Grip.Cards

Here's Some Advice I Wish I Got Earlier About Playing Netrunner

You've reached the Deep Net, a new series of articles about my year spent learning Netrunner — and what wisdom I earned along the way.

It’s been about a year since I started playing Netrunner in earnest, and I remain just a beginner. One of the reasons I moved onto Netrunner as my lifestyle game of choice is just how different it ends up being from any reskin of the Hasbro-flavored dudebasher du jour. As good as it feels to be playing a game that is fresh and new, its differences unfortunately also end up making it quite a bit harder to improve at, to truly understand what makes it tick.

I’ve written a half-dozen variants of this article, trying to pry general rules for improvement, and each time I had to stop and re-evaluate what I’m doing and start from scratch. There is just not the kind of literature for this game that the one Magic: the Gathering in the room can command, unfortunately. There’s a gap in helping people to get from the point where they know the rules and play the tutorial games, to where they can play a game competently in a consistent fashion.

In the end, I’m just too new to be confidently Spouting Big Truths about the game; I’m definitely not at the point where I’m any consistent myself! I opted instead for something a little more personal: listing pieces of advice that have made me consistently better at the game, even if they’re not necessarily things that I am confident are absolutely right for everyone. Experience may prove some parts misguided, or unnecessary; we’ll see. But, so far, they have helped me, and hopefully they may help you as well.

Without further ado:

One: Stay Flexible.

More than in your Typical Hasbro-Style Dudebasher, Netrunner is an exercise in competitive plan achievement. It truly feels like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time: your actions matter in the small and tactical —

(and never you forget your credit total, your opponent’s, what ice is down, what icebreakers are down, what’s open, can you jam agendas safely, can you get some more accesses under your belt, what’s your read on the new card in the server, what’s the risk assessment on getting that wrong, can you put at least some pressure by forcing your opponent to rez ice, what do I need to pay to break a specific piece of ice)

— and in the larger and strategic —

(how far are you on your game plan? how many resources have you spent so far, and, have they been efficient enough? how many have you spent responding? how many will you need to get the rest of your deck’s game plan into action? how much along is your opponent on their game plan? have you identified their archetype? their specific strategy? how close are you to winning, or to losing — are you on game point? is your opponent?)

— and the border between these two larger categories of considerations can become quite fuzzy, as you spend your precious mental presence on figuring out what your next click ought to be. It’s a terrible mix of some intuition, built from pattern-matching your experience and by keeping up to date with the meta, mixed with the cold, hard math of credits needed and clicks left.

More than in other games, the interplay of these two is fluid. Understanding when and how to weigh one or the other can be, elsewhere, the difference between a good player and a pro — but in Netrunner, it feels more like the difference between a complete beginner and a competent player.

This is already a big realization by itself. (“What do you mean, I can’t improve significantly at the game simply by learning to be better at low-to-the-ground tactical decisions alone?”) But it was in the process of figuring out which of these considerations was most important that I noticed that “can you make rules or guidelines for what’s more important, tactics or strategy?” is the kind of question that is basically impossible to answer well.

It all ends up depending: on circumstance, on reads, on matchups and on meta state. Where other symmetrical games lend themselves more easily to general principles, with resource trades and move value that one can largely quantify, the information asymmetry in Netrunner frustrates that kind of analysis at every turn.

In short: to play Netrunner well, you have to embrace specificity and ambiguity, and stay flexible in your approach to your decisions, because unambiguous wins based on first principles are just way fewer and farther between.

It’s a game where the options are many and available together on turn one, and limited clicks require you to sequence a handful of those very carefully; card advantage works very uniquely; hidden information stops you from making plans that are universally valid, the kind of plan that need only inflect for tactical considerations once you understand which matchup you're in. It is rare for a move to make the decision tree less complicated, in Netrunner — not without considerable work in supplying outside knowledge and in-game reads. Knowing when and where to push for the uneven exchange, and how to do so as efficiently as possible, is not just about a few interspersed key moments in a sea of low-to-the-ground decisions, but a going concern that doesn’t ease up for the entirety of the game.

If you're thinking this is a lot of work: you're correct. Luckily, you don't have to process this salad in your head every time you need to take a decision. There are a bunch of decent heuristics that are useful to avoid general blunders and start making better, more efficient decisions and avoid getting into game states that are more obviously bad for you. (I intend to have separate posts discussing them, and where, how, and why you should heed them — but of course, because the whole point here is to stay flexible, also when you should not.)

