Restructuring your Corporation
A new set is coming out, and with it, Second Thoughts brings us a potentially powerful new Corp card. (Well, actually, there are a number of interesting cards. But for now, there is one card in particular that I want to discuss). I am talking, of course, about Restructuring.
(Its back!)
Restructuring is a powerful corp economy card with a catch: it requires you to jump through the hoop of getting up to $10 in order to play it. A common analysis of this card is: “While it’s great in some decks like Weyland that are rich, my <NBN/Jinteki> deck is poor, so I can’t use it”.
Let’s look at some similar statements that one could make about Netrunner deck construction:
- “Atman is great in decks that have Datasuckers, but my deck doesn’t have datasuckers, so I would have to play other breakers as well, and would run out of memory, so I can’t use it”.
- “Scorched Earth is a great way to kill the runner, but my Weyland deck had no way to tag the runner, so I can’t use it”.
Essentially these analyses are saying that there deck is in a state of local maxima, and that adding only the particular card to the deck, would make it worse. That’s a valid point. Those decks probably wouldn’t want to only add those cards into their deck, and change nothing else. But therein lies the challenge of deck building. Sometimes, in order to accommodate a powerful card, you have to change more than one thing about your deck. Essentially, you have to build up a new deck, making a number of changes, and then evaluate the new whole against the previous deck. You have to get away from the local maxima, and try to see if there is a better, stronger deck, somewhere else in the deck construction space.
Perhaps we will find, through testing, that our original NBN deck was better all along. Perhaps we will find that our newly restructured deck is superior. When a card is powerful, when it has high potential, it’s worth trying to build around, to jump through hoops for. Maybe you’ll end up with something that doesn’t work. But maybe you’ll end up with a deck that uses only Atman as an icebreaker, and win GenCon.
Of course, it doesn’t always work out. Sometimes we think a card has a lot of potential, like Underworld Contacts. And we put all these link cards in our deck in order to activate it. We even added in Access to Gloabalsec!
(Remember that month when everyone was playing me? Yeah….)
And the end result is…well, not terrible, but lets just say that the grand total of Underworld Contacts used in 1st place Plugged in Tour decklists is a big zero.
Which result will we find when we test Restructuring? When we put it in our non-Weyland decks and try to get enough money to play it? Without testing, we can’t really know, but I suspect that it will end up being quite strong, and we will see a lot of corp decks focused heavily around burst economy cards.
How to Restructure?
Alright, so we want to try restructuring. How must we change our corp deck in order to accommodate it. First of all, we need to have ways to reliably reach $10, early in the game. Our goal is to get to $10, restructure up to $15, and then spend the money usefully. What cards can help us?
0) Weyland IDs.
This is #0, not #1, because it’s super obvious. The BaBW and GRNDL IDs obviously do a great job of letting you restructure. Everyone is already going to be easily throwing Restructuring into these decks.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get on to other corporations, where things are less clear.
1) Celebrity Gift.
Play Celebrity Gift with a full hand, and you have $10. Play the Restructuring you just showed them, and you’re at $15. Plenty of money to rez the Tollbooth on HQ so that they can’t get in and take those Astroscripts you just told them you have in your hand.
You say your Jinteki deck can’t get to $10, that it’s always too poor? I think that’s a bit unreasonable. Celebrity Gift is a good card! It makes Restructuring better, and Restructuring makes it better. Add Hedge Fund and you’ve got most of a strong economy already right there.
Of course, Celebrity Gift costs a lot of influence, so you can’t fit it into every deck. Also, it has a drawback, it reveals your hand. Hey look, now you have TWO build-around type cards! This is like a puzzle, you should go work on it. Hint: what works well with both? Jackson Howard.
2) Hedge Fund.
Play Hedge Fund and you are only $1 away from Restructuring. Easy!
3) Low cost ice and economy ice.
