Images courtesy of Null Signal Games

Netrunner‘s latest set, Elevation, is finally in full preview season, and Card Gamer is excited to deliver the community some exclusive scoops! Elevation, formerly called Dawn, is the latest Netrunner expansion. It’s meant to be a foundational set, which means these cards will be evergreen and will not rotate. The expansion will become the building blocks of many decks, accompanied by the introductory product System Gateway.

Speaking of, the release of Elevation will also trigger the rotation of all Fantasy Flight Games-era expansions, which means we’re about to enter an era of only Null Signal Games (NSG) cards.

NBN, one of Netrunner‘s evil megacorporations, is dead set on controlling the media throughout the world. In fact, NBN produces more content everyday than the average human can consume during their entire lifetime. Every single advertisement, program, and performance is selected to directly appeal to the viewer; their algorithm is the most advanced, and they will find you wherever you are.

We’ll have some spicy previews at the end of this article that plays into these themes later on.

Corporations Will Have Some Trouble

This rotation is about to be one of the biggest ones, as we’re going from around 853 unique cards in Standard, all the way down to approximately 540 cards.

The biggest loss for Corporations is Rashida Jaheem, which has definitely warped Corp deckbuilding and turn-one install dynamics. Whereas in the past, Corps fell back to the classic Hedge Fund, ICE HQ and R&D opener, Corps now leave one central undefended to install and ice up Rashida. Some games can arguably even be decided if the Corp is able to fire off a Rashida at the beginning of the game.

We’re also losing a huge chunk of Agendas, which form the backbone of what Corp decks look like. Several three-point Agendas will rotate out, meaning Corps will have to rely on The Basalt Spire and SDS Drone Deployment for Weyland, Salvo Testing for Haas-Bioroid (HB), and Fujii Asset Retrieval for Jinteki. NBN won’t have any three-pointers left due to Bellona being banned, so the faction will have to settle with whatever NBN three-pointer we receive, plus Send A Message, should we wish to run a leaner agenda suite.

More importantly, though, Project Atlas, Project Beale, and Project Vitrivius are all rotating out, which all consistently saw play in various decks within these three factions. Suffice it to say, the new agendas have big shoes to fill.

The NBN Problem

NBN as a faction has always been at the top of the metagame. It’s considered by most players as the faction of choice for Spikes. In fact, Project Beale has been in every single NBN decklist that has won the World Championship. For the curious, it’s a grand total of three times: in 2024, 2018, and 2016. As another bonus, HB is the Corp faction that’s won the most worlds titles, with a grand total of seven times!

With the loss of Project Beale, NBN decks now need to significantly change their game plans. Before, sticking tags and playing a Psychographics to score three to seven points was not unheard of, and is a valid route to victory for the faction. Now, NBN has to score agendas the old fashioned way. And let’s not talk about the loss of other high-impact Agendas such as Better Citizen Program.

This brings us to Card Gamer’s first preview card, Embedded Reporting.

Click to access…

 

Embedded Reporting

NBN Agenda: Initiative – Requirement: 3 – Score: 2

Dividends 2 (When you score this agenda, place 2 agenda counters on it for each excess advancement counter.)

When your discard phase ends, you may remove 1 hosted agenda counter to search R&D for 1 operation and reveal it. (Shuffle R&D after searching it.) Add that operation to the top of R&D.

There’s a lot to process here. Yes, your worst fears have come true; NBN gets a 3/2 agenda. Embedded Reporting has a new mechanic: Dividends. By over-advancing Agendas with Dividends, we gain some additional bonuses.

For NBN, Embedded Reporting tutors for an Operation, but places it on the top of R&D. This also only happens after the discard phase, meaning, we can’t use it to just grab an End of the Line should the Runner end up tagged at the end of their turn.

Other nuances to the card: it protects the top of R&D, keeping it safe to random accesses. However, it’s kind of a non-bo with Gaslight, unless we draw the top of the deck with Spin Doctor. Shuffling the deck through Spin also just loses us our tutor, so it could be a bit tricky to set up.

Also important to note that Embedded Reporting has Dividends 2, a notch above the new 3/2s. So its effect should be weaker, right? I’m not quite sure about the answer. An immediate synergy I’m exploring is tutoring up Nanomanagement, together with the newly-revealed NBN double-sided Identity Nebula Talent Management/Gemilang Arena. Gaining clicks is an extremely strong mechanic, as demonstrated by HB, so why not just borrow their cards? It’s already proven to be an effective strategy for NBN in the past.

If they want us to flip back, they either have to run into R&D with no Agenda on top, or run into HQ, where Behold! might be waiting, aside from encountering all the nasty ICE we have waiting.

NBN’s Tag Punishment

Tag punishment is one of the biggest deterrents for Runner to float tags. If the tag punishment is too tame, Runners won’t respect our game plan. For brawler-type decks, or those that stick tags on the Runner and mess with their board state through cards such as Market Forces and Self-Growth Program, these cards will soon retire. We need a new way to scare Runners.

Introducing: Bigger Picture.

Click to access…

Bigger Picture

NBN Operation: Gray Ops – Cost: 0

Play only if the Runner is tagged.

Resolve 1 of the following:

• Give the Runner 1 tag.
• Remove any number of tags. The Runner loses 5c for each tag removed this way. Gain credits equal to the number of credits the Runner lost.

Tag punishment is tricky to get right, as it can either be extremely meta-warping, or won’t see any play at all. Bigger Picture is an economic denial card, while also being a way to stick more tags on the runner than they’d care to clear.

Synapse Global might be the go-to brawler ID, just because of the value it provides. Since we’re removing tags from Bigger Picture’s second mode, we also trigger Synapse’s ability; it’s some form of click compression. This can turn into a scoring window for us.

If we don’t get any more tagstorm options (that is, giving the Runner lots of tags at once), then the first mode could also see play. I can also see this being the way for Corps to seal the deal on the Runner floating one tag at the end of their turn. We can give them one more tag through Bigger Picture, then End of the Line two times for the classic kill line.

NBN has been my favorite faction since I started playing Netrunner in 2012. In fact, most of my podium finishes were with the faction. So seeing how the faction shapes up after Elevation is so exciting on a personal level.

Elevation is set for release on April 24, with a tournament legality date of May 10th. We’re in for a whole new era of Netrunner.

As a final parting gift, I have one more teaser for what’s to come for NBN for Elevation.