[Netrunner for Newbs] On Tempo and Economy

This is part of a series of short articles I'll be writing to help beginners understand the finer points of running the nets. I'll be mostly covering some of the basic key concepts and strategies that more experienced players tend to take for granted, and how this understanding can significantly improve your gameplay.

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Parli l'Italiano?

Tempo is Italian for "time" and is one of the most important concepts to master in many boardgames. Popularised by Chess, tempo describes an abstract advantage one player may have over another. For instance, if you force your opponent to make a move that does nothing but retreat to save a piece, we say that he has lost tempo. If, on the other hand, your opponent makes a move that does two things at once - say, he pins your Rook against your Queen and manages to secure the centre of the board at the same time - we say that he has gained tempo.

Tempo is one of the most important things that a burgeoning Netrunner has to understand as well, because once you understand tempo, you'll be able to better understand how to construct a deck to take advantage of tempo, and why doing some things - like purging viruses - is often considered a tempo hit (but sometimes necessary).

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Click Compression

So, every player can click for 1 credit or click to draw 1 card: that's good, gives us a baseline to determine what things are worth at a minimum. When you have a card that allows you to do more than that, playing said card usually gains you tempo because you're doing more things in the same amount of clicks. For instance:

• Magnum Opus & Armitage Codebusting gives you +2c for 1 click
• Easy Mark gives you +3c for 1 click
• Lucky Find gives you +6c for 2 clicks
• Sure Gamble gives you +4c for 1 click

Of course, there's also things like cost, opportunity cost, draw cost, amount of time the card stays on the board etc to consider, but I'm not going into there. You'll have to decide for yourself if a Magnum Opus is worth 5c and 2 MU, or if it's better to play Armitage Codebusting, or if it's better to just stack event-based economy and so on.

The main takehome lesson here is that click compression exists and is (assuming that all costs are equal) universally a good thing. The moment you end up doing more in the same amount of time that another player would, you've gotten yourself some tempo. Some other cards that give click compression not in the form of credits on the Runner's side include Mass Install, Quality Time and Doppelganger.

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Burst Economy vs Drip Economy

A deck with burst economy gets large amounts of money immediately, whereas a deck with drip economy gets small amounts of money over a period of time. Burst economy tends to be event/operation-based, whereas drip economy tends to be resource/program/asset-based.

One of the main reasons we see burst economy more these days is that burst economy, although more unreliable, gives you tempo. Why? Consider: Easy Mark, one of the weakest burst economy cards, gives you 3 for 1 click, whereas Magnum Opus, one of the strongest drip economy cards, gives you 2 for 1 click. Whenever you play Easy Mark, you get a small surge of tempo because you have money that you can spend right now; whenever you play Magnum Opus, you lose tempo because you have to spend at least 3 clicks on it before you break even (although, after that, you have an infinite source of money, which is nice).

Another way of looking at this is to think of burst economy as being able to give you what you need when you need it. If you need 4c to get into this server this turn, it doesn't matter that your Daily Casts will pay out more over time than a Sure Gamble: you lost your window of opportunity to steal the agenda. Drip economy lets you build up money, but burst economy gives you money when you need it.

This isn't to say that burst economy is inherently superior to drip economy, of course. However, you'll have to keep in mind that drip economy almost always has a hidden tempo cost, so be prepared to lengthen the game if your deck is powered by drip economy. Hearkening back to advice from my previous articles, you have to be aware of which game phase your deck is strongest in and build your economy accordingly.

Burst economy also has another disadvantage, and that's its lack of staying power. The moment you recover the cost of your Magnum Opus, every click thereafter is pure profit, and the Opus is going to stay around for a very long time, to give you money whenever you need it. However, the moment you play your Sure Gamble, that's it. Until you draw another economic event, you're stuck clicking for money.

>Example: Daily Casts pays out 5c net over a period of 4 turns without any clicks needing to be spent. However, for the first 1.5 turns, the runner is still struggling to break even with the tempo cost that he lost by paying 3c to put the Daily Casts down.

>Example: Sure Gamble pays out 4c net immediately. However, if the runner lacks the 5c he needs to pay the card's cost, he must click 5 times to put the money together first: which is, itself, a loss of tempo. For this reason, people who play Sure Gamble must make sure that they're able to meet the cost easily, either by making sure they have enough money in hand all the time, or by making sure they have cheaper sources of bursts.

Case Study: Liberated Accounts

An Anarch Armitage Codebusting that pays out 4c per click? Holy shit that's great! Except that it costs... 6c? Aw man. It's still good, but why isn't Liberated Accounts being included in every Anarch deck? It's because of the tempo cost associated with the card.

Anarchs are a notoriously poor faction. The way they gain tempo is, often, not by compressing their own clicks, but instead by wasting the corp's clicks. How's that work? Well, for starters, Noise gets to discard a card from the top of the deck, which will end up denying economy to the corp or disrupting their plans one way or another. Whizzard trashes the Corp's economy for cheap, bringing them down to the Anarch's level of poverty. Reina makes it more expensive to rez ice. You get the idea.

Now add in the fact that Anarchs can threaten multiple servers at a time - through Medium, Nerve Agent, Keyhole, Datasucker and more - and you'll end up with a Corp that is forced to take a tempo hit in order to ice up everywhere. Viruses, an Anarch specialty, can also get out of hand sometimes, and the only way to rein them in is to purge: which, in turn, costs the Corp an entire turn of doing stuff.

So, Anarchs cost the Corp tempo instead of gaining tempo themselves. That's great. What's that got to do with 6c? Well, because they specialise in disrupting tempo, they have very little means of gaining tempo themselves, which makes it difficult for them to scrap together a large amount of money like 6c. Even after scraping together that amount of money, you take a further tempo hit by only recovering your investment after 1.5 clicks, making it a card that - while strong - is rarely played in most Anarch decks.

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Dancing to your Faction's Tempo

Shaper gains tempo by compressing card draw. By being able to draw many cards (Diesel, Quality Time) or tutor the right cards at the right time (Test Run, Self-Modifying Code), Shapers ensure that they will always have the programs they need at the right time.

Criminals gain tempo by compressing economy. Many of their cards have the ability to make them ridiculously rich, but many of their cards also cost a lot of money, which equals them out. However, they have influence, which means that they're able to import some less costly options from out of faction in order for them to capitalise on their in-faction economy.

HB gains tempo by manipulating clicks directly, either by getting more clicks themselves (Director Haas, Biotic Labor) or by forcing the runner to lose clicks (bioroid ice).

Jinteki gains tempo by forcing the runner to draw more cards (net damage) or by forcing the runner to spend clicks making runs that they don't want to make (Replicating Perfection + Sundew, checking out facedown cards in a shell game deck). They're something like the corporate equivalent of Anarchs, in that they gain tempo by forcing the runner to lose tempo.

Weyland gains tempo by being ridiculously rich (GRNDL Refinery, Building a Better World). I mean, honestly, that's pretty much their entire gimmick. Oh, and I guess they're also able to threaten to kill you once in a while (Scorched Earth). Whatever, no big deal.

NBN gains tempo by being able to gain free clicks (SanSan City Grid, Astroscript Pilot Program) or by taxing the runner through tags (Data Raven, Midseason Replacement).