When I first started playing on Jinteki, I really had only played Netrunner with my daughter, and we’d not found many of the weird little quirks of the rules. As I played a few times, I noticed the game prompting me to rez my Adonis campaign before my turn started. It blew my mind that I’d never thought of rezzing it at the end of the runner’s turn so I could get my money back out right away.
Fast forward a while and here I am listening to Breaking News episode 55, and one of the hosts “reminds” us that there’s a rez window at the beginning of your turn before the “your turn begins” triggers fire. MIND BLOWN AGAIN.
I am tempted to whinge over the weird semantic space that is created by allowing players to change the board state at the beginning of their turn and then trigger things that happen ‘at the beginning of your turn’. But instead I want to ask:
What nuances of the Netrunner rules blew your mind when you learned about them?
First, you can sacrifice a program and then reinstall it with Scavenge.
Second, you can only do this if you have other possible targets.
Third, there’s no way for the Corp to know if there is another possible target in the Runner’s hand.
The interaction of foundry and ABT still is just the most confounding thing in the world to me. (If you abt and install an ice, foundry forces a shuffle, which means the other cards you were looking st get shuffled, so the rest of abt can’t resolve)
The UK channel on Slack had a long debate a couple of days ago about what happens if you encounter Fairchild 3 with 2 credits and nothing installed. Eventually we deferred to Damon and ANCUR on Twitter and the ruling was that you have to pay your 2 credits, as you can’t pay the “trash an installed program” cost, but that if you have 2 credits and a card you have to trash the card as you can’t fully pay the “pay 3 credits” cost and there’s no “if able” clause like Tollbooth.
The slightly arbitrary “pay any costs you can pay in total, if not pay any costs you can pay in part, if not do nothing” ruling really threw me although half the people in the channel seemed to find it perfectly intuitive.
Playing with a friend that rarely plays. He hits a Tollbooth which sucks up his Ghost Runner credits. “What the hell, they aren’t in my pool! They are in between the data like the card says. They are the fairy lady’s credits, not accessible to some god damn toll collector.”
That only works if you are able to move the advancement tokens off somehow. Otherwise, as noted on the card, the rez cost is lowered by the advancement tokens on it, which is true whether the card is rezzed or unrezzed. Since BS gives you back the rez cost, a triple advanced Wormhole still gives 0 credits; the same you rezzed it for.
Now lets pretend it works the way you want! The way I usually think about advancing ICE is that it basically takes 2 credits per advancement: the one you used to advance it, and the one you lost by not just clicking for a credit. Lets look back at Wormhole again as an example of what I mean. Let’s say you have 10 credits. You spend your turn clicking up to 13, and then the runner runs on it and you rez for 9. You’re now at 4 credits. If you had spent your turn advancing it instead, you’re at 7 credits, both before and after rezzing it, since it costs 0. So basically, spending the turn advancing it saved you 3 credits over clicking for credits, so Wormhole effectively cost 6 to rez.
So now back to Not-How-Blue-Sun-Works, where we magically ignore the space ICE text and get back real money for advanced ICE. Wormhole cost 6 to rez after triple advancing it, as per the example above. You now pick it up for 9. You’ve now spent an install and an entire turn advancing ICE to get a Beanstalk Royalties! So even in this case, it’s still a really, really bad move for BS.
Thank god it doesn’t work that way so I don’t have to see people trying to do this.
I think, to a certaint extent, you’re missing why this would be good. Rezzing an asteroid belt for free a single a hard end-the-run when you need it. Then when you need to fire your midseason/scorch/whatever, picking it up for 9 I see a big Econ boost. It’s unarguable that if you are doing this as pure economy it’s bad. But it allows for low cost/high burst that I think could be decent in the faction.
My main rules epiphany in Netrunner was when I learned the steps of simultaneous triggers. It opened my eyes, and suddenly I understood everything that had confused me before.
Trigger.
Confirmation.
Resolution.
It helped me understand the strange Data Raven vs Inside Job interaction.
The one Rules quirk that made me go ‘…the hell?’ has thankfully been fixed, and it involved hosting the Chess ICE on Scheherazade. It used to be true that if you hosted a Chess ICE on anything that wasn’t an ICE, you could no longer move it with a click. This is no longer true.
ABT/Foundry gives me a giggle even to this day, and it’s my prime example of THIS GAME IS NOT THE SAME when I teach former Magic players.
Other little quirks: To stop Sneakdoor Beta, put Crisium Grid on Archives. If you put the Grid on HQ, though, it will prevent Gabe from gaining 2cr.
Off the Grid and Crisium Grid on HQ are amusing.
If you trash a Harbinger while playing Hayley, you won’t get her ability during that same turn.
With the Supplier… If you have 2 Link and an Underworld Contact on the Supplier, you won’t get a credit from UWC. If you have 1 Link, a UWC installed and a Dyson Mem Chip on the Supplier, you will get a credit from UWC if you install the Mem Chip with the Supplier.
For what its worth, its the same reason that Adonis Campaign puts 12 credits on itself. Lakshmi’s ability looks for “any” card rezzed to trigger. We already have other cards that look for “itself” rezzed to trigger. “Itself” is included in “any”. When you frame it like this it makes a lot more sense, but I was also surprised at Lakshmi working for itself when that came up.
