Net-Decking

A contentious point for many players of competitive games, today I'm going to talk about net-decking.

What is Net-Decking?

The most amusing definition I found was on Urban Dictionary

Netdecking

The process of stealing a tournament winning TCG/OCG/CCG decklist from a discussion forum and replicating it. Implies a lack of creativity and desire to do nothing other than win in the player.

Clans are notorious for this, particularly like the lamers who make up the Yu-Gi-Oh clan "g3n3s1s".

Go to any tournament for this type of game and you'll see a lot of it. The winning decks will always have a great deal of cards in common.

by Hino-Kagu-Tsuchi December 20, 2004

 Also referred to as Net-listing for games that don't use cards, it is building your deck/team/army by copying someone else's list from sources found on the internet. This can be from articles or videos talking about the game, or from scouring tournament results. Often, it involves using the complete list but sometimes it's using the majority of the list while adding your own spin either to personalize it, because you think of a better idea or to hide that it's been copied from the internet.

It's a simple process. You watch/read coverage of an event, see something you like the look of and then copy it to try yourself. It was successful and by playing it maybe you can find some success too. you play it against your friend or take it to a local event and are met with disdain. What went wrong?

The Downsides of Net-Decking

Firstly, many people don't like it. There has long been a stigma to Net-decking. It's seen as a crutch, a thing that people do when they care more about winning than they do about fun. It has gained a reputation that it passes on to anyone who does it, in any game.

I've long heard it dates back to the early days of Magic the Gathering. When websites like The Dojo started talking about deck construction and reporting on the decks that did well, the internet was still in its early days. To have access to those lists was seen as giving you an advantage that was considered unfair. Everyone else was trying out different combinations of cards to find out what worked, and you were taking a shortcut.

Deck builders were putting in hard work to find winning decks, and then you were simply copying their product in an effort to copy their results. You wanted their victory without having to put the same amount of time in to earn it. This is the underlying assumption behind the tournament stigma. This creates bad feeling.

Secondly, if it has done well at a tournament, it may be of a power level that doesn't feel welcome at a casual game. Some people are trying out "fun" ideas or less powerful things that they like the flavour of and don't want to face the latest tournament tech.

Tournament winning lists are usually keyed at winning the event by minimising variance, being efficient and limiting the opponent's ability to interact with its game plan. For an opponent just looking to play some cards/push some models around, that doesn't give them what they are looking for. This is an extension of the stigma above but applies to non-tournament games.

While almost everyone plays these style of games to win, a lot of players put their own qualifiers on how they want to win. When these ways are luck-based or inefficient, their matchup with the tournament list becomes a slog that often feels unwinnable, regardless of their actual ability to win the game. This creates bad feeling.

Finally, just because a list won an event, doesn't mean it is going to play itself. There may be tricks and synergies that are important to its performance, but not immediately obvious. Many of these games require in-game decisions that are often complex, and familiarity with your list is a boon.

If you are after tournament success, you will still need to practice with the list. It is clearly doing something to be successful, and you want to work out what that is before you take it to an actual tournament yourself. Likewise, if you want to make changes to the list and put your own spin on it, you need to understand how it works so that your changes don't destroy it from the inside out.

Without this knowledge, the list won't perform as well as expected. It won't produce the results that you want. This creates frustration.

So is Net-Decking bad?

Is it the worst thing a player can do? There are many people that will tell you it is. It has such a stigma across many games that people will deny doing it, even though their list matches the recent big-money winning list 100%. People will berate net-deckers, complain if they enter an event with them and grouse about their existence.

They are entitled to their opinions, but I would say they are wrong.

For the first downside; why is research frowned upon?

I liken Net-Decking to building a desk or cooking a meal. Sure, you could look at every card available to the event, try them out in every possible combination and settle on the deck you want to play that way.  You could also grab some wood and start building a desk with a variety of tools until you find the best techniques to build the desk you want. You could throw various ingredients in a pot and taste-test different mixtures until you find the one that tastes best.

