A week late and an interesting deck short (5th at UK Nats)

Oh god, how do you do one of these.

HELLO WORLD!

Last weekend was my first time every playing IRL netrunner in a room containing more than 10 people, and this writeup is just an excuse to tell all the people I met during these amazing 6-ish months of playing the best card game ever.

EDIT: this ended up being too long, fawning over cool peeps will continue in the runner writeup <3

So, let’s get the boring bit our of the way, yes this is just shoot the moon, but cutting out good cards that make you win (Ablative, Sudden) for still-good-but-probably-not-as-much cards that help you not lose (3rd Tatu, Mavirus). I really bought the whole "UK is just R+ and 419" talk wholesale and thought I needed to fit a Mavirus in somehow, it pretty much won me every game vs Esa, but again Abraham is much better at NR than me, so maybe I was winning those games anyways, who knows (couse I don't).

Now to reflect on these first 6 months of Netrunning.

I got into this amazing card game with a friend of mine in early May, we just saw the shut-up-and-sit-down review, thought it would looked great and impulsed-bought the crap out of system gateway before the video was even over like the new grads with too much disposable income that we were (still kinda are but 🤫).

Humble beginnings and broken arms

As soon as we got our hands on the cards, which was a bit longer than expected, due to the SINGLE PERSON HANDLING THE ENTIRE EU SHIPPING PROCESS breaking their arm, we got to playing system gateway and were instantly hooked. The art work, the flavour text, the gameplay was all just mixing perfectly in our already cyberpunk-receptive imaginations, we played it non-stop for 3/4 hours the first day, and agreed to continue the next day to unlock the remaining 10 cards each side had for the intro decks.

Also, I would like to quickly mention again, that for someone who had only played casual level magic and digital card games, the idea of not getting an order because the SINGLE ENTITY managing all orders for Europe had an injury was crazy, but in a "these guys absolutely rock, they are just doing it for the love of the game" kind of crazy, when I first got the email back from support, I still hadn't played a single game of netrunner, but I was already grinning in admiration for the scrappy resolve these guys had to keep everything going.

A few weeks pass and I finally have to leave my home town of Turin to move to Spain for a new job. Out of all the things that I thought would happen relocating to a new country, missing playing a card game no-one outside of me and my friend knew about was not one of them, but still, that is how I felt.

Looking for some way, any way to get my Netrunner fix, I discover Jinteki.net, and was instantly scared away: I hit the "cards" tab, got hit with a billion cards I've never seen before, and proceeded to close the site in confusion.

Still I longed for those evenings of system gateway. I had started working the new job now, it was really boring, and gave me a good chance to listen to stuff while at work. Looking for "Netrunner" on Youtube I stumbled into Andrej's videos: while I had no clue what more than half of the cards where, I remember slowly parsing what was going on, both visually and in actual gameplay. After a week or so and about a dozen hours of listening to this kind Canadian teaching me about this game I only ever played the tutorial for, I felt ready to give Jnet another shot.

Using the power of NRDB, I just picked a deck that looked fun, and just kinda took it from there. For runner, I played whiteblade's Getting Away with it, thinking that it was probably an evolution of the Zahya I loved playing in System Gateway. Turns out, while the crim plan of "just touch agendas" was indeed similar in spirit to what I knew from system gateway, there were a lot of bad corps trying to do bad stuff to me with cards that I had never seen before.

My first two months or so of playing my runner winrate was probably in the mid 20%s, I was constantly, dying, running out of money, getting fast advanced and dying again. I felt like a color-blind person trying to solve a 5000 piece puzzle, even when something did work, it was because the pieces lined up in a good way, not because of any smart play by my end.

Unfortunately for anyone who queued into me during the months on June/early July, my constant dying as reg crim fed my darker impulses, and the first deck that I started playing a lot as corp as Mitosis PE. I still hadn't gotten a clue what I was doing, but Mitosis'ing a Fuji and an Urtica t1 was a good way to get free wins, and I really needed some free wins to mentally persevere through and start getting a clue what was going on.

A month passes, and I have consumed most video content I can find on YT about current day Netrunner (shoutout to Clot windows and you, the video that finally made me understand the NR timing structure).

I am still criminally (heh) bad at running, and I feel like I have experimented as much as I could in PE, when as runner I see someone playing an ID I had never seen...

Earth Station (my beloved)

I can't quite explain why, but the moment I looked at this side-flipping corp, I just knew I had to build it, and work on making it good. I was bad, still didn't know a bunch of cards, but armed with the NRDB advanced search feature, I got to work building my first deck.

In the span of a couple of weeks, I get tinkering with 3/4 different versions of ES, and comparing pros and cons between them (some of the highlights included badpub ice + Redneck Repair Squad in the remote, Superdeep Borehole + Sacrifice as well as Transport Monopoly + Clearinghouse). I am thoroughly addicted to the process of deckbuilding, opening up NRDB and scouring the card list for good uses of 2/3 influence, or the right ice to shore up RND, which was a recurring problem.

Also around this time, I got ridiculously lucky and had work offer to send me over to Seattle for two weeks, where I will encounter the first IRL NR scene I had ever seen.

The Emerald City, and those who inhabit it

While I was toiling away for my IRL megacorp during the day, I was lucky enough to find the link to the Emerald City Grid discord, and I try to attend as many nights as possible in the twelve or so days I have there.

There I meet Abraham ( as well as many other amazing people), outside of really kicking my ass as both runner and corp, I was just shocked by how kind and welcoming he was to a complete stranger just passing through.

This feeling was sent to overdrive went I suddenly realised that the next day would be my birthday (I was very consumed by work/NR, days were a fuzzy concept), and when I PM'd him on a whim asking if we could play an extra game or two that weekend, he instead invited me into his house for a surprise birthday party.

A surprise birthday party. With cake and all. For a kid he just met a few days ago and who would leave the week after.

I ended that day on the verge of tears, not quite able to put how amazing everything was in words, but knowing that that experience of kindness and affection will stay with me for the rest of my days.

Continues in runner writeup, once inspiration strikes again..