The need to embrace flexibility and specificity is the biggest takeaway I found for myself, and, I will be honest, it can be absolutely infuriating that it is so central to the game — especially to someone who would rather be given immediate, actionable advice. Understanding this means understanding why, when asked, people who are skilled at Netrunner will immediately go into the specifics of a matchup or game, rather than bring up a general rule; or why they will tell you one thing and then immediately bring out counterexamples. The work needed to bridge this gap makes for a very complicated transition from "I know the rules" to actual competency — and this is why it is the first and most foundational piece of advice I can give, despite just how complicated it can make everything that follows.

So, remember: the guidelines here are a lot looser, and applying them to the visible board state without thought only ever ends in losses. These guidelines can still be valuable, but they only truly become useful only when you do the work of bringing context and intuition from the specific game you are playing into your decisions.

Two: Take Notes!!!!! Take Notes!!!!!!!

That can be a bit of a bummer if you are here for actionable advice — so, here’s some that can make things a lot easier for you, immediately: take notes during a game!

As a person with ADHD and dyscalculia, with poor memory and limited ability to handle mental arithmetics, I tried to play Netrunner like I play other games, by keeping what I could in my head and referencing the board… and it simply would not work out. There's too much that's slow to add up, and there's too much that, if forgotten, risks you making runs with much less information than you'd need.

I have always been loathe to take notes — but, let me tell you: the moment I started doing so was an immediate increase in effectiveness and confidence. Suddenly, I could know how much to break something for without having to painstakingly count — or worse, just going for it while short a credit or two, losing the game just because the attention span ran out. There is so much hidden state in this game, and so many of your decisions depend on bringing specifics into it, that having a way to make the parts of the hidden state I can unravel clear and present has been nothing less than a must for me.

I've found that most of that happens to be when you play a Runner game, so here's an example of what my note-taking looks like for that case:

The notation may be a little obscure, and may only really work for me, but, basically, I'm recording:

• What pieces of ice (the slashes) are in front of Archives (the down triangle), R&D (the up triangle) and HQ (the square), and each remote server. For each of them, I write a little note about context; I've found it useful to write which breakers I had when the ice was installed — the slashed 'B' above means I had a barrier breaker (and thus this is probably not a barrier, or if it is, it's one that my breaker cannot easily deal with), and, for ice that's rezzed (the full X), how much I may need to pay to break it, if I can.

• Each card I happen to know or see in R&D and HQ, including when cards move to or from either (if possible — I try to make educated guesses for cards that are installed, for example).

• Each card that is relevant in Archives, like a trashed Mavirus or Subliminal Messaging.

• If I can, also how many cards the opponent has drawn (the tacks at the top) as a rough visual indication of how many agendas should have, on average, left R&D. This isn't an exact count, of course, but may help figure out the odds when I have a solid read that agendas are just not in a remote, and perhaps a, say, HQ run may yield more than a remote run, or it's a good time to force them to use their Spin on the table.

• You may note that the note matches the order of servers you find on Jinteki.net — when playing IRL, I try to match them to where visually they are on the mat.

• Sometimes, on install, I will also write guesses down based on the cards I saw in HQ or R&D, especially for ice.

Things I do not write down are largely about the composition of servers' roots; those change too frequently to have a visual notation, and I find that in general I have an okay handle at keeping the relevant reads in my head, now that the notes are doing heavy lifting on the rest. What you can or cannot handle may be up to you, so it's a matter of experimentation to see if this fits you and which parts are better made clear by not taking up space in a (potentially unreliable) head.

There is a lot less hidden information you can't just pick up and read as the Corp, but I found some note-taking there to be also very valuable. Cards trashed to damage that seem relevant, cards whose effect I tend to forget, any time I see the Runner's hidden information for some reason, or my guesses for whether they will try to, say, quest — all good things to write down so they are not understood one moment and forgot later when they count.

So, the tip here is that you may want to figure out something like this for yourself — it really filled a gap I was struggling with, and I believe that if you're having similar trouble, it may help you too. Finding something like this that lets you see yourself improve on things you thought you could never resolve is, truly, an incredible feeling.

Three: Take Care of You.

On that note, there's one piece of advice I was kind of dreading to give, but that is so intensely important has to be said out loud. Here it is:

Take care of your happiness, your focus, and your mental health, and prioritize them above any pressure you may feel around your play.

Learning Netrunner so far has felt a lot, to me, like trying to understand pro Magic during the peak of the pandemic: it can be opaque, grueling, and at times intractable. It may interact more or less well with your learning style; it will take a while to feel like you're doing something right, and when you are — if you're like me — you may feel like it's hard to figure out exactly what changed for you to go from ineffective to capable.

