It's really hard to win a Netrunner tournament.

17 Feb, 2025

I have been playing Netrunner fairly intensely for a long time, particularly in the last few years. I'm not a confident player, but others would generally consider me knowledgeable about the meta, able to build and tweak good decks, and able to make good plays. But I struggle to win tournaments: I have won exactly one and got close on two other occasions in my ten(!) years of playing. I'm still proud of these results of course, but there are a lot of tournaments where I did much less well - so I'd definitely like to improve.

This post is an attempt at reminding myself how winning at tournaments consists of far more than just "don't be bad at Netrunner", and the things that seem to have worked from me, remembering from my past experiences.

The many variance factors in Netrunner tournaments

Your deck says "no"

We've all experienced agenda flood. Or not finding economy cards. Or needing that one tech card that never comes up. This is just how it goes sometimes. And when tournaments require you to lose very few games to make the cut or win overall¹, losing games to unlucky draws can really mess with your chances of making cut.

You end up facing the worst matchups

Everyone picks decks for different reasons. Some meticulously investigate the meta and make an informed call about what decks can beat the most common decks. Others have a pet deck that they tweak over time, perhaps making calls about what tech cards to bring or just hoping that bad matchups don't appear. Regardless, these calls can end up being wrong: either wrong about the meta as a whole, or wrong about the decks that you end up facing. Sometimes you get paired into your worst matchups consistently and have to struggle through them, while other times you happen to get paired into the best matchups and breeze through. There's a reason that "just dodge [insert bad matchup here]²" is somewhat reasonable advice!

In a similar vein, you may end up with one deck that is worse for you than another - perhaps for the meta call reasons, or just because you don't gel with it that well. Suddenly, half of your games are uphill battles and your chances of winning overall drop drastically. This can be particularly demotivating, as in theory you could have brought a "better"³ deck and had a very good day!

You get betrayed by tiebreakers

The two tiebreakers in Netrunner, Strength of Schedule (SoS) and Extended SoS (ESoS), are well-understood but very difficult to predict⁴. That win you got in the first round might have been against someone who fails to win a game for the rest of the day, but in the same breath you could lose to someone who eventually goes undefeated. When you end up in the bubble of a tournament - the place where getting into the cut requires you to have a higher SoS than others on the same score as you - you're relying on your opponents' performance. You can easily have tournaments where you played perfectly but lost a few games to circumstances out of your control, and then end up missing the cut due to tiebreakers out of your control.

You have enough else going on

It is very hard to separate your mental performance in Netrunner from the rest of your life. You might have not slept well the previous night. You may be stressed about other things. You may be busy with your job while the Netrunner meta slowly becomes more and more competitive and cutthroat due to the increase in people wanting to take the game seriously and thus practising more than you are able to.

You don't have enough tournament experience

Being good at Netrunner and being good at tournament Netrunner are two different skills. Tournaments are a test of stamina as well as skill, the ability to adapt to a wide range of matchups and play consistently over the course of an entire day (or longer). People who've been to lots of tournaments are experienced with this - they can keep their mental health in check despite losses and know how to make themselves function best over a gruelling day. Netrunner is a mental sport and has the exhaustion that comes with it.

I am not an expert in sports psychology nor doing well in Netrunner tournaments. But I've collected a pair of sources as a starting point - please let me know if I'm missing a relevant reference and I'll edit it in:

• A good first port of call may be this article by Whiteblade111 (particularly the section on playing) - it's more than three years old but still has a lot of sensible things to say.
• Panetierre's two zines, What I like to do between rounds at a Netrunner event and Netrunner is a game we play with our bodies, talk about some of the mental health aspects of tournaments. They were called out by the current World Champion in his writeup of the event, which is definitely a good sign.

For my personal experience: I've found that my best tournaments have been those where I've been calmest. Where I've joined and not expected to do well, began each game thinking "and this is where I lose" and then kept winning instead. I still had losses in those tournaments, but I was able to pick myself up and keep going. I wish I was more like this in real life

Over time, you will slowly build up a repertoire of things which help you during tournaments⁵. I find that writing brief notes about how a game went after a given game helps to track how it went beyond me winning or losing - was I unlucky, did I make a game-losing misplay, did I do something amazing that I should learn from? Also, plushies good.

Netrunner is really hard and it's important to forgive yourself when it doesn't go perfectly. Even the "most consistent" players have their off days⁶! As shown with all of the points above, there is an element of luck in tournaments - part of winning tournaments is going to enough tournaments that you get one where the above things don't happen.

Take care of yourself, play the best you can in the circumstances surrounding you, and hopefully the wins will come. Remember that the little 3-0 or 0-3 result for a given round does not reflect how that round went beyond whether you won or lost: it says nothing about how hard you fought. Focus less on the numbers and more on how you feel you played. Learn from, but also forgive, your mistakes.