The part of ANR I really enjoy

Netrunner General
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So here is what I enjoy in Netrunner: I really enjoy games that revolve around ice and remotes and stuff put in remotes behind ice.

I really don’t enjoy games with assets after asset. I don’t like those games as Runner and I don’t really enjoy them as Corp. I’m not sure why. After all, both games are about managing economy and making smart choices about when and where to run, but there is something interesting about the puzzle of getting through ice that is just missing for me when the game becomes “Can I afford to trash that Jeeves, or will that just get me hit with HHN?”

What do you really like in this game? What kinds of games to you really enjoy?

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I’ve thought about this a lot and for me it basically boils down to 1) having agency over my decisions and 2) encountering interesting dilemmas.

For the first point, it’s really what attracted me to the game in the first place. Coming from playing games like Magic the Gathering, I remember being really captivated by the Click system, particularly the action Click: Draw 1 Card. You always have options in Netrunner as far as how you will spend your valuable time, and because these actions aren’t necessarily tied to cards few decks really “play themselves.” I’ve played numerous other card games where you really only get the choices the deck gives you, and it feels like you aren’t making many meaningful decisions as a player if everything boils down to just playing the objective best card in your hand.

To the second point, I love when Netrunner spits out some unexpected challenge. For example, maybe you lost your Killer and then you realize you can break a Vanilla, let the Ichi kill your Fractor and get you that sweet single access that could be the winning agenda. In my experience with board and card games, nothing really compares to Netrunner for creating these types of puzzles.

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Art and theme, as well as the power fantasy of controlling an evil megacorporation. Who else hasn’t cacked with glee as they throw down two Scorched Earths or fired their first Archer? I really get immersed in the world itself, although the game has a couple balance issues.

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Look at this, a positive thread title!

Yet the first post manages just over a line about what they like, then shifts right back into 4 lines of moaning about what they don’t like. If you are miserable when playing this game, maybe you shouldn’t play, but that’s your choice. But I would really appreciate it if you stopped sharing your misery.

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I enjoy the bluffing games, and you don’t necessarily need ice for that to be fun. NEH fastrobiotics vs Kate or Kit was a classic matchup, I really enjoyed installing a Product Placement on top of a rezzed SanSan just to bait out a Clot, even though it rarely worked cause my opponents could read me :slight_smile: You can still get that to an extent with CtM decks, but with Sensie banned there’s less incentive to run uniced facedown remotes so it’s hard to get them to faceplant an MVT.

Assets really became obnoxious when the bluffing aspect disappeared due to cards like Mumbad City Hall, and trash costs became truly obnoxious.

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So what do you enjoy?

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i love the assymetric style of the game, the mini games inside the game(not psi xD), like bluffing, trying to kill the runner ,the thrill .do or die scenarios. really lovely game still one of my best games played

i also love how you have to adapt to your opponent’s id/faction/play find it’s weaknesses and abuse them. mind games,traps…oh boy…

nothing auto pilots. decisions matter, if you lose it’s probably your fault . “i could have done that better”

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Look at this, a positive forum comment!

Yet your comment manages only one line about what you like in this post, then shifts right back into 3 lines of moaning about what you don’t like about the post. If you’re miserable when reading this post, maybe you shouldn’t read it, but that’s your choice. But I would really appreciate it if you stopped sharing your misery.

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I’ll second Walloon and rubyvr00m in saying I like the puzzles produced by combinations of ICE, and that it’s usually most relevant in remotes.

At GenCon I was playing Andy against a Gagarin deck that had stacked two Tour Guides to make a scoring remote. I hadn’t even found my Sentry breaker yet, but used inversificator to swap one for a Mausolus, then next turn when they went to score out, I did the same again. Ran through both Mausolus letting them fire to steal the winning agenda. Highly satisfying.

Like Walloon, I also don’t really enjoy playing against Asset Spam, but thematically asset spam actually seems the most fitting. In pretty much any cyberpunk story of plucky low-life hackers stopping the nefarious plans of a mighty megacorp, the Corp should have tons of different facilities making them mountains of cash. The Hacker doesn’t systematically dismantle every single corporate facility one-by-one until the Corp has no more resources than the hacker. They pick one or two strategic targets and breach the defenses of the unwitting Corp to escape with precious secrets, leaving most of the Corp’s assets intact. It just doesn’t feel that way mechanically in the game most times.

I’ve said before one of the things I like about Netrunner is that it’s “fun to lose” - meaning that even in games I didn’t win, usually enough interesting or unexpected things happened and I got to make enough interesting choices that I had an enjoyable and often memorable time.

Lastly I’ll say that I like how not-snowbally it is. Most games I lose, I don’t feel like “oh I lost it on turn 2”. Lots of runner games you’ll get to 4-5 points, then the Corp will build up a much stronger board state, but you’re still only one good access from victory. Maybe you’re down to zero credits when the Corp goes to score their winning agenda out of a server with 4 ICE and Ash and Batty, but you click for 3 and Maker’s Eye into R&D, spending 1 to break Vanilla then letting Ichi trash your rig and tag and brain you but SWEET SWEET VICTORY is the second card down.

