@Apreche I find that when a new player or returning player is trying to learn the game, that it’s better to find someone also getting back into the game. See if there are any returning players in your area.
I know all the players in my area. They never stopped. They’ve just been rolling along.
You would be fine. And for Netrunner it actually feels thematically apt.
Running blind into an ICE and further, having to read the ICE to see wtf it is can be quite fun, like a discovery phase again.
But yes, you may have to read a few cards here and there but man is fun right now.
I would totally recommend grabbing the NISEI set and having a go. Mostly becaue (again) we don’t know how long this second wind may last.
I can wait for the game to die and be resurrected again later. It already Jesus’d once. It will rise again.
Yeah but Nets is a social game for many people. I’ve got a great little casual group here and I can’t understate enough how nice it felt to shuffle up new cards and start the shit-talk at my friends kitchen table again. After 6 months, we really thought this was lost to us but NISEI are giving this back to the comminity.
Its not really about the game itself. I’m sure it will return in some form in the future. It’s too mechanically good to be retired forever. But dam if it didn’t take 15 years to come back once, would you wait another 15 when you can play now?
Yeah, our awesome NYC community never died, although it morphed a lot over time. I just don’t have time for it anymore. Time to do different things. I gotta keep changing it up.
Fair.
I would imagine they would love to see you pop in for a sesh one time. My only comment is don’t let lack of playtime or card recognition stop you. We all stopped for 6 months and had zero problems.
You just might have to pick up and read the occasional card 
I’ve been playing this game on Jinteki and the occasional in-person round with a friend on and off for about three years now.
After not playing for a couple of months I got back into it a couple of weeks ago. I really like the game and put myself on a little project: I want to win a game with every standard legal identity. There’s 71 of them at the moment. I knocked 25 out so far. Here’s what I did.
They’ve clearly created a lot more identities since I played. Trying to win with all of them is tough. There were many for which the strongest deck you could build around them was simply better with another identity in the same faction. If you do get all those wins against opponents who are trying to win, that is a real accomplishment.
Well, I’ve completed the second part of this undertaking, though I split it into two segments this time. Part 1 and Part 2. Also there are only 70 identities as I accidentally counted one twice, and I got 21 left of them to do.
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Well, I completed my quest. 70 identities down in a bit over 3 weeks and about 150 games. I wrote a big post on it on reddit, so I’ll just link to it here.
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I have been playing again a bit recently. Someone linked me to this video, and there two things about it: 1) It’s an incredible game. And 2) One of the commentators is the first person I have heard that speaks in a similar cadence as @Apreche
I watched that one live. Tommy Wong is/was a legend win or lose.
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Always wanted to get into Netrunner (have 1 core set) but even with the fixed releases it was a bit prohibitive price wise to run a competitive decks for me.
Yeah, the only reason I was able to Netrunner was because I was lucky enough to start when there was only one data pack. If I had not started at the absolute beginning, I wouldn’t have done it because the cost of catching up, both mentally and financially, would have been so prohibitive.
I’ve never played Magic, and only played Netrunner when the original core set was released, so my experience with card games is very limited.
That being said, I like how Magic has multiple formats… where there’s one format where all cards are legal and can be used to create your deck and another format where only the current set is legal. I honestly don’t know how popular that is, but I feel like Netrunner or future games should adopt similar ideas.
If Netrunner had had multiple core sets, more frequently, it would have provided people with more “on-ramps” to play the game, rather than having to spend the money to go back and buy everything.
Granted, Netrunner was never as popular as Magic is, but with that type of format, you’re always going to have people who are interested in the game, but come to it late and don’t want to invest the time or money to buy everything before to be competitive.
Regardless of particular ideas to help Netrunner, it didn’t matter. Even if the game had lived on, FFG did not invest the time or effort required to nurture the community, competitively or otherwise. They just kept printing cards, and did the bare minimum of errata and competitive rules and such. No amount of product development would have meant anything if they didn’t do anything to take care of the players.
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That’s very true. FFG has never been good about supporting their competitive games, whether it was Netrunner, any of their other LCGs, X-Wing, Destiny, etc.
These days, FFG is barely a company, so I don’t see that changing. I doubt they’re even going to release any new card games. They’re essentially a walking corpse of their former selves.
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Arkham Card game, which is co-op and also by FFG, has the exact same problem where there’s a lot of really strong cards in the core set but you only get 1 copy and a lot of decks like to use 2 (Max two copies of a card) and some of those cards are also used in multiple builds (theres a similar affinity system to netrunner where you can dip into other deck types for cards for a limited point/level amount). People legit buy mulitple core sets to play a co-op game at a high level of difficulty and the resale value of these cards online is pretty high as a result of this scarcity that in some ways is worse than a booster pack focused game.
I would love to get into the digital netrunner community that’s out there (sidestepping the money problem), but just don’t have the time right now/feel like I would get absolutely bodied walking in as a newb.
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