I am sure this has been asked before several times, my apologies, but who wins if the runner is running on archives which contains an Obokata Protocol and a “Shock!” with only 4 cards in hand and the runner chooses to take the Obokata Protocol?
Does he have the opportunity to choose to interact with the agenda first thus win the game and “avoid” the “Shock!” or does he have to take the “Shock!” first? Does placement in the Archives matter in this case and at all?
I am guessing the best option is to leave the Obokata, take the “Shock!” damage and come back with 5 cards in Hand, but I was curious what happens in a situation when the runner would steal the last agenda point and die to damage in the same run, who would win?
My understanding is that when a Runner has a successful run on Archives, they can choose the order in which they access cards, therefore if they ran with 4 cards in their Grip, they could access the Obokata Protocol first (provided they knew which card it was, either because it somehow went into Archives face up, or it is the only face down card in archives for example), pay the additional cost of 4 net damage to steal it, thus winning the game. They would not then need to access the Shock! (which would kill them), as the game is already over and won by the Runner.
Yes, this is correct. The runner chooses which order to access cards in Archives, and the game ends immediately once one player hits 7 points, so Shock! never happens.
(As an interesting aside, I believe the latter is a change from the original 90s Netrunner, where the game was only won once the run was over, so the runner needed to survive.)
I think that the old version (the runner needs to complete the run) is more thematic, but I guess the runner has a slight handicap anyway (most of the time, I mean during most of the past metas) so this balances it out a little bit.
All cards in Archives are turned face up before the Runner decides what order to access them in, so they don’t need to know anything about the Obokata in advance.
Accessing Archives
When accessing cards in Archives, the Runner turns all cards faceup in Archives before accessing them. Then he or she accesses and resolves individual cards one by one, in any order he or she wants.
I was a huge fan of the late 90’s original and finally picked up a core set. After a fair amount of games, it feels like the games don’t play as well as they could or as richly as I expected having played so much of the original.
I imagine that buying some more cards and referring to the new list of banned and restricted cards. However, it feels ludacris to have to spend 700 dollars just so my wife and I can play a game card game with the complete sets. On the other hand, we are both hardcore, competitive game nerds (on and off mid-stakes poker pros over the years, Magic local champ in jr. high, ect) and it feels like we aren’t going to have the rich depth of play with anything less than a full set.
The angst of loving a game but being sort of feeling insulted at the idea of paying hundreds of dollars for a stack of plastic playing cards has always been hard to resolve.
Say, if I just wanted skill-heavy, good games between the two of us, is there any middle ground between a 30 dollar investment and a 350 dollars (or more) investment?
You quite often see complete collections for sale on eBay or Facebook - try finding your local Netrunner group on FB or IRL and see if anyone’s selling. If you’re “hardcore”, I can understand wanting a complete collection - I wish I’d just bought a complete set second hand instead of a partial set (which I’ve now spent significantly more on completing!).
I’ve seen complete collections selling for around $250 upwards (depending on number of cores, storage solutions included, alt arts and promos included etc), so this might be a reasonable middle ground for you price-wise.
Would one full set be fine to share with my wife? Will we be wanting to construct decks with over lapping cards or will playing this game involve having to shuffle cards around a lot. Do we both need a set for this not to get messy?
When I played the original netrunner, my collection actually got mixed up with my brothers in what was a very upsetting incident at the time. After that the game was kind of less fun, as we tried to build from our shared pool.
Some cards like Sure Gamble and Hedge Fund are used in almost all corp and runner decks, so it’s nice to have multiples of those, however most sets that you buy from someone who is selling them will contain 2-3 core sets. Beyond that, if there are ever cards you want in more than one deck, just throw a random card in a sleeve and a piece of paper in it saying what it’s supposed to be. Even on game nights with other people, I’ve yet to meet anyone who minded.
So I guess as a real answer, I’d think that it’d be fine with one full set of Netrunner cards.
I read somewhere terminal directives was a good expansion to get if I maybe wanted to get one expansion to mess with first. But the cards also want stickers put on their sleeves and destroy card, if I could ask, does that mean those cards are a self contained side game or if you don’t destroy cards as you play it, are those cards still integratable into a tournament deck?
The stickered, destroyed, etc cards are a self contained side game. There are a bunch of tournament legal cards in Terminal Directive, but they don’t ever get altered by the campaign.
