Terminal7 17: A Duel of the Fates

[Nelsormensch]

Terminal7 17: 

 

A Duel of the Fates

People like data because it's simple, honest, specific. It's either 0 or it's 1 and there's nothing in between. While that might be true for individual bits, the best runners knows that in aggregate, data isn't static. It flows and changes, depending on where it lives. Like a raging river, data too has eddies, undertow and currents.

 

Nels and Jesse explore The Spaces Between this data, looking at the latest data pack in the Lunar Cycle and its introduction of a new type of event- currents. Also discussed is the Overdrive draft set, which includes a number of as-yet unreleased Lunar Cycle cards and how they hint at things yet to come.

 

Games Discussed: Android: Netrunner

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• Ed Harrison's NeoTokyo OST
• Matt Marteinsson's Mattesque EPs

[Nelsormensch]

And here are the 3 winning submissions for the "tell us a tale of using an interesting card" content for an alt art Wyldside. First, Robert Ramirez:

 

This past weekend I spent some time demoing Netrunner at the local Wizard World Comic Con, to both spread the gospel and to try to find new blood for our local San Antonio meetup (meetup.com/alamolcg).  Between demos, I played real games with a buddy of mine who was demoing other euros in the same game room.  For our last game of the weekend, I ran a Tennin Institute deck.  Because I had never built my own TI deck, and due to lack of time, I shamelessly netdecked (props to ODie on netrunnerdb).  My opponent was running a fairly run-of-the-mill Noise deck (fixed breakers, datasucker, Imp, Medium, etc with Overmind and Femme).  

 

This game was just the perfect storm.  The first couple of turns set the tone for the rest of the game, when he facechecked my Swordsman with a 5 power counter Overmind in play.  Boom!  

 

But that was only the beginning.  When I was at 4 points and he was at 0, he decided to get a bit more aggressive, thanks to the pressure that comes from Trick of Light/Free TI advancement token shenanigans.  So this eventually is what happened: 

 

Runner's turn:

-Click One: draw bringing him up to 6 cards

-Click two: Install Femme, and "Femme" the middle ICE card of three on my scoring server, which had 4 advancement counters on it (thanks Tennin!) but was still unrezzed.  I'm guessing he thought it was Ice Wall....

-Click three:  run R&D.  I did not rez my single ice protecting it.  Snare comes up.  Boom!  His hand goes down to 2 cards.

-Click four:  he decides to float tags, and ran my scoring remote with the Femme'd ice.  All my ice on that server was unrezzed.  This it what it looked like:

 

Susanoo

Tyrant (with said 4 advancement counters, and now Femme'd)

Cell Portal

----server---

Nisei Mk II with 1 advancement counter

 

So then I don't rez Susanoo.

He continues the run.  I rez the Femme'd Tyrant with the 4 counters...

He pays for it.  I smile inside...

I rez Cell Portal.... my hands are starting to sweat at this point....

With no decoder, he re-approaches my unrezzed Susano.  He wants to continue the run. So of course I'm happy to oblige by now rezzing Susanoo.    

He can't break it and bounces over to Archives, which looks like this:

 

 Ichi 1.0 (rezzed)

------archives----

3-4 facedown cards 

a few face up cards including one Shock.  

 

I can't describe the power trip I felt.... the pounding in my head that muted all sound.... the slowing down of time around me... similar to a record slowing down... I hadn't realized I was holding my breath for what seemed like an eternity... All this because I realized I was forcing him into a meat grinder...

 

He can't break the Ichi, because of the credits spent on Tyrant!

Ichi trashed his single Datasucker and Femme, while inflicting some brain damage.  He is now down to 1 card.  

He's a mess at this point. I could tell he had lost hope by now.

He decides to access archives knowing that the face up Shock will bring him down to 0 cards... 

 

.... still holding my breath.... trying to keep my hands steady.....  I slowly flipped over the second Shock.... for the game!  

 

Of course, I kept my cool and did not jump out of my pants in celebration because:

A. He hadn't played ANR since the beginning of the Spin Cycle, so he was very rusty and had no idea what to expect from the more menacing Honor and Profit Jinteki.  

B. I made that Runner deck, so he had no idea how to pilot it.  

C. I'm not a dick gamer.  

 

Still, it felt amazing seeing it all work.  

[Nelsormensch]

Kurt Beyerchen's:

 

I'm new to the competitive gaming scene. In fact, Netrunner is the first game I've played where I've entered tournaments. The positive stories surrounding the community, as shared by you guys and others, helped ease my fear of being made fun of for my terrible decks. 

