Revisiting Netrunner and a meetup.com

Happy Friday, Chaps!

Its been quite some time since i posted anything, truth be told its been quite some time since I've really hobbied (hobbyd?) much. But the interest has been rekindled somewhat in the past week or 2.




I'm still having the occasional game of X-Wing (which, I must admit, I am liking more and more the more I play of it.) And the last time i had a game of X-wing, myself and Rich also cracked out the Netrunner decks we'd built most recently.
For me, this was immediately after humanity's shadow, set 5 of the genesis cycle. I know Rich had picked up both the sets following that one but I'm not sure how many of those cards he had actually made use of. We only had the one match, but in all the furore of me getting a bit ticked off about the pace of releases, I had forgotten how much I actually enjoy playing the game.

As such, I started looking back into the game, and I was somewhat surprised to find it wasn't quite as bad as I'd feared. Looking back at my records, I haven't purchased any of the expansion packs since the First week of May.
We're now in November and the only packs I'm missing are genesis cycle pack 6: future proof, the large summer set: creation & control and pack 1 of the spin cycle: opening moves.
So basically, it seems Fantasy Flights inability to deliver these sets to their own stated release calendar competently might make the schedule slightly more palatable.
Don't get me wrong, i would still have preferred a gap of probably 6 months after creation & control before the spin cycle starts to be able to fully digest the genesis cycle plus C&C and try out all the crazy deck ideas stemming from that, but a 3 month gap is definitely better than the 1 month gap originally advertised.

So jump to Monday afternoon, I'm browsing face book and notice a few card spoilers for the next pack in the UK Netrunner facebook group and I decide to have a bit more of a browse around what's been going on in the group. And someone had started a conversation about the monthly Netrunner event id started at darksphere, it appears its still running but doesn't get many players (as in, less than 5).
However, one of those guys has started a weekly event at (of all places) cafe nero at London bridge organised through meetup.com and its been steadily growing in numbers since the first date in July. So i decided to sign up and pop along this week to try it out. Despite the fact that my decks were 6 months and 3 sets out of date, I had a couple of thoroughly enjoyable matches in a pretty casual environment against a couple of welcoming chaps. The venue shuts at 8:30 ish and a few of the attendees popped over the road to continue in the pub until later, though I decided 2 matches was enough as I was feeling a bit tired by this point so went home. I'll definitely be attending again though, maybe till later next time.

The most interesting development of the night, for me though, was seeing this guy and seeing what he is capable of:

I know he may not look like much at first glance, but wow. He's truly the real deal.
Negligible influence cost, free to rez, gives better economy on your clicks by drawing two, lets you hide agendas in archives and can then shuffle them back into your deck if the runner makes a run on archives (and you can even wait until they've paid to bypass any ICE before you do it) AND he makes the Noise anarch strategy a lot worse.
He's by no means an 'I win' card, but he's such an amazing piece of utility of the type that the corp has been sorely lacking so far due to the fact that he can change things up in the runners turn, mid-run even. For too long the runners have had lots of tools to use mid-run, now it seems the pendulum is swinging back towards the centre.
It seems I'm going to need to pick up a copy of opening moves....oh well.


He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Jackson Howard.