A Look at the Rampant Anarchy of Order and Chaos

Should log in to class. Should attend virtual lecture. Should submit code project. Instead, music at MAXIMUM VOLUME. It is time to shred some poor bastard’s server. Whose? Doesn’t matter.

Part of the beauty of Android: Netrunner is that each faction has its own distinct identity. All of the game’s Runners are lower-case “c” criminals, violating all manner of laws as they hack into Corporate servers, but a capital “C” Criminal does not play like a Shaper. A Shaper does not play like an Anarch. And Anarchs don’t play like anyone else.

As guest writer El-ad David Amir noted in “The Anarch Way,” the Runners who associate themselves with the Anarch faction don’t like to follow the rules that others set forth. Such rules make them chafe.

Accordingly, the Anarchs work against the rules. Ironically, this becomes a common, defining trait across the faction: Anarchs are defined by their opposition to the established order. What others build up, Anarchs tear down.

Now, as Order and Chaos draws near, we look forward to its new cards and focus on the Anarch faction. What will these malcontents gain from the expansion?

The Punk, the Saint, and the Wounded Man

For starters, Order and Chaos gives us three more of these angry, dissatisfied Runners around which we can build our Anarch decks: MaxX (Order and Chaos, 29), Valencia Estevez (Order and Chaos, 30), and Edward Kim (Order and Chaos, 28).

They’re all angry. They’re all talented. They’re all very, very good at tearing things apart. And apart from those shared qualities, they’re almost nothing alike.

MaxX

An angry, young g-mod streetbanger who has never appeared to live up to expectations, MaxX works a long, gray, tightly structured day job in MegaBuy customer service that fuels her appetite for nihilistic after-hours release.

For MaxX, the act of shredding corporate servers is a cathartic release akin to the scratchy blare of a power chord pushed through layers of feedback. Punks ripped apart the overly elaborate guitar solos that preceded their reductive songs. They thrashed and drummed and howled. Like them, MaxX expresses her rebuke of societal norms by processing codes that reduce servers to nothingness. Hers are acts of pure, Wanton Destruction (Order and Chaos, 35).

Moreover, MaxX thinks faster than nearly everyone, though she’s forced to idle in slow-mo with normals at the office all day long. Her ability reflects this, reading, “When your turn begins, trash the top 2 cards of your stack. Draw 1 card.”

It’s unclear, however, if her self-destructive tendencies will outpace her impact on the net. She’s a genetically modified dynamo who can process information at a blistering pace, but her rebellious ways constantly leave her at risk of suffering permanent brain damage – not that she cares. For MaxX, it’s all about loud, immediate thrills, and when she’s Amped Up (Order and Chaos, 31), she can do just about anything to which she sets her mind; the only question is if she’ll get it into her head to accomplish anything meaningful before she burns out.

Valencia Estevez

The Angel of Cayambe, Valencia Estevez uses her talents to assist some of the most desperately impoverished residents of New Angeles, while the shadow of the Beanstalk, in which she lives, casts a pall over everything she does.

The Beanstalk’s constant presence and the desperation in the eyes of those people with whom she works ensure that Valencia will never forget the injustices of the system that keeps those at the top of the Beanstalk removed from those at the bottom.

Accordingly, Valencia’s runs are acts of mercy. They’re not initiated to punish the megacorps she invades, nor to elicit chuckles from her friends. She takes her runs to buy second chances for people who never had a first chance. Hers is a sympathetic story, and it’s hard for any Corp to deny her intentions.

Valencia Estevez ensures that the Corp always starts with one bad publicity, and several other cards in Order and Chaos further play off of her ability. The current Itinerant Protesters (Order and Chaos, 33) shrinks the Corp’s maximum hand size by one for each bad publicity it has, and Valencia can give the Corp even more bad publicity with Investigative Journalism (Order and Chaos, 49). Of course, when you look outside of Order and Chaos, the neutral event Blackmail (Fear and Loathing, 89) is a natural inclusion, and it suggests that Valencia might not be as saintly as she first appears.

In fact, a Valencia Estevez deck might play downright dirty, leveraging the Corp’s dirty secrets against it until its maximum hand size is squeezed down to just one or two cards. Then, even if she uses shady methods to get there, Valencia’s almost guaranteed to be able to use the situation to her advantage, drawing free cards each turn from her signature console, Vigil (Order and Chaos, 47), and reversing the fortunes of some of New Angeles’ most desperate individuals.

Edward Kim

When we look at the angry man that is Edward Kim, we understand that he’s haunted by some past misfortune. For one, he’s missing a hand. We can see this, just as we can see that he hasn’t had it replaced with a cybernetic. Second, we know he lost someone – a woman or a girl – and, more than the loss of his hand, it seems that this is the loss that has truly forged him into a seething, muscular force for vengeance.

Kim’s runs aren’t for play, and they aren’t about giving people second chances. So far as he’s concerned, he’s already lost. What was taken from him can never be replaced. Kim’s fury drives him toward retaliation. At the far end of every server he crashes, he sees the faceless masks of those bioroids who cost him the life and love he once held. Now, he strides powerfully through the streets, a snarl on his face, and on the net, he bares his fangs.

With his built-in ability to trash the first operation he accesses at no cost, Edward Kim excels at ripping apart the Corp’s HQ. He can trash operations, he can pay to trash assets or upgrades, and if he finds agendas, he can score them.

Naturally, Kim partners well with Imp (What Lies Ahead, 3), Scrubber (A Study in Static, 63), and Paricia (Creation and Control, 45), as all these cards provide him with even more means to trash the cards he accesses. However, Order and Chaos pushes Kim and his destructive efforts even further, providing him with a trio of events and an AI icebreaker that allow him to rip through ice in the same way that he rips through operations, assets, upgrades, and agendas.

The run events Forked (Order and Chaos, 37), Knifed (Order and Chaos, 38), and Spooned (Order and Chaos, 39) all allow you to make a run and trash a specific type of ice if you can break all its subroutines. Boosting their efficiencies, meanwhile, is the AI icebreaker, Eater (Order and Chaos, 40), one of the most efficient of all icebreakers yet introduced to the game. In fact, Eater would be an overpowering addition to the game were it not for its single drawback: When you use Eater to break an ice subroutine, you cannot access cards for the remainder of your run.

Of course, if you can trash all the ice that stand between you and a server’s data, you can launch subsequent runs with impunity. And then you and Edward Kim can smash the Corp in the face, hurting it just as you have been injured.

Burn It All Down

If you ask any of the Anarchs from Order and Chaos, the world is broken. It’s unfair. It’s lopsided. It’s built on the backs of the downtrodden and modeled so that the rich just keep getting richer. Also, it’s stupid. It makes people stupid. The execs think of them as cattle with bank accounts that they need to find better ways to herd.

What, then, does Order and Chaos give to these runners as they look for ways to burn down the existing order? They ask for a match, and they get a blowtorch.

The world will burn.

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