Netrunner, while technically a portable game, is different from the handheld titles we typical feature here. For one thing, it’s not an actual tiny cartridge or digital experience; it’s a Living Card Game — think of it as like Magic the Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh, except it’s much cheaper since you don’t buy booster packs filled with random cards, instead picking up monthly data packs that contain all the cards for that particular release.

It’s also an asymmetric, two-player competitive game that pits resourceful hackers (think Shiren the Wanderer, pulling tricks out of his bag to survive any situation he encounters) versus huge megacorporations, sinister companies with hidden agendas protected in servers meant to keep those “runners” out, if not outright kill them.

I chatted with the game’s lead designer Lukas Litzsinger about Netrunner recently, but we mostly discussed its future and competitive scene. Just a quick warning: if you’ve no familiarity with Netrunner, maybe check out this intro video/tutorial, consider buying a Core Set, and come back in a few months after you’re acclimated with the game, otherwise none of this will make sense to you! Or just scroll through the article to laugh at the googly-eyed cards (credit to the Netrunners with Googly Eyes tumblr!).

10 Netrunner issues I talked about with Lukas

Near-Earth Hub and Consistency

I sat down with the designer right after Netrunner’s U.S. Nationals tournament at GenCon a few months ago, and naturally the first thing we talked about was how one particular corp identity, Near-Earth Hub, not only placed first at the event but seemed ubiquitous in the tournament’s matches, especially in the Top 8. Despite its dominance at one of the game’s biggest competitive events, Lukas argued that he still saw a lot of diversity in the runner and corp IDs:

“I think there’s actually pretty good variety at the top level of the game right now. The top, top 1 percent level, it seems to be skewing a little more toward the consistent decks, which is like Andromeda and now Near-Earth Hub. That’s something that we’ll definitely watch to make sure that consistency just isn’t too good. But overall, there was a lot of exciting and close games. The Top 8 did not show the diversity that was actually in the Top 16 and Top 32. I’ll have to actually break down the numbers, but just glancing through the decks, there were Reina decks and Whizzard decks and Replicating Perfection decks that just missed the cut, and it would have been really fun to see them go up against those other decks in that sort of environment.“

From there, the conversation shifted toward why many competitors stick with expected identities like Andromeda and Near-Earth Hub, if he believes other identities are just as strong and capable of winning.

“I think you definitely see more popular choices… But I feel like a lot of the less popular choices are also very good. And it’s hard because with Netrunner you can have a great deck, but if you can’t play the deck or practice with the deck, it’s not really going to matter. A lot of players have played Andromeda for a long time now, so they’re very comfortable with it. Of course they’re going to continue to play Andromeda because she is very consistent and they’re very comfortable with her, and they do well with her because they know how to play the deck. And there’s a lot of other decks… Like Anarch decks in particular are a little more combo-centric, and it’s a lot of moving pieces to manage, so it’s a lot harder to achieve that same level of success with anarch, just with the way the faction currently functions, than it is with criminal. And when you’re at a tournament and you’re playing for hours and hours at a time, the mental wear and tear of playing those decks that are a little more complicated is going to probably force you into more mistakes. So in any given match, you might have an Anarch deck or those Replicating Perfection decks do incredibly well. They’re potentially very strong. Replicating Perfection, I think, was throughout most of the tournament just as dominant as Near-Earth Hub. But over the course of a long tournament, it’s a lot easier to make one or two critical mistakes, you lose that game, and before you know it you miss a very aggressive cut. And so I think that was definitely one thing we have to take in mind when you look at the Top 8. They say, ‘Oh, this is so homogenous. That’s terrible’. And it’s like, well, I think there are other factors that lead to why these decks usually rose to the top. That said, we would like to see those decks end up actually being able to be winning decks and take tournaments. And so we have a Kate and Near-Earth Hub champion, but Near-Earth Hub definitely dominated the Top 8, so we have to make sure that it doesn’t become too popular because then everything is a mirror match, and we definitely don’t want that to occur.”

Shaking Up the Meta with Silver Bullets

Once players hone in on an extremely strong and efficient way of playing a deck, like say Near-Earth Hub Fast Astrobiotics, it can be difficult to nudge competitive players away from that consistency. I asked the designer how Fantasy Flight Games deals with that problem, as well as with obstacles like groupthink that discourage players from trying new ideas.