Conversely, you can buy a cookery book and follow a recipe from that. You can research design techniques to make a sturdy desk. You can see what people are playing in events and do well with and follow their tips. We live in a world where rather than doing everything from scratch ourselves we can turn to others for advice, teaching or doing the task for us. Why should list design be any different? Plenty of people like to talk about what they have had success with, and how they got there. People also like absorbing this content and using it as a stepping stone to generate their own success.

There are likewise many people who enjoy making their own lists and forging their own path to victory, with little to no input from others. There are people who enjoy finding success with under-utilized cards/units/models. These are all valid approaches to gaming, and no approach is better than the others. If you are doing it the way you enjoy, then more power to you. The stigma needs to go away, there are so many facets to learn when competing at a game that short-cutting list building doesn't replace all the other things you need to learn to find the success. For most people, these games are hobbies and time is short.

For the second point, the casual game, here is where things get murky. What defines a game as casual rather than competitive. Within these gaming systems, the point is to beat your opponent. Should you not try as hard as possible to do so?

That depends on what your opponent and yourself are expecting from the game. As I said;

"Tournament winning lists are usually keyed at winning the event by minimising variance, being efficient and limiting the opponent's ability to interact with its game plan"

These lists are fine for running in a tournament. You and your opponents are attempting to beat each other, often with prizes on the line, and probably should be running efficient lists and minimising variance. This will often give you the best chance of winning and is the appropriate place for such lists.

These lists are fine for practising for a tournament. Again, you should expect to face such lists and they are what you want the most practice against.

A game to spend an afternoon playing with a friend on the other hand? You need to talk to your friend and discuss what you both want from the game. Maybe they want tournament practice. Maybe they have a list they want to experiment with that either explores a mechanic or a theme of the game.
This probably isn't the best time to use a list that limits their ability to interact or circumvents portions of the game rules. Again, maybe they want to test against that sort of list, but it's always best to talk.

You want to enjoy the game, win or lose, and so do they. If you both have differing expectations for the play experience, then one or more of you are going to come away dissatisfied. Smashing someone in a way that doesn't let them actually play the game won't feel good to them, and if it's a game you are after it won't feel good to you. Your mileage may vary if you are after smashing your opponents like that all the time, but don't be surprised if finding non-tournament opponents becomes difficult.

Sometimes it's good to take your foot off the gas, play a list that's less honed for tournaments and have a game. You may find a new facet to the game that you enjoy. You may even find something underplayed that has become good in the new meta without the majority realizing. And just because you are playing a less powerful list doesn't mean you have to play to lose.

Finally, Net-Decking won't compensate for a lack of fundamentals. As an extreme example; you could take the most powerful list in any game and hand it to someone who doesn't know the rules of the game. Having the tools won't help without the experience of how they work. You need to analyse the list, work out what the synergies are, learn the plays, etc.

Look at the source of the list. Did you pull it from event coverage? Maybe there is an interview with the player who ran it. Did you get it from a website? Maybe it came with a guide to how the list played, and how it was built. Don't just grab the tool, grab the instructions as well.

This is especially important if you are planning on making changes to the list. There are various, valid reasons to make changes. Maybe the meta has changed since the event it won, and you believe it needs to adapt. Maybe you perceive a weakness in the list that you can remove. Maybe you have a favourite card/unit/model that you want to include and you need to find room for it.

Play the original list first. Do the full research. Only by knowing how the list works can you decide what to change. You don't want to remove an innocuous-looking piece only to find it's integral to one of the combos and the other pieces don't work without it.

As a related side note; if you want to do well at a competitive game, you need to know the fundamentals and be good at them. If you aren't getting the success you want, go back and look at them. Maybe it's card sequencing, maybe it's positioning, maybe it's relying on too many low probability events. If you can work out what the problem is, your game will improve.

End the Stigma

Net-Decking shouldn't be ridiculed. It's part of the hobby, especially in competitive games. If you are after a casual game, discuss this with your opponent to avoid dissatisfaction. We all play these games to play these games and enjoy ourselves, we shouldn't be making each other feel bad about the way we choose to play.