 

As a rule, I avoid netdecking, as I only just learned from your last podcast the idea is termed. While I see the things people are doing by watching YouTube videos of casts by TeamCovenant, etc, I make it a point to grind through the deckbuilding process, trial and error, learning more about myself and the cards in the process. I don't play on OCTGN, and only have one local friend who plays. We get a few games a week, always tweaking and polishing our decks. A goal for us is to come up with concepts we haven't seen or heard about before. Through this trial by fire, I feel like I've gotten decent at making unique, but not always effective, decks with interesting, but not always effective, card combinations. 

 

One card that I NEVER see get play is Notoriety. This card is one of the most underrated and underplayed cards in the game. Yes, it requires several things to fall into place, and having the right cards in hand and in your rig, particularly mid-late game, but what combo doesn't. However, nothing is more satisfying than taking your first three clicks for seemingly scattershot runs, then dropping down a Notoriety. Particularly out of faction. Its a free Agenda point, it's tradeable with Data Dealer or Frame Job (which combos nicely into Blackmail, another underplayed favorite of mine), and it's just such a blow to the ego of the other player after he scoffs at your third-click pointless run on Archives. 

 

Going to my second tournament ever, I was filled with those new-student-in-class nerves. The night before, I built a middling GRNDL deck for the Corp. But the real experiment was my new breakerless Gabe deck. Yes, breakerless. I built it around the pure joy I get playing Notoriety after a seemingly random set of runs. Fast and loose, unpredictable, and most importantly, I want the Corp to feel unsure of what's coming next. 

 

In the tournament, my first match I was paired against a guy who organized the first tournament I played in. I knew he was good. I drew into Notoriety opening hand. When he decided to ICE up an economy remote first turn and leave his centrals open, I made my move. Nothing in HQ, pulled an Agenda off R&D, and of course there was nothing in Archives. His confusion on my Archives run was visible until it clicked for him. "Spend One and..." "What?! Nice!"  His genuine surprise, amusement, and support for me playing a card that gets so little tournament play helped easy my nerves and made me feel good about the rest of the day. And it was enough to justify the weird decks, and those underplayed combinations. 

 

I only was able to play it twice more that day, and each time people were either impressed, or asked to read it because they hadn't seen it played before. I came away with only a 50% win ratio with that breakerless deck, but it was such a blast to play. It was fast, it was aggressive, and the corp players always sat on edge, trying to figure out when I was going to build my rig. And doing something unique led to a lot of conversations. Nobody made fun of me, no one dismissed my inexperience, and I came away with so much positive energy about the game and the community. 

 

Thanks guys for the podcast, I hope you enjoyed my (long) story about Notoriety, my favorite underplayed card. 

[Nelsormensch]

Tim Post's:

 

Death Spiral

A Ridiculous Netrunner Fan-Fiction by Tim “The Martini” Post

 

Bootup

 

Noise shouted over the pounding music. It was easy to score free program licenses and hardware req tickets from the hackers, crackers, and net-heads that drank, shot up, and danced at Wyldside, but it didn’t lend itself to easy conversation. He’d been here for hours, nursing what free drinks he could score; Noise was flat-ass broke. He’d found nothing but junk so far, and he was on his way out when the tweaker stopped him.

 

“Hey! Hey! No WAY! Dude, dude…PARASITE!”

 

An admirer, Noise sighed. Great.

 

“My first and greatest. A fan?” he replied.

 

“Hell yea, man! Brother, you need to tell me some TALES, man. EPIC!”

 

“Yea, thanks. Listen...I have to go.”

 

“No way! Hey, let me at least get you a drink?” the woman asked. Her body shifted unconsciously back and forth to the music, her perpetual motion driven by the huge load of stims she must have taken.

 

“No? At least take this, on me!”

 

Noise looked at what she had handed him. The small ampule was filled with a thin, translucent green liquid.

 

Hell yeah.

 

Runtime

 

You were supposed to trickle the stims into a vein. You were definitely not supposed to dump them directly into your spinal column. Then again, you weren’t supposed to do a lot of things that Noise did. Between the serum lubricating his synapses and his own natural ability, he’d be able to heavily multitask, using his overcharged synapsis as additional processing cycles.

 

Noise hadn’t asked for the genetic tampering that had destined him since before conception to be a genius with numbers, but damn if he wasn’t going to use it.

 

He laid back in the chair in his tiny New Angeles apartment. His target was half a world away in Neo-Tokyo: a Jinteki-owned research facility. This one had been on Noise’s radar for a while. He’d been hunting down details on their last project, something about cloned human brains being used as organic processors - oddly similar to what he was doing to now, he realized - but he’d taken too long; the Jinteki cloners and bio-programmers had finished with it and moved on to something new.

 

Noise brought his program suite online, floating windows on his virtual display: a full set of Icebreakers, as well as a virulent Datasucker, bloated on metrics and stolen code snippets from several previous runs. He’d need it all; the facility’s Ice was stacked deep and he was completely in the dark. He felt time slow as the stims kicked in. He opened a connection to the appropriate server, splitting his attention as only the drugs would allow as he navigated and prepared for the first Ice encounter. Noise smiled; this was going to hurt later, but it was going to be worth it.