“That’s one reason why we have to sometimes print the ‘silver bullet’ cards that we do. I don’t really like to use that word because, you know, it has a negative connotation with card game players. Like, ‘Oh, a silver bullet. I just use it to beat your card, and then I win the game.’ And I don’t think they’re at that level with Netrunner. We’re talking about very specific answers to cards that aren’t actually going to straight up win you the game if your opponent is playing it. It doesn’t end the game with a headshot. You’re still going to be able to play the game and compete in the game. But we do have to make sure that as the card pool grows and we want to push it in a new direction and create new deck archetypes, it’s going to take a lot of time for people to find the most efficient, consistent builds out of those archetypes. When it comes down to a tournament, a lot of players would rather just go with something they’re more comfortable with. And so you have to print some cards sometimes that are perceived as silver bullets just to force the meta to be shook up and to make tournament players think, ‘Well, if I do play this deck, which is very consistent and strong and has been winning for a long time, I might run into X, Y, or Z.’ And so you want to make the equation just a little bit more complicated, and you don’t want any strategy to be just so consistent that you don’t even have to think about it. Because then the game will just stagnate.”

I mentioned that many of those perceived silver bullet cards, such as Cyberdex Virus Trial, rarely see play in most competitive games. Lukas countered:

“You don’t really see them played, but part of the reason you don’t see them played is you are sacrificing the consistency of your deck, and therefore you won’t put it in unless you think the meta is going to be dominated by the type of deck that it’s there to counter. In a way, just having those cards exist is enough because they serve as a check. If viruses did get really big all of the time, you might actually see Cyberdex Virus Trial being played. Perhaps it will with Order and Chaos coming out. There are a couple strong virus cards in there. It’s nice to have those safety valves in the meta just to keep things in check if they get out of hand. You know, Plascrete, for example, is a card that you always have to take into consideration if you’re trying to do a scorched tag’n bag sort of strategy. And even if your opponent isn’t playing it, it’s still going to affect you when you’re building your deck. You have to think, ‘How can I deal with Plascrete. I have to play Posted Bounty perhaps and maybe use Reclamation Order to get my scorches back to do it twice.’ Just having those [cards] in the game creates meta choices that payers can make. There’s one area of skill, which is building your deck. There’s another area of skill, which is playing the game. And then there’s a third area of skill, and that’s predicting what your opponents are going to play. That’s what those cards are there for, so that if you see something, a weakness, you think, in the current meta, then you’re able to potentially use those to your advantage.”

Online Card Games

While Lukas obviously wasn’t able to talk about any plans Fantasy Flight has to make a digital version of Netrunner (OCTGN plug-in notwithstanding), I did get his thoughts on porting a tabletop game to PCs.

“I think card games can work very well in an online space. Obviously there are a lot of challenges with porting a card game over to a digital space. One thing you lose is the tactile nature of being able to shuffle your cards and mess around with your decks and lay out your whole cards. And [there’s] the social play of Netrunner; there are bluffing elements. You look at poker, online poker is very different from playing poker around the table because you can’t read your opponents in the same way, so you have to rely more on the straight-up math and statistical probabilities that you’re looking at in the game. Whenever you move a game into the digital realm, you’re going to a lose some of that interpersonal interaction that makes the game really fun and memorable. On the other hand, you can very easily find opponents to play with because they’re a click of the mouse away. That can be a great boon for the game because sometimes it’s hard to build player-bases in your area. Or it’s 11 o’clock at night, and you’re not going to go to a game store to get into a game, but you can just log on, start something up, and enjoy the game. I think digital implementations can really reinforce a game by allowing people to enjoy it any time of the day and let you find somebody who enjoys it as much as them, and throw down.”

He’s made sure to check out a few online card games, too:

“I played [Wulven Studios’s Shadow Era] for a while. That’s a good game. Hearthstone has incredible polish. Blizzard puts a lot of detail into everything they do. Hearthstone is very impressive on a technical level. I enjoy playing it; it’s a fun game. It’s definitely a different space when you have like a card game created digitally from the very beginning. You can do different things with it. And Blizzard has experimented with that a little bit. But when it comes down to it, it’s still a very traditional experience, I think, because people are familiar with the genre and they’re kind of looking for that outlet. It’s exciting to see the growth of digital games and digital card games in particular. I think that is definitely something you’ll see more of as time goes on.”

Dirty Hands and Lucky Find

I asked if the Netrunner community ever came up with surprising strategies or took the game in directions that were completely unexpected, but he struggled to pinpoint many examples of developments that weren’t anticipated.

