This month on the Snapshot: Anarchs are good, Weyland actually shows up and a new aquatic animal threatens to unseat the mighty turtle.

RUNNER

Tapwrm’s addition to the MWL was a pretty big deal for the faction it’s mostly played in, Shaper. The lock Hayley builds that dominated Worlds have more or less fallen off the radar. Instead, Hayley’s most popular builds are rather surprising – apparently she’s discovered a love of looting and pillaging. I’m talking about Pirate Hayley, a deck initially popularised by 2016 World Champion Chris Dyer. As he so eloquently points out, it’s called that because it has a hook and a bird in it. Now it has a crocodile too. The basic flow of the deck is kind of like Geist, where Tech Trader makes you a bunch of money and you use a variety of trashcan tricks to bust remotes. Also like Geist, the wincon is a combo of remote camping and hitting R&D hard – in this case, with Deep Data Mining.

Also on the Shaper front, there’s a lot of experimentation with new Runner Kabonesa

Wu. A prominent initial build was the Cold Ones style combo by crithitd20 – keep an eye out for this one. There are also several lock-style build around taking advantage of Wu’s ability to guarantee turn 1 Opus – Daine brings back his classic Congress build and the Moscow SC winner goes for a toolbox approach. Meanwhile, notable Shaper innovator/lunatic and Sneakdoor favorite bahram aka saetzero won an SC with his Reavershop build, because of course he did. Kabonesa is a good Runner to be tinkering with because she’s an infinite tutor which gives an enterprising deckbuilder a ton of potential to make something hideously game-breaking. Maybe it’ll be you!

As exciting as Shaper is, the tried and true Reg Anarch decks look to be by far the strongest Runners available at the moment thanks to either the raw econ of Val/bad pub or the speed of MaxX combined with the efficiency of the pile of good cards in faction. In Val there are two main flavors – the Comrades Indexing/Film Critic setup or the new Find the Truth/RNG Key builds popularised by gejben. The biggest choice you’ll face are your choice of restricted card, with a fairly even split between Employee Strike and Film Critic. However, in the current meta Strike seems to be the best call by a decent margin. This build recently won Canadian Nationals and is a very well-rounded deck with strong matchups across the board. The most common MaxX variants either aim for an event heavy, early game strategy or a more controlling build with more lategame econ.

On the less conventional side, Apocalypse Anarch has been making a comeback in both Edward Kim and Val. Opus/Frantic Omar is a reasonably popular choice for a controlling-style Anarch. Clan Vengeance decks have also been stirring and are looking forward to the upcoming Zer0 for a huge power boost.

Criminals are primarily represented by the Geist minifaction, which received a solid power boost in Corporate “Grant”. Interestingly, the most common builds don’t actually use the bin breakers! Other than that it plays much as Geist always has – snipe remotes, run R&D when the Spy Camera says to and Legwork if neither of those things has happened for a while. Also, Timmy Wong won an SC with Nero because he’s the people’s champion.

Finally, out of the “real” minifactions Adam continues to be the strongest (albeit much less popular than last month). The aggressive shell with Employee Strike continues to be the most popular version. Sunny is moderately popular but it’s hard to nail down a build. The structure seems to be putting in 3 Nexus, the breakers and maybe Power Taps, then putting in a bunch of out of faction draw and just filling up your 50 card deck.

CORP

The corporate world of Netrunner is in a pretty strange spot right now. NGO Front is shaping up to be a defining Corp card of the game, as it’s a huge power boost to any deck that wants anything to do with having a defended remote server. The removal of Violet Level Clearance and Brain Rewiring being added to the Restricted list has all but deleted CI from the metagame. In its place, Titan has sprung up as seemingly the fastest Corp.

Let’s look at Weyland first because this is the first Snapshot in basically forever where there’s anything interesting to talk about.

Titan FA is by far the biggest contributor because it turns out Reconstruction Contract is a good fast-advance tool when combined with Dedication Ceremony. Interesting how Dedication keeps popping up with busted interactions! The goal of these decks is to score Atlases by any means necessary as fast as possible. Consequently they all have 3 Fast Track and 3 Illegal Arms Factory to draw them as fast as possible, along with 3 Biotic Labor, Audacity, Dedication Ceremony and Reconstruction Contract. Although this is very much a glass cannon deck that is based almost entirely around Atlas, these tools reduce variance somewhat. It’s also uniquely well positioned because the Tapwrm restriction means that Clot-locking Shapers are nowhere near as popular. This seems like a great meta read more than the deck being busted, but it’s proving to be quite strong.

On the rushier side, Skorpios continues to do its thing, again taking advantage of the reduced prevalence of Sacrificial Construct. Argus can do it too! You could also do 24/7 combos with Armed Intimidation in Jemison, if you like to fast advance but in a complicated way. Finally, Gagarin asset spam continues to be a mid-tier threat.

NBN is finally having to change with the times. CTM has more or less disappeared since the best Runner deck is Valencia with 3 Employee Strike and 3 Mining Accident. Azmari, though, is an ID that lets you gain money every turn which is really strong. Wishbone won Canadian Nats and is essentially a hybrid of Sol Glacier with CTM tag punishment. It can make absurd amounts of money and score out in a taxing remote with the option to SEA Source + Exchange of Information for the win. Abram Jopp took a different approach with his 6 agenda build that uses MCA Austerity Policy for pressure and forces the Runner to steal 3 agendas while the Corp only needs to score twice and follow up with Echo Chamber. NEH asset spam/kill also has a presence but may suffer from Valencia’s dominance.

Jinteki is primarily represented by “panic Palana”, aka standard Jinteki glacier (which can actually be any ID but usually Palana or Aginfusion) that is basically always fine. A particularly interesting variant is this Jinja City Grid build with Fast Track that aims to go faster than normal and build a highly taxing remote with Seidr Adaptive Barrier. The Punitive Palana builds are fairly popular, and strong if you don’t expect to see Film Critic. PE Fast Advance is also surprisingly popular (by which I mean there was more than one list).

Nobody seems to be particularly interested in playing HB at the moment unfortunately. The main innovation is Timmy Wong using NEXT Sapphire plus The Twins (yes, seriously) to draw your entire deck and pull off Brain Rewiring or 7 point combos. It’s nowhere near the power level of the old combos though. We’ve also seen the HHN/Boom! CI make an appearance, although it’s had a similarly high drop in power level. Finally, Jinja Glacier appears to have decent potential. The linked list is out of Architects of Tomorrow but you could easily tweak this to work in CI or Asa.