Also, I second Saan’s recommendation to get one set and use proxies, but it’s worth mentioning that of course the one place proxies usually aren’t allowed is tournaments. If you start going to casual nights, you’ll probably meet people you can borrow cards from for tournaments, but that can be a nuisance, so you may eventually find yourself inching towards two collections. I wouldn’t worry about it much now because it’s only going to be an issue if you both take it up seriously enough to go to tournaments regularly and you often want to play similar decks, but I figured you should be warned that it is possible.
couple more n00b questions;
At the higher levels, how much does bluffing and bluff-detecting improve your chances of winning?
My wife and I are both on again/off again mid-stakes poker pros and we noticed that a lot of the body language principals seem to carry over. I think I am pretty decent at telling if a player puts down an under-defended agenda or an ambush, has a HQ full of agendas or not, if he can afford to rez his ice or not, that sort of stuff.
Do players consider this sort of stuff in this game? Do people watch for tells?
And the last question; it seems like I have to not only understand the cards that I put in a deck, but be prepared for all the cards I might be up against. This sort of feels like I have to know an overwhelming amount of cards to be able to really play the game. Is there a way to approach that process without feeling overwhelmed?
Bluffs definitely have their place. At the high level it’s a lot less “I Mushin No Shin’d a card, is it an agenda or a trap” and more “I just put a card in this server, can you afford to check it? Can you afford not to?”
The classic example of this was I think the penultimate match in the 2015 world championship, one player was agenda flooded early and just left an agenda behind a single piece of ice for the whole game.
If you’re interested, here’s the video. It’s one of my favorite games of all time.
If the question is “can you afford to check it/can you afford to not” wouldn’t feeling confident that you know what it is without checking it be an advantage? Is that level of opponent-reading occurring or are you saying that at the higher levels of play they don’t think as much in those terms as they confront those questions exclusively with cards/runs/strategic inference?
Again, maybe this is a silly question but I am super interested in those aspects of the game.
Like in any game, there are cards that are just better than others. You won’t know your opponent’s decklist, but you can expect some cards common to an archetype.
For example, if I’m sitting across from someone playing Controlling the Message, I’ll fully expect to see a few cards:
Daily Business Show
Commercial Banker’s Group
Mumbad Virtual Tour
Enhanced AR Security
Hard Hitting News
There are also cards that almost always come paired. For example, if this CtM deck rezzes a Data Raven, I can be pretty sure they’re running Quantum Predictive Model as well.
This knowledge comes with time, practice, and following the meta. The good news is, you don’t need to know an overwhelming amount of cards, as you get better you’ll gain a solid sense of which cards will be important to memorize, and which can just be bucketed into an archetype. For example, I never remember the specific numbers on Passport, I just remember that it’s a mediocre breaker. If I need to know more, I can always read it when my opponent plays it.
I played for a very long time on jinteki.net and I am already getting a feel for it. The design is beyond impressive. My only regret, I guess, is that I had been having a good time playing it with my novice friends around the house in our down time and now I am going to be 100 miles ahead of them and wasting too much time on the internet now on top of that. It’s not like I can resist though. I recently gave up internet poker for a living and this is probably becoming my gateway out.
Not exactly a new player, but I was wondering if there are any active netrunner communities in Southern Massachusetts or Rhode Island. Been meaning to get back into the game but none of the stores I’ve been to in the area have any players, let alone weekly meetups.
Follow up:
Per a few peoples recommendation I got the Terminal Directives expansion and played through it with my wife and I have to say, this was kind of a terrible thing to recommend to a new player.
I was stoked on the concept of the campaign and was excited to play through it. However, there are enough to worry about learning without, adding additional, minor side effects like “get 2 bits when a runner jacks out”. It’s another little thing to forget to do and adds nothing to the game except slightly imbalancing it. The rules were written in the most confusing way possible too.
My wife called it an Aspergers game. Needless stickers, charts and meticulous, needlessly complex details for no reason but for the OCD autistic types.
The biggest drag was the adding of cards between games. It’s easy to make a good runner deck but it’s pretty hard to put together a good corp deck as a new player with a relatively small pool of cards. I have to keep adding cards and taking them out after every game. It’s not easy or fun to have to stop game flow and have to read an article on how many ice per deck is standard or whatever.
I guess I am happy to add the cards to my collection but the concept was so interesting, it just absolutely did not work. Total drag.
