Decks to Beat – Weyland Plugged-In

From time to time on the Legend of the Five Rings side of Strange Assembly, I’ve assembled “Decks to Beat,” and with a surge of deck data from the Plugged-In Tour, now seemed like a good time to bring the concept over to the Netrunner side of things, what with emergency weekend travel for work blowing up my chance to actually play in one. *grumble*

Decks to Beat are things that you need to, well, be able to beat if you want to have much tournament success. They may or may not be the “best” deck, but they’re a deck that’s all over the place and doing well. In these articles I try to look at what the standard card choices are for these decks, and then assemble them together into a deck that will be handy for testing against – I’m not advancing them as the most optimal version of the deck, but (IMHO) you need to be able to beat the most common version of a deck more than you need to be able to beat one particular optimized version of a deck. They may also be a handy starting point for testing with, but for that you will want to tweak and optimize them to suit your meta and your playstyle.

One deck on each side of the aisle has really stood out in winning Plugged In events. Tomorrow we’ll look at Andromeda for the Runner, but today we’ll start with the Corp’s most successful archetype, Weyland Tag ‘n’ Bag.

Identity: Weyland Consortium: Building a Better World

Duh.

Agendas (~11)

3x Hostile Takeover (1)
3x Project Atlas (2)
2x Government Contracts (3)
2x Geothermal Fracking (2)
1x Posted Bounty (1)

Tag ‘n’ Bag Agendas are pretty single-minded – tutor up Scorched, get money to pay for Scorched, hand out a tag so you can play Scorched, etc. Project Atlas and Hostile Takeover almost achieve 3x in every single Weyland Scorched deck. Geothermal Fracking and Government Contracts average out to a 2x each. Throw in a singleton Posted Bounty and, luckily for us, this average mix works out to exactly the 20 agenda points we want for a 49 card deck.

Assets (~4)

3x Snare! **
1x Jackson Howard *

We’re going to deviate from straight averaging here to aim for a more typical deck. Because a few decks run no assets at all, while a few run Melange Mining Corp as a 2x, the first Melange is technically more common than the third Snare! But nobody ever runs 2x Snare!, and I’m going to give the trio of Snare! the nod over a singleton Melange for now.

Upgrades (~1)

1x Corporate Troubleshooter *

Having said that, I’ll go the other way for the moment for the Upgrades. Most winning Weyland Scorched decks have no Upgrades, but a substantial minority to, and of those that do, the Upgrade suite is almost always 2x Corporate Troubleshooter. We might drop this out of the gauntlet deck by the time we’re done, however.

Operations (~14)

3x Scorched Earth
1x SEA Source **
3x Beanstalk Royalties
3x Hedge Fund
2x Green Level Clearance *
1x Oversight AI
1x Power Grid Overload

There’s a good amount of variance in the number Operations, ranging from only 10 up to 18 (those card slots have to go somewhere if you’re one of the decks with no Assets or Upgrades), but not so much where it counts. Those 10 are, of course, 3x Scorched, 3x Beanstalk, 3x Hedge Fund and 1x SEA Source – every single deck ran that package, for pretty obvious reasons. A pair of Green Level Clearance is pretty clearly the next most common play, but it gets dicey after that. The first Oversight AI is as common as the second Green Level Clearance, but that’s not something that usually shows up as a singleton in a “real” deck. The single Power Grid Overload is less common, on average, than Oversight AI, but can more reasonably be a singleton. The tail of of the Operations could be another place to knock a few cards off if we need them elsewhere.

Barriers (~6)

3x Ice Wall
2x Hadrian’s Wall
1x Bastion

Once you set aside the lone deck with a single-Bastion Barrier suite, there’s a lot of commonality among the decks here, and this section is pretty straightforward. The one exception is that if you look on an individual card level, a single Wall of Static is as likely to be here as not. That would take us to 7 Barriers though, and these decks average only six – ah, the vagaries of rounding. We’ll have to keep that Wall of Static in mind.

Code Gates (~3)
2x Enigma
1x Tollbooth **

Again, a straightforward selection. The Code Gate population of these decks is really low (sorry, Yog)

Sentries (~9)

3x Archer
2x Shadow
2x Caduceus
2x ???

Here we’re fragmented enough that, while the average Sentry output for the deck is almost nine, there’s no agreement what you might want after the seven listed above. Data Raven? Draco? One of half a dozen other Sentries that only appear in one winning deck?

Other (~1)

1x Chimera

Like the Upgrades above, Chimera usually isn’t seen in these decks, but it’s just barely common enough as a 2x or 3x to make the average Weyland deck sport one … if you round up.

Conveniently enough, the ways the rounding has broken down in the above estimate has left us with exactly 49. To normalize the deck a little bit, I’m going to drop the singleton Oversight AI in favor of the second Corporate Troubleshooter – neither of those cards usually appears by itself, and the 2x Troubleshooter is slightly more common than the playset of Oversight AI. I’m going to add a seventh Barrier in the form of a single Wall of Static, and take that slot away from the lone Chimera. For the eighth and ninth Sentry slot, I’ll slide in the third Shadow and the third Caduceus – since at least a couple of those are in almost all of the decks, I think that’s more relevant to test against than a random Flare or Neural Katana.

Identity: Weyland Consortium: Building a Better World

Agendas (11)

3x Hostile Takeover
3x Project Atlas
2x Government Contracts
2x Geothermal Fracking
1x Posted Bounty

Assets (4)
3x Snare! **
1x Jackson Howard *

Upgrades (2)
2x Corporate Troubleshooter *

Operations (13)
3x Scorched Earth
1x SEA Source **
3x Beanstalk Royalties
3x Hedge Fund
2x Green Level Clearance *
1x Power Grid Overload

Barriers (7)
3x Ice Wall
2x Hadrian’s Wall
1x Bastion
1x Wall of Static

Code Gates (3)
2x Enigma
1x Tollbooth **

Sentries (9)

3x Archer
3x Shadow
3x Caduceus

Now, if I’ve counted correctly, the deck even ends up at the 15 influence limit. Note, however, that for testing purposes it wouldn’t really be a big deal if this ended up at a few more – it’s for testing, after all, not running out at a tournament.

Let me know what you think, and if the “Deck to Beat” format works out reasonably well for Netrunner. And stay tuned tomorrow for Andromeda!

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