A ton of the wisdom about this game is locked up into internalized tacit knowledge in good players’ brains. That most effective play has to be internalized isn't an unusual fact in competitive strategy games, but the ratio between tacit experience and explicit knowledge available for Netrunner is significantly skewed toward the former when compared to other games. Parsing what to do can be really challenging for someone starting out who doesn’t have the skills or resources to be effective at extracting wisdom from experienced players.

(I suspect a lot of these difficulties are about the fact that, when we talk about the game, we sometimes apply language from other games to Netrunner to understand what we're doing, and it doesn't capture exactly the right vocabulary yet. There's a lot of specific jargon in Netrunner, but it mostly describes overarching tactics or close-to-the-ground moves more than being able to describe how strategies differ between each other or why or how they work, and while imported terms like 'combo' apply more or less cleanly, others like, say, 'aggro' and 'control' can have comparable meanings, but how exactly they apply differs a whole bunch from other games, and even across Corp versus Runner.)

So: if you're talking to a better player than you and being completely baffled about what they find relevant and why; if you are looking at several lines and struggling to figure out how moving one or two pieces around changes everything; if you struggle to tell someone the difference between a reg build and your dorky variant; if you feel sometimes you're just not getting it: you're not alone, this game is fucking complicated to play and describe and internalize at all levels of experience.

Experience, of course, still remains the best source for getting some of that hard-won tacit knowledge for yourself: the best way is definitely to do reps, to do them thoughtfully, and discuss them with people you understand and that can manage to be accessible to your learning style at least some of the time. Also, the lesson on staying flexible still applies: is there an angle where your thinking is fixed across lines that you may need to abandon or shake up? If a good player is telling you to do something you would not in a million years… well, sometimes you can extract what their hidden assumptions are, and sometimes the person with hidden assumptions is you, and you may need to shake some of them off first.

All of this is highly personal, of course, and it’s a lot of work that we shouldn’t really need to do so much of. Finding more accessible and communal ways to describe how to get there, in a fashion that is explicit and useful, falls to all of us. We, as a community, need to find better ways to help ourselves and each other make sense of the game outside of internalizing just so much practice.

Unfortunately, we don't exactly have the notional equivalents of, say, 'who's the beatdown's, nor have we done the work to explicitly apply window theory or any of a million tools from That Other Game to this one… again, yet; we do not have the money going around for a cottage industry of pros teaching others in that way.

That said: we have people like Andrej showing consistent play and theorycrafting week to week, and the Neon Static people doing new-player-friendly content, and Eli putting up actual deckbuilding theory on QTM's YouTube channel, and classics like The Two Year Turn, and so many more streamers making sure that examples of good play are seen. I bet there are pieces written on the game from the peak FFG era that I just don't know myself but could help build the right abstractions — once you can abstract a piece of complexity away with the right vocabulary, the right insight, and taking apart what forces contribute to it, it becomes easier to evaluate the environment it exists within and understand and communicate about the whole.

It's been a bit of a time for Netrunner over the years. But we’re a good, passionate and eager community: I have no doubt in my heart that we will get there.

And on the days where you feel you can't get there — when everything is gibberish, and you can't get the practice in, and the world is crashing around you like it is around all of us, and you're pissed about how little energy you have left for learning when you do get to drag yourself to open play at 6 PM after a long, stressful work day that either uses up the same resources you need to play or numbs them out of your ability to grab them, and the help from your meds is also drying up around that hour, and—

ahem.

… well, remember that you goddamn matter. You matter to yourself: there is no you without taking care of you. If you think playing Netrunner is cool, know that there is no you-playing-Netrunner without you-taking-care-of-you, either. The game is in a good place, as I write this, and it will be there for you again whenever you want, even if you take a break, and destress, and take care of other things in your life and nurture them to recharge, and go to gently build both the ability to manage your learning, and the resilience to bear the difficulties that you cannot really affect.

So, yeah. Take care of you. What feels out of your reach isn't, necessarily, even when you feel it is; but the only way to get there is to make sure you are at your feasible best when you try. Even if that may mean taking breaks, thinking of something else for a while, deciding whether it's worth it to come back. You're fine, your pace is fine: we're all in a weird marathon, figuring out how it all works while trying to find the words to talk to each other effectively about it, and we're all coming in curious and eager and mid-stride.

To recap:

• stay flexible, and embrace ambiguity and specificity;
• take notes, or, more generally: find ways to make the game work with the way your mind works, and accommodate along the way;
• and take just so much care of yourself, by understanding the context that makes this game difficult and working with it rather than pressuring yourself. These three helped me get a ton better, even on the days where I don't think I will be doing any good — the difference is clearly there. And I hope that can be a starting point to develop ways that can help yourself, as well.