco District or Professional Contacts as their draw engines. The main difference between the plans is their choice of restricted card. Wilfy’s winning deck uses Laguna to blast through the deck quickly, then do it again with Levy AR Lab Access. Greg’s runner up goes for a classic Aesops build with the very spicy Heartbeat inclusion to counter Rewiring. Team UK settled on Clone Chip for its flexibility. Each of these is very powerful, and any could easily have taken the top spot. The top Smoke came in at number 29 – still excellent! – using Magnum Opus.

Anarch

Arguably the main impact of Anarch this year was the Great Maw Debate, centered around that simple question – “is Maw good?” The answer was a resounding “probably not” with no Maws appearing in the cut and not many in Anarch at all – plenty in Smoke though. There were two main archetypes in evidence: a reg-ass build taken to top of Swiss by Abram and 3rd place overall by Dan D, and the Counter Surveillance builds that ultimately didn’t make top 16.

Of the reg shells, the most popular IDs were Val and MaxX, leaning on their inbuilt econ and setup acceleration respectively. An Edward Kim piloted by Australians Alex Forndran and Jesse Marshall did extremely well and aims to play more aggressively. Of note is the one-of Hunting Grounds, a card that showed up frequently in Shaper decks as well and is very strong in this meta thanks to Data Raven, Komainu, Data Loop, Loki and IP Block seeing widespread play. Reg Anarch promotes a much more aggressive playstyle than the Hayleys, so if you’ve been missing Crim try one of these out!

Criminal

Oh boy. Crim is suffering from a similar problem to Weyland at the moment where their faction identity is “other factions but worse”. Additionally, Criminals have the significant problem of having had their development balanced around Account Siphon and Desperado for the history of the game. Without those cards the rest collapses pretty quickly. Of the brave 17 who attended worlds a mighty 2 made day 2 and both of them were Geist, a Criminal in name only. Of the 9 non-Geist Crims 7 of them were on Gang Sign (5 Leela) which is not actually a good deck. Kitara needs to reboot Criminal pretty hard for them to see real competitive play any time soon.

Top “Criminal” at Worlds: Geist, at 12th. This is a very interesting build that forgoes the cloud breakers in favor of standard breakers and the Aumakua/Dean Lister package. It includes a huge number of resources and Off-Campus Apartment, then uses Calling In Favors to generate huge credit bursts. Underworld Contacts provide drip econ while Drug Dealer gives even more draw.

Top Criminal at Worlds: a Steve list that’s not on NRDB at 95th.

Minifactions

Sunny performed the best out of the non-Geist minifactions with a very respectable Day 2 finish at 33rd. It builds around the standard Sunny mega drip econ shell with the Tapwrm/Sac Con combo to slow the Corp down. The inclusion of 2 Clot and 3 Peddler along the Sac Cons also give it some legs against the faster Corps. Meanwhile, the top placing Adam isn’t on NRDB but the second best one is! And it was only two places behind so let’s feature that instead. Aumakua is fantastic for an aggressive runner like Adam so this deck exploits it as much as possible. Adam’s going to be real scary at some point, you heard it here first.

Netrunner is really good right now. The top decks require a ton of skill to pilot effectively but are in general very interesting. Any of the top 16 could very easily have taken it. Can’t wait for store champs!

Happy running