I wanted to post this in it's own topic because I don't think this quit fits in well as a simple post on the Board Games community thread.
So, for the past week or so I've been obsessed with learning the mechanics of Android Netrunner. I dunno what specifically gravitated me towards it...maybe it's because recently Team Covenant has been doing some quarantined videos and in one of them they revisited Netrunner for the first time in years; and I watched the entirety of it. It was glorious. You can tell their love for the game was resparked when they revisited it, and seeing them play bluff games was really appealing to me.
However I knew it was more or less a "dead" card game. At least, officially. The truth is the game continues to this day with new cards in the form of a new game that's compatible with Android Netrunner called Nisei:
https://nisei.net/
What I found out was that there was still a thriving community for this, and new releases are still taking place with the latest being from December last year. Of course I'm not expecting regular releases ala a company like FFG can produce, but it's amazing how persistent the game is. The deckbuilding website netrunnerdb and jinteki also see a LOT of traffic even till this day. What I discovered that this "dead" card game was alive and thriving in the form of a dedicated fanbase.
So at first I was thinking about getting a Core System 2019 printed on MakingPlayingCards which is one of the suggested ways of doing it. The problem? Well the cheapest way of doing this with full playsets of all the cards would be...drumroll please...
$130
!!!!!!!!!
Fuuuck that shit! Ain't no way I'm paying that entry fee right now. So I decided to pay for a Core Set on ebay for thirty bucks (the original, not the revised edition which is going for like a $100 dollars a pop YIKES!), which I know is technically out of rotation or some parts of it are but eh I'm ok with that.
So I wait...I wait. This is where I learn the rules extensively, watch youtube videos about how to play and various games. I'm zoned in man. Well...it ain't coming till Thursday so I said fuck it and played it on Jinteki.net. After 3 one hour games - even though I'm probably abysmal - I've already fallen in love with this game.
Where do I even begin? So ok get this shit there's like MULTIPLE win conditions in this game and every single one of them is this meta-game of cat of mouse. It's hard to describe unless you play it for yourself, but the whole dynamic between the Runner player and the Corp player is honestly something I've never seen in a card-game before. The Corp player plays his entire deck like he's playing Trap cards in Yu-Gi-Oh except it's super hard to actually do anything about it; the Runner player plays at breakneck speeds but OH WAIT if I run out of cards in my hand I'll freaking lose and the Corp playing has a bunch of cards in his deck that can do Net damage (aka discard cards at random from their hand).
Literally every decision you make matters in some capacity. Wasting an action can cost you the game, but what's amazing about Netrunner is that even if you make major misplays you can still bluff the fuck out of your opponent to the point where the misplay becomes a pro play. There's so many different things could happen in one Netrunner game that even if you encounter the same cards the games will feel completely different from one another.
Another thing that's unique about Netrunner is that it's a 2 player TCG-style game...but there's no monsters or dudes in it whatsoever. That's because the players ARE the monsters and dudes, and what's cool is that each game forms a unique narrative of sorts. I mean you can literally play as a corp called NBN and your theme is...fake news. What other card game does stuff like that?!
Anyway here's my gameplan with experiencing Android: Netrunner which may or may not go well:
- I'm going to get everything in release order more or less and play the game as it was meant to be played originally. This might change. One of the reasons why I decided to do this because to make the Nisei System Core 2019 you can simply pull cards from your collection and most of the cards from it are from the Core Set + first two cycles or so. So by the time I have a decent size collection, most of my stuff will be in rotation for Standard format.
- I'm going to invest a LOT of time in Jinteki and the physical card game. I want to introduce my friends to this.
Tell me what you guys think about the game below!