“There’s always surprises, but sometimes it’s hard to remember what you expected when you first [designed something] because by the time the cards come out, you hear so many different opinions from everybody. ‘Did I anticipate that or am I just spitting back out what somebody has told me now?’ But whenever you finish a play-test set, you think you have a pretty good idea of where those cards are going to land and what are going to be the general deck archetypes, but you never know. The community is always really creative, and you’re never going to be able to predict everything that they come up with. For example, Travis Chance has a dirty hands Exile deck, where he just takes pawns and keeps double installing the pawns. His version of the [Dirty Hands/Street Chess] deck he played and tweaked over and over and over again. I never would have expected you could actually achieve success with something like that at the level he has. It’s fun to see players push decks in a certain direction and come up with unique builds using some cards that some people think are underutilized or weak or just like ‘Oh that would never actually be able to win anything.’ But a lot of times if you put in the work and the effort, and you play the deck over and over and over again and tweak every single card, if you’re comfortable with it, that’s the most important thing. You can netdeck all you want, but if you haven’t played with the deck before, you’re not going to win with it. You have to put in the time and the experience and the effort.”

As for Lucky Find, it was clear from the start that the card would have a huge impact for runners, especially in Prepaid VoicePAD economies:

“There’s a reason that card is two influence, and that’s because it’s one of the best economy cards in the game, hands down. The burst it gives you, the fact that it only has a threshold of three credits, that’s incredible value. And we talked for a long time in play-testing like, “Is this a one-influence card? Is this a two-influence card?” It was never actually going to be a faction card because that would be just too good for any one faction. But there were people arguing for one influence and people arguing for two influence. And at the end of the day, it came down to… I see the card at one influence going into every deck. I think it’s that good. There’s no reason you wouldn’t spend influence for it. It would almost be like a Jackson Howard for the runners., and that wasn’t really something that we wanted it to be. That just lowers the deck diversity on the runner’s side. So let’s put it at two influence and actually make it a hard choice because if you’re running three, that’s six influence, and that’s over a third of most runners’ influence, and you can’t run some other card that’s really helpful to shore up a weakness in that faction by going all-in on economy. You can do it, but you just have to give up something in the process, and giving up three influence didn’t feel like enough for running three of them.”

Netrunner Drafting and its Future

As fun as Netrunner drafting can be, the format hasn’t taken off like we’ve seen in Magic the Gathering and other card games. Why hasn’t drafting become more popular in the community?

“Draft is kind of a tough sell because people are used to Magic [the Gathering] draft. They’re like, “Oh, maybe I buy a couple packs. It’s $15 or something like that. At the end of the draft, I can sell off the cards or sell off the packs, and it’s not going to cost me that much to play.” With Netrunner, when you’re dealing with an asymmetric game, you’re going to have to draft twice in one go. That’s going to drive up the price. You could do a half draft, but most people want the full experience of drafting corp and drafting runner. And because of our LCG model, you don’t really have the same secondary market that you have for Magic. You kind of have to look at draft as an experience. This is another way to play the game. I’m going to get entertainment out of this. It’s not going to have quite the same value as a Magic draft if I’m looking at it as a semi-investment or something like that. But I think the draft experience is as close to the original Netrunner as you can come in Android Netrunner because we’ve basically removed faction limitations. … It’s an experience that for a long time we didn’t think we could offer in the LCG environment, but it was something our competitive players really wanted, so we wanted to find a way to get it to them. Doing print-on-demand cards was a way to do that, so it’s pretty awesome to see that, you know, maybe we’re not selling a bazillion of them, but the people who are playing it are really enjoying it. That’s kind of what it’s there for.”

I asked if Fantasy Flight has reached its goals with drafting format, and how the format could be further improved, beyond including cards/spoilers from unreleased data packs:

“I think in a way we reached our goal. One thing that we might want to do in the future is to put a more competitive focus on it because it is such a high-skill test. There is a high-skill cap to draft. We’re running kind of casual draft events [at Nationals and Worlds], but we could start running a little more competitive drafts or just actually kind of push that as a slightly more competitive format.”

Order and Chaos Expectations

What can we expect from the Order and Chaos deluxe expansion pack coming out this winter?:

“Anarchs and Weyland should get a boost. It’s interesting; when Creation and Control was first announced, people were like, ‘Oh no, Haas-Bioroid and Shaper? Haas-Bioroid, the best faction in the game right now? They’re getting a box? They’re going to dominate forever!’ And then the general feeling after the box came out was that ‘Oh, Haas Bioroid didn’t get much stronger. They got more diverse, but they didn’t really get stronger. There’s more deck types for them, but their core decks didn’t get that much better.” For a while, they actually got worse because people were trying out all these new cards, so obviously your deck isn’t quite as efficient as it was before you threw in all these new cards. And then the same kind of thing happened with Honor and Profit. “Jinteki? Awesome. Jinteki could use a little boost. But Criminal? Whoa, Criminal is so good. This is going to be crazy.” But the same thing kind of happened there. Order and Chaos on the other hand, it’s like, 'Anarch, Weyland, balls to the wall.’ They are just going to get awesome cards, both sides. And we’re going to also try to give them both the deck diversity and archetypes that the other ones have in the process. But even something like [Because We Built It], the Weyland identity that has the 1 recurring credit for ICE, that everyone’s like, “Oh, I would never play that. It’s so bad.” We want to bring that advanceable-ICE-style play back to Weyland. And Anarch, the crazy run destruction play that’s been pioneered with Imp and Whizzard and Scrubbers. We want to push those factions to be diverse in deck archetype but also reinforcing all their main themes with strong cards that are going to have an impact when they’re released. And so I think you will see those factions get a boost in popularity hopefully at the top-tier level when the box comes out.”