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This.
I have Player Agency regardless of what my deck gives me, except in extremely rare circumstances where it gives me only agendas, or no ICE, or other statistically annoying things.

(Meandering bit about Asset Spam)
TL;DR: Asset Spam in general is fine. Currently it has the problem of HHN, and there being few low-power high-trash Assets.

Asset spam is fine. Currently we have a few ridiculously powerful Assets, when we should have more things like PAD Campaign. PAD Campaign is a great Asset. It has a relatively low effect (1cr/turn isn’t… HUGE, though it is there.) along with a high trash cost. That, I think, should be where Assets really shine. Assets shouldn’t want or need ICE protecting them, that’s where the Political assets went wrong. Same as Mumba Temple; They put ‘downsides’ that really weren’t. You want Assets that don’t require ICE defending it. You want a deck with less than 15 ICE… Adonis Campaign is another Asset that’s Good, because it takes a few turns to positively affect your board state, and must be defended with ICE because it’s A) Very good effect, and B) Relatively cheap to Trash.

Honestly, Whizzard messed all the Asset math up. Now that he’s gone maybe we can rebalance these Assets to be more accurate. NEH was supposed to be the Corp that put out a bunch of little assets that slowly gave them more and more advantages as the game went on, instead of the Fastrobiotics we got instead… And really, the other huge problem Assets have right now is that all of them have the protection of HHN. Again, if we can get high-power Assets with low Trash costs to not have ICE in front of them, because the Runner will Lose The Game to HHN if they go and trash them… That’s not a good state.

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(Not to derail the conversation here, but you bring up some interesting points.)

I think you’re absolutely dead-on re: the extent to which HHN warps the value of assets, and I think the design of more recent punishment cards tacitly acknowledges that using “the runner made a run” as a precondition or balancing mechanism was not very good (and in fact may be antithetical to the game’s core principles and a great swathe of the runner card pool).

Damon said a number of contradictory things, but claiming that the game should be about making runs and then designing a card that causes the runner to lose four clicks and eight credits if he or she does is one of the more inscrutable outcomes of the Flashpoint era.

Looking at Wake Up Call as an example (note: I am not making any claim about Wake Up Call’s goodness or badness here, please don’t email me) you can see what I think is an attempt at a different way of balancing a punishment card. In the HHN exchange, the corp loses nothing. In the Wake Up Call exchange, the corp has (presumably) lost an asset that they cared about, and the runner has gained some kind of advantage by getting rid of it. It’s plausible from a design perspective, anyway, even if we all know how easily a situation can be engineered that abuses this nominal balance (Mumbad Virtual Tour, for example).

Looking at Calibration Testing and, er, the Weyland one, my interpretation is that the design team are trying something new for this cycle: assets that enable the corp to score out of a remote. I think we have been so battle-scarred by the political assets that we’re unable to appreciate a slightly lighter, perhaps healthier touch that helps corps for whom there is a perpetual “get to five points then slowly lose the game” problem. Time will tell, but it seems “assets done right” might be a theme for the cycle.

Of course, there is every possibility that this is a case in which the admission of a lesser evil conceals the existence of a greater one. Netrunner players have a limitless capacity to engineer categorically un-fun play, and I’m sure it won’t be long until we’re all back to rolling our eyes at the new super toxic IG deck. Plus ça change, hein?

Cautiously optimistic about the future of assets though, speaking purely as a private citizen. :sunglasses:

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My favorite part of ANR is yomi. Traps and mind games. All corps do it to a greater or lesser degree, but for me the joy of getting a runner to Faust past your Tollbooth into a bluffed Snare for the flatline is the greatest thing.

The runner side at it’s core has far less possibilities to create such scenarios, but both sides of the mind game can be enjoyable. Conversely, things that eliminate mindgames, like SMC for ice placement, are some of the most frustrating for me, because that is the point where ANR becomes a game about money, not tactics.

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The part of Netrunner I really enjoy is the part where “emotions” are generated in the darkest, most malevolent region of my creaky old ribcage: that which you, the living, call “a heart.”

I have tried other games and felt nothing, with the exception of a single game of Magic: The Gathering in the summer of 1998 with my high school best friend, coming down off a high dose of psilocybin mushrooms as the sun rose over my parents’ otherwise empty house, after we had been lost in the woods for what felt like the entirety of recorded history and more, and after we eventually emerged from the trees onto a hill, confused and afraid, only to find the city laid out in miniature below us, like an ant colony with tiny buses, tiny cars, and tinier people driving to their tiny jobs in a reality that did not concern us, and after we laughed hysterically, returned home, chain-smoking, poured a bunch of my parents’ gin into a teapot (?) and decided to shuffle up the Magic cards I’d mostly ignored since I went away to college the previous summer…

…With the exception of that single game of Magic: The Gathering, games didn’t make me feel “emotions” for a very long time.

Netrunner is a very, very good game indeed.

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