Netrunner at PAX Unplugged 2025

What on earth is Janksgiving?

Janksgiving is a charity tournament format aimed at raising money to help fight houselessness and food insecurity. It was started in NYC by shiiuga in 2019 and has been held at least once every year since.

How does it work?

What do Netrunner players love doing more than anything else? That’s right! Rage quitting on JNet. Playing bad jank. Well, boy do I have the format for you! You will first generate a set of Jank rolls using our brand new handy dandy Jankpplication, The Janksgiver (very kindly made by @solemn_storm) which can be found here: https://jankgiver.solemn.website/. You will then choose one full set of those rolls for each side, Corp & Runner, and build decks with them using the deckbuilding rules below. Then, you bring your decks to the tournament and face off against everyone else’s jank until we crown the ultimate jank champion (jankion?), all while raising some money for a good cause.

When? Where? What? How?

We will be playing on Saturday evening. Exact start time and location in the con centre to be determined. We will be doing three rounds of double sided Swiss. Entry will be a minimum donation of $10, with no maximum donation. Go with your heart, but don’t go broke.

But what’s in it for me, Master Spy?

Nothing, worm! Everyone who donates will receive a full double sided playset of Retribution/Audrey as chosen by 2024 champ Tradon and designed by Sanjay Kulkaček. The winner will get to take home the coveted Janksgiving trophy that I’ve definitely already purchased and am not leaving until the last minute. Most importantly will get to choose the charity that will receive the balance of the group donation. There may be other prizes available to win!

Donation Rules

Minimum donation is $10 . Everyone who donates will receive a copy of the door prize (as long as they are still available, even if they do not go on to compete in the tournament). We like to reward generosity! Donations can be made individually or as part of the main group donation. Individual donations can be any amount (of $10 or more) and can go to any charity of your choice as long as they meet the criteria of combating houselessness or food insecurity. How you make your donation is up to you, but you must show me proof of donation before you can be entered into the tournament or receive the door prize. The group donation will be collected by me either in the form of cash, by PayPal, or if you have no other way, by Venmo. I am not able to accept any other forms of app based payment. I guess I could do a bank transfer if we’re really struggling. This collective donation will then be sent to the charity of the winner’s choice. I will post proof of the donation in here.

Mulligan Rules

If you really don’t like any of your initial rolls on one side, you can take one free mulligan. You may only do this for ONE SIDE, and you must use your Mulliganed roll, even if you think it’s worse than the first 3. Sometimes the jank gods are not smiling on us. There are currently no other known reasons to get a mulligan, but weird stuff happens all the time, so if you think you deserve one, ping me and I’ll take a look. To activate a reroll, ping me in this thread and tell me which side you are choosing to reroll. I will do the roll for you on the bot.

Deckbuilding Rules

This has been simplified this year because Ben is a genius and built an app that removes all the edge cases that needed extra rerolls. This is a casual level event. Decklists are not required unless you want to show off your wombo combo. Use your weirdest alt arts. Your opponents will be looking at the top card of R&D with confusion already anyway.

Deckbuilding rules are as follows: You must use 1 whole set of rolls from the 3 Janksgiver gives you for each side. You may not take the ID from one of the three rolls and use the cards from another, for example. Your deck must include 3 copies of every card included in the roll you choose for each side. Cards in your jank rolls are all out of faction for the rolled ID and DO NOT count towards your influence limit. EVERY ID regardless of side or faction has an influence value of 6 IN PLACE of its printed influence value. Remember, your rolled cards don’t cost influence. This influence is to spend on cards to tie your rolls together into a combo. All corps, regardless of faction, get a full set of 3 Spin Doctors with no additional influence cost. Spend your influence on something fun. All other Standard Format deckbuilding rules apply. Standard card pool and ban list is in effect. Every ID uses its printed minimum deck size and Corp decks must maintain a standard agenda density for their size.

Other Bits and Bobs

The Janksgiver is brand new, and like all brand new things, may occasionally break. If your first attempt to roll a set of cards results in a stream of HTML, just reload the page and try again. This is the first time that we are doing the rolls away from Stimslack or Discord. I will not have oversight of what you roll and will be using an honour system. Please don’t abuse this by just rolling over and over again until you get a set of cards that you like. You wouldn’t download a car. Well, maybe you would. But don’t cheat at Janksgiving. The Janksgiving Turkey knows where you live. I am handling rerolls because otherwise the system is too open to cheesing. If you think this format is neat, you’re right! It’s been a lot of fun over the years, and we have raised several thousand dollars for various charities around the world at this point. If you would like to run a Janksgiving event in your meta, I would be delighted for you to do that. Several have been run on the West Coast of the USA in the last year, including North & South California, Seattle, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook, and boy it sure put them on the map. If you do run an event, just let me know. Feel free to play around with the rules, but the Janksgiver will only ever be able to roll what it has up on the site. I also want feedback! Several changes were made to the rules after last year’s event at worlds, including upping the influence value for all IDs by 1, giving Spins to corps for free, and removing agendas and in faction/neutral cards from the available pool for rolls, amongst other things. If you have thoughts or suggestions, I’ll be happy to hear them.

Jankgiver note: When making your rolls please select Standard Only. We are not using rotated cards at this event.