Valencia Estevez

One of the Anarch identities from Order and Chaos that’s seen a lot of buzz is Valencia Estevez, who forces corps to start the game with one Bad Publicity. Will she be a competitive identity, or will she be more jank like all the Blackmail combo decks I’ve built in the past?

“Honestly all three of the runners in the Anarch box, I think are competitive. They’re very strong. Even [Quetzal] is really fun. That’s actually probably my favorite Anarch identity to play. I think Bad Publicity Anarch is going to be a thing. I don’t like to predict.. You never quite know how things are going to shake out. I would be surprised if a Bad Publicity Anarch deck didn’t do incredibly well at next year’s GenCon. I think it will be a strong archetype that a corp will have to start playing around dealing with in the future.”

Future Netrunner Events

Since I didn’t start playing Netrunner until this March, I missed out on the Plugged-In Tour last year. I also missed out on the Chronos Protocol tour this year, being based in North America. Unfortunately for me, it doesn’t sound like Fantasy Flight will keep holding events like these:

“So the Plugged-In Tour and Chronos Protocol Tour, those were awesome fun. Will we do something like that in the future? It’s possible. It was great to travel around and meet fans, but I wouldn’t expect something like that to happen every year. [The Plugged-In Tour was] kind of a one-time exclusive thing to promote the game and to meet fans. You know, the community wasn’t incredibly strong at that point in time. That just gives us developers and employees [a chance to] get a pulse of what’s going on with the game right now. Obviously having Worlds, having people come to Minnesota in the winter, I know it sounds crazy. It might be a little bit crazy, but it’s so much fun, having all of these gamers, LCG gamers and X-Wing gamers in the same place just playing all day, our various games. It’s going to be awesome. In Minnesota in the winter, you definitely need to warm up. There will be some after-hours partying and stuff. It will be a lot of fun. Worlds will be good. It will be interesting to see how the meta has shifted with the packs that have been released since GenCon and Worlds. We’ll get a couple more releases out.”

Breaking Gender and Racial Barriers in Netrunner

I talked quite a bit with Lukas about the game’s remarkable gender and minority representation amongst its runners, also going into why the actual community doesn’t reflect that diversity. If you want to read a couple more thousand words about that and Netrunner, check the piece out at Gamasutra.

Barrier of Entry

Lastly, I brought up an issue some are hoping Fantasy Flight addresses soon — the perceived rising barrier of entry, in terms of costs:

“The barrier of the entry remains at buy a core set of one of our products, open the box, try it out, see if you like it. That’s the entry point, and that’s always going to remain at about 39.95 [or $30 if you buy it at Amazon]. However, buying everything, which is what a competitive player is going to do, is definitely going to get more expensive over time. It’s still not the same as a collectible card game with blind buy boosters where nobody expects you to have everything. It’s just not kind of the business model. There are people who will do it, but for the vast majority of players, you are never going to get a complete set with all of the rares and everything else. Saying the barrier of entry is getting higher is true at a competitive level, but I don’t think it’s true at a casual level. The thing you have to be careful about is the casual player will just see all these packs. If you have a collectible card game, you say ‘Oh, booster packs. I just buy one of these. It’s all the same. They all look the same.’ You don’t see all the things you’re not actually buying. You get a couple cards in that pack. With an LCG, you see all these chapter packs or data packs lined up on a wall. “Whoa, there’s way too much stuff for this game.” That’s the part we have to be careful with and cognizant of. It just feels overwhelming to a new player if they expect to buy everything at once. So usually we suggest, you know, buy a core set. See if you like the game. Start looking up cards. We tell you what is in every pack. And so even our newer cards, they have QR codes in the back. If you’re at the store like, “I don’t remember what’s in this pack,” you can at least pull out your phone. We want players to know what cards are in a pack, and buy the packs that have the cards that you want. If you can buy everything, that’s awesome. You have a complete set. You can play everything you want in the game. But as the games go on, it is definitely something we want to address. So at Worlds this year, we’re going to announce some sort of policy and provide players with information about what the plan is for all of our LCGs moving into the future.”

Thanks for reading all of this!