Talkin' Netrunner - Intro to Netrunner

God, Netrunner. Netrunner is #1 on my “I should play this again” game that I never go back to because I am a COWARD. It’s probably my favorite card game. I play Magic: The Gathering more, because my wife likes it, but personally, I wish I could build up the brain juice to fire it up, but social anxiety goes bonkers sometimes.

For those who don’t know, Netrunner is a 1v1 deckbuilding Living Card Game. One side will play the Corporation and one side will play the Runner. This game has asymmetrical rules, so each player is playing the same game, but also their own game. You can read the more complete rules here if you don’t want to listen to me give a brief rundown.

On the Runner’s turn, they get 4 “Clicks”, or actions on their turn, they can spend this to make a Run at the Corp’s R&D (Deck), Archives (Discard Pile), HQ (hand), or any of their installed Servers (more on that in the corp section). The goal of this is to hamper the corp’s ability to proceed with their plans and steal their Agendas.

Agendas are the Corp’s plans and big projects. These are marked with point totals on them, and this is important. Whoever reaches 7 Agenda Points wins.

To protect these assets, corporations have ICE, cyber security designed to deter Runners. To counter these, Runners need ICE Breakers. To bypass them, the runner will need to overcome the toughness of the ICE, usually by spending Credits to increase the strength of their ICE Breaker during this run, or by using cards that let them bypass them. Each side builds out their resources, managing their own economy, trying to hinder the other player, and the corp can even try to kill the Runner. When a runner takes Meat or Net damage (usually a fictional difference. Net damage is usually done by ICE or other digital attacks while Meat damage is done through physical means), they discard a random card from their hand. If the player takes Core damage, they discard a random card AND their maximum hand size is reduced by 1. If a Runner takes more damage than cards in their hand, or if their Maximum Hand Size is 0, they lose the game.

That’s the basic shape of the game. There are other rules and mechanics, but what I want to talk about next are the Factions and Deck Building. There are 3 main Runner factions, then a few special ones I won’t go into: Shaper, Criminal, and Anarch. There are 4 Corp factions: Haas-Bioroid, Jinteki, NBN, Wayland. There is some general overlap between them, but each faction’s cards lean different ways.

• Shaper cards lean heavily into manipulating the board state. You contain cards to move ice, change types and unrez (flip facedown) corp assets.
• Criminals gain a lot out of making successful runs. Successful runs can lower install costs of things, earn money, or allow you to look at more cards.
• Anarchs are really heavily risk/reward types. Powerful effects and viruses, but often have drawbacks. Some Anarch cards will deal damage to you in exchange for cheaper costs.
• Haas-Bioroid uses the Bioroid types of ICE. In fiction, Bioroids, or biological androids, are under their ownership and they license them out, but they use them as protectors of their assets. Bioroids let a runner clear their subroutines by spending Actions, so they can be bypassed without an ICE Breaker, but losing actions for the turn can be taxing on the runner.
• Jinteki is the tricks and traps corp. ICE for Jinteki does Net Damage frequently, but also they have Assets that can be installed on the remote Servers that can cause the runner to take pause, because they won’t know if it’s an Agenda there, or if it’s something that’ll tax them.
• NBN is all about tags, a mechanic that puts little tracker icons on the player. A lot of card effects trigger if the Runner is Tagged. Even without cards, if a Runner is Tagged, a Corp can spend an action and 2 credits to trash one of their installed assets, making Tags dangerous.
• Wayland is big ICE, big costs, and big money making cards. They also have single action cards that deal direct damage to the opponent. Some of their cards give them Bad Publicity, which gives the Runner a free credit every turn, but usually in exchange for a big one time effect. To me, Wayland is the most straightforward corp.

There are also some neutral cards that don’t belong to any faction.

Below is an example of both a Runner and Corp “Identity”, which are the specific Runner or corporate subsidiary you’re playing. You can click on the image to switch between them.

OK! Lot to take in but I want to focus on a few numbers. The one in the upper left corner of Kate isn’t important for what we’re talking about today. If I get into more mechanics maybe it will but we’ll ignore it for now. The 45/15 are the big ones. The first number indicates the size of your deck. It must contain 45 cards. The 15 is the amount of Influence points you have. Influence is used to add cards from outside your Identity’s faction to the deck. Since Kate is a Shaper, she can use their cards fine, but to use Cyberfeeder (see below), she’d have to use 1 Influence Point for each copy included in the deck. Our Wayland Identity would need to spend 2 Influence points per Snare! in their deck. Most neutral cards don’t have an Influence cost, but some do.

The number in the upper left of these cards is the cost in credits of playing the card. For the Corp, since they play a lot of cards face down, it’s the cost to activate it. They don’t pay anything until they are ready to Rez it. Runner cards get played face up, so they need to be paid up front.

The big thing to remember though, like… THE most important thing is that each game feels like an evolving narrative. You have this plucky runner who wants to fuck with a mega corp in this dystopian world. You kit them out with hardware and software, to prepare them to jack in and break into the servers or headquarters of the company and look for incriminating evidence to sell, and undermine their projects. You lean on your own wits, as well as your contacts and other events. The corp wants to advance these projects and install protection to keep you out. Not only are they installing their Agendas, but also things like advertising campaigns, or hiring advisors or specific characters that make their job easier. Sometimes you need to preemptively do some damage control because you just sent out a hitsquad.

This ebb and flow of the game makes each match so cool. You need to have a corp deck and a Runner deck so you can play both sides eventually, so you’re getting twice the deck building of a normal game.

One final cool thing: There’s no randomness to the card packs. Every block or pack has Every Card from that expansion. Not just 1, but an entire playset. You buy the Old Hollywood datapack, and you get Every Card that was printed for Old Hollywood. ANd each block has its own evolving narrative that you can see through the cards and through the flavor writing insert. For example, 23 seconds, the first part of the Flashpoint block, is about what happened when the largest bank in the world, the backbone of all economic activity in the world, goes down for 23 seconds. Corps are really aggressive in this set as they take action to recover after billions of credits are stolen or simply lost. It’s really goddamn cool.

Despite Fantasy Flight Games no longer having the rights to the Netrunner license, a fan company called Null Signal Games has taken up the mantle. For now, they have continued printing new cards, reprinting old ones, and keeping the game alive. It still has a decently sized fanbase and they even made a couple game formats that are good for beginners. Startup is a good way to mitigate feeling overburden with all the history of cards in the game. It’s a very good starting point for new players.

I think I’ll write more about Netrunner in the future, for now though, check out NetrunnerDB and Null Signal Games if you want to learn more.

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