I used to play the original game when I was a kid and have tremendous nostalgia for it. It’s been on my mind lately when I play ANR because it is such a similar game. A bit cruder, wilder, spicier.
I’m well aware of all it’s short comings and imbalances in the competitive scene. But in my world, no one bought a million cards to calculate out the most degenerate fast advance decks. Most people only bought a few starter decks and a dozen packs and it was a brilliant game. Some have argued that the reason it didn’t thrive as a CCG was that it was a good enough game without needing to buy volumes of cards. As I recall, after The Duelist published an article that got into it, in my meta, there was 4 ice-breakers that were considered ‘best’ and only 6 pieces of ice that were mostly considered standard. The game was endlessly fun because the game was trying to figure out which of those 6 ice were in front of you. If I had my original decks, I could have played that game forever and it would always have been fun. Even at the time, I always complained that it would have been better as a non-collectible game and credit to FFG for sharing my outlook. Their system for releasing cards is imperfect but leaps ahead of previous models.
Maybe my memories are rosie. But the idea of playing a version of Netrunner with a whole different set of cards and quirks (There are multiple, common 7 to advance 1 point agenda and a 14 to advance agenda worth 3 points if stolen and 7 points if scored).
Since the meta is effectively dead, it’s a perfect game to just build sparring decks that are meant to match-up well.
I bought a lot of 3000 OG NR cards off ebay and was really stoked to get what I assumed was someones old collection. But it seems like it must have been a game stores overstock of picked over commons. I am the proud owner of literally 150 copies of Nomad Allies and 200 copies of Zombie. With only 1 copy of Score, it’s a drag having 3000 cards but not being able to make even a basic deck. No cards are from Proteus, either.
I was wondering if anyone else still plays this game or has any experience with it in the last decade.