On the Matter of Spoilers

Corporate Troubleshooter here.  I'm in preparation for the Colorado Regional tournament, and so I've been working on some decklists that I don't want to make fully public yet.  So, I felt like talking about another topic that's ongoing with Netrunner.

Spoilers.  With almost any game, film, or book, they're kind of inevitable.  In order to raise hype for a product, the marketing department will usually release a trailer or a preview for said product.  Yet, sometimes details are leaked out deliberately by personnel.  Why?  Maybe to get important information out, or maybe to stick it to the people in charge.  So far, we've had some spoilers from FFG for every set so far, and for the entire upcoming packs in the SanSan cycle.  But we also have some spoilers in the form of the System Crash draft set, which has cards in it from the upcoming packs.  We've also had text spoilers for upcoming packs and for prior sets, which have been somewhat reliable.  And we've had spoilers that were actually traps set up by FFG to figure out who was leaking information.

So what do we do about spoilers?  Well, you can try to avoid them, but if you're in a Netrunner community online, other members may not feel the same way about spoilers, and may post them publicly.  You can embrace them, and start planning out decks in advance, which is not a bad idea, but it means you're now planning for a meta that doesn't exist yet, and may not exist because of unforeseen factors.  There isn't an easy answer to the problem of spoilers, although from a certain mindset, there isn't a problem.  Still, the flavor text does have a point: "Don't you hate it when you know everything before it happens?"

Well, that's all for now.  Next time will probably be my report for the Colorado Regional tournament.  Until then, keep an eye out for spoilers.