 

The Ice fired immediately, before he had a chance to react. A trap, he thought. Typical Jinteki.

 

The corporate program invaded his interface and locked his connection. He felt his stomach rise, as if he was riding down the Beanstalk lift or down the first hill of a virtua-coaster - there would be no jacking out, no going back now. Confident in his preparations, Noise didn’t much care.

 

Go big or go home.

 

He pulled up the analysis as the next defensive protocol began: a tracing sentry, not one he’d seen before. Still, not much of a threat. He twitched a finger to tap on the window with the white mask, engaging the Mimic, which inserted itself maliciously into the corporate codestream, scrambling it until it did nothing useful at all.

 

Burn it all down, Noise thought. Whatever these goons are up to, there’s going to be nothing left by the time I’m done.

 

The next Ice loaded. When he saw the “Sentry” indicator on the analytics screen, he hovered his hand over the Mimic again, but stopped, frowning. There was the framework of code to do something here, but as far as he could tell, this Ice didn’t do...anything.

 

Strange, he shrugged, and moved on to the next layer of security.

 

Warnings flashed; the next piece of ice had taken a snapshot of his program state and memory contents. Noise dismissed it, unable to do anything about it. Another sentry, so he sent the Mimic up against it, leading the tracing subroutine through a merry chase until it looped onto itself and crashed.

Almost there, he smiled,  and we’ll find out what you’re so eager to protect.

 

The last Ice loaded - a strong code gate that was poised to redirect his connection away from his intended target and off into...who knows where. He fired up the Yog.0 database, but it returned an error - “Key not found.” Noise looked at the analysis, but there were too many layers to strip down even with the Datasucker. He’d just have to follow where the thing directed him and get back on track later, assuming it didn’t dump him in some waste server.

 

Where it took him was another Ice. What the hell are they up to that they need this many layers? he asked. His interface didn’t answer the rhetorical question.

 

It was another of that first, unusual sentry that he’d encountered. Must be some security engineer’s baby. He rolled his eyes and called up the Mimic again. It disassembled the Ice easily, but Noise was starting to get nervous looking at his available processing power - nearly down half of what he’d started with.

 

The next was a similar modular code framework, but this time with a malicious feedback subroutine. The Mimic was getting a workout, but was more than a match. Behind that was the code-snapshot Ice again; Noise broke it again, but suspicion started to creep into his mind.

 

When the redirector grabbed him and spun him around again, he went into panic mode. He let the first sentry - the exact same one each time, he realized - fire. The first subroutine back-fed through his connection, using it for financial manipulations. The second fired a trace. His display lit up with a flashing light in the corner: they knew where he was. The modular sentry had two feedback subroutines this time. Noise broke them both, but the Mimic had eaten the last of his cycles - he could feel all of the lines of code running through his hacked brain like a thousand shouted conversations in a busy nightclub, threatening to overwhelm his thoughts and senses. As the corporate analyzer grabbed his code-state again and then started a trace, Noise fought to bring his senses out of the virtual space, trying to manually disconnect.

 

Redirect. Another tag. The feedback routines hit, stars flashing in his eyes in three rapid pulses as the voltage in his net connection spiked. Analyze and tag. Redirect. Tag. Pain again, this time four flashes. Noise saw dark fog come in from the side of his vision as he fought to retain consciousness, weakly struggling to rise from his chair and break the connection. Analyze and tag. Redirect. Tag.

 

Pain, then nothing.

 

Shutdown

 

He gave a self-satisfied smile as he tilted his office chair back. Another chump caught in the Death Spiral.

 

“Your tea, Watanabe-san.”

 

He didn’t bother thanking his assistant; she was just service clone, after all.

 

Akitaro sipped the tea and looked out his office window, wondering if he should feel guilty for hunting the men and women who used to be his comrades. He glanced around. The office was huge and plush, done in a retro-modern style of muraled paper panelling and shiny synth-oak. The view out the window might be fake, as the facility was tens of floors below the ‘surface’ of Neo-Tokyo’s mega-towers, but it was relaxing and fully 4-D.

 

He flipped the view from the tranquil garden scene to the main lab floor. The pink forms twitched in their tanks, their infant brains growing slowly, learning.

 

Akitaro shivered, and turned the viewport off.

[kubey]

Kurt here, thanks for choosing my entry. I have to say, those other two are pretty great. I loved the restrained excitement that we've all felt in a mean Jinteki deck described by Robert. And Tim's...there are no words, that was just amazing.

Great submissions guys. And great ep T7 gents!

[Markv]

Terminal7 17: 

Nels and Jesse explore The Spaces Between ....

 

Something clicked while listening: the 5 from da5id in Snowcrash is a Roman numeral V. Netrunner and Stephenson: keep up the good work.