A Letter to Beginnings and Endings

I'm not very involved in this community, and I don't play competitively. I am absolutely petrified by the idea of engaging with others; as an avid gamer, I am the person who only makes call-outs or stays silent the whole game. I lurk in discords, I people watch. But there is no way to engage in a game like this asocially, especially not when there is such a caring community behind it.

I have horrible social anxiety. Life dealt me a really bad hand with my mental issues and early childhood, but this game has been a rock through this past year. It's been there whether I've had a bad day or good one, and it's gotten me through some horrible nights with the anticipation and routine it's brought me.

I learned about Netrunner from someone I will call Mr. R, my physics and homeroom teacher. My mental health had been going downhill since my freshman year, I struggled to socialize with others as an autistic trans kid, even being in a very liberal city won't fix the way some kids are. So I played board and card games with him during homeroom.

One day, early this year, he asked me if I wanted to play a new game. Obviously, I went for it. He handed me a System Gateway shaper deck, and I honestly can't remember what he played (I believe it was NBN or Haas Bioroid). What I do remember is that I lost, miserably so, even being hand-held through each action, but I still came out of the game happier than I had been in weeks. And that day I think I rediscovered what life meant, in however small a way. We play nearly every other school day now. A game, however well or poorly I play, is often the highlight of my day or even week. I usually play corp, he plays runner; this started on my third or fourth game overall, where I insisted on trying corp and fell in love with it.

For my 18th birthday, he left a System Gateway set, wrapped in papers from his classroom, in my open backpack. It dropped out, he hadn't intended for me to notice until I got home, but he had to sigh and actually hand it to me. I cried on the bus ride home. Since then, I've bought or been gifted the Liberation cycle, the Borealis cycle, and I ordered Elevation last Thursday.

It set in a while ago that I graduate in about a month. It's insane and makes my head spin to think about, but it's the truth. And no part of me is ready for things to change. There will be no more every other day games, no frantically sweeping up my desk or taking pictures of where we left off so I can catch my bus at the end of the day. There will be no more lingering and walking backwards as I talk and talk about our most recent deckbuilding adventure.

But a local gamestore holds a Netrunner night every Tuesday. Mr. R's daughter's dance class will be moving to Thursday this summer.

So things will change, but they won't end.

I asked him once, early this year, what graduating would mean. Would I lose someone who's saved me from some of the worst moments in my life? Would we still talk sometimes? He answered saying he'd write more later, but that he was looking forward to being my friend in less than a year. My friend. At the time, I had exactly 2 friends. Now I'm proud to say I have 4, soon to be 5. Some of the most important, impactful sentences of my life were in that conversation. And they may seem stupid to anyone else, but I cried my eyes out looking at them over and over again.

Look, I don't know if you think I play Netrunner with you as a favor to you, but that's all wrong. If anything it's the other way around. We are dungeon masters. There are not many people like us.

Fact of the matter is that I struggle to make real friends because most people are boring and have boring problems. Uber nerds keep life exciting by coming up with non boring challenges for each other. Preferably involving dice.

I don't know if I'd be alive if he hadn't texted me that, if he hadn't introduced me to this game, if I hadn't said yes.

So this deck is somewhat of a love letter to the past year. Something I built that actually seems like a bit less than just a mess. It's not fully cohesive, or perfect, or whatever else. It's got aspects that Mr. R found interesting, and the first identity he mentioned seeming neat and wanting to build a deck for when we looked through the cards from Elevation. It's got aspects that I found interesting, I haven't really played around with just trying to trash the corp's cards so they just lose yet.

Looking at this, it feels almost like a real deck. It's not perfect, but I'll get there one day. I'll make new friends. I'll play competitively and see what works and what doesn't. I'll look at more competitive decklists. For now, this is all I need; something that works and that makes me happy. I think the same probably applies for life in general.

To anyone else struggling with a phase change in life: it's temporary. Things will resolve and be okay in the end. And really, if nothing else, Netrunner will always be there.

As of actual game strategy, this is just meant to do its very best to make the corp just lose. You either want them to be incapable of scoring or have to trash agendas and rummage through archives, in my experience. It wouldn't be impossible to just run them out of cards either, but I'm not sure how well it'd work. Flip Switch could theoretically be tossed out, so could at least one copy of Ashen Epilogue. AirbladeX (JSRF Ed.) is here to try and let damaging subroutines resolve when possible. In my experience, Audrey v2 is decently well fed, but the other breakers are good backups and function better circumstantially, you could remove them according to your preference. Banner is an absolute staple here, hence the two copies. Audrey v2 and Banner are all I'd say you really need out. No Free Lunch is mostly in as an experiment, as well as Rent Rioters, you could easily take out the No Free Lunch for another copy of Flip Switch or another card of your choice. Flip Switch works well as, if you get in a tough spot, it's a nice way to save yourself from a nasty piece of ice, but it's not necessary either and could be replaced with various other cards or removed entirely. Anyways, I hope you have fun if you use the deck.