Hey guys,

Just an open letter to anyone interested in voicing their opinion.

Built from the ground-up a Netrunner Player Base in my area that took a lot of effort to sustain, and once we needed to spend our energies elsewhere it slowly petered out. I know in my area there HAS to be a lot of players out there, and so I'm brainstorming ways to both communicate with them and energize them--in short building a healthy Netrunner community.

What events in your community excited you? What methods has your community reached out to you best? What sort of organized play have you enjoyed more, and which less? What kind of prize support do you like most, promos or gift certificates/free data packs? How did you first get into Netrunner? What's your opinion on weekday events versus weekend events?

I don't know if there is a duplicate thread here; I saw one similar from a pure player perspective on CorpDraw, but that was it. I'm sure other small stores would like to hear from you guys as well!

Thanks,

Nick

From my experience, all you really need are the game night kits, and even those might be optional. All I really had to do was post on the web (places like this forum, BoardGameGeek, Reddit, CardGameDB, Facebook) and say "You can play Netrunner here", and people just showed up. As for events, tournaments are really good.

Another thing that was pretty popular in our league was achievements. (From simple stuff like "Play as Haas-Bioroid" and "Win against Jinteki" to more complex ones like "Spend 10-11 credits in a single run" or "Expose an unadvanced agenda".). Each achievement had a point value, and you could trade in your points for promo cards later. This gives players an incentive to be more creative with their decks and makes playing more fun.

Thanks for chiming in Skwizzle!

We've had achievements as part of our past 3 leagues. We're going to look at just posting as more places, like CardGameDB and Reddit, and see if that helps.

Running the same type of league over and over tends to make play repetitive. I've run achievement leagues back to back, and I noticed a drop off the second time around. I'm currently running a simple Identity league where you get points for attendance, playing different IDs, and winning games. Top 16 get an alt art card, top 8 qualify for end of the league tournament.

First of the year, I'm going to run an Escalation league where we'll start with Core Set only decks, then add cycles and deluxe expansions. We'll end that round with a Store Championship. I'm hoping the Escalation will attract new and less experienced players, since it will add cards to the eligible pool over time.

So, the usual rules apply for league play. Regular nights and times that always happen, but it's also important to mix up how the league operates. Finding ways to draw in new players helps out immensely, so demo nights and friendly teachers are big.

I'm a player in Chattanooga TN and we have a small player base here. A couple of the other players have been discussing how do we bring new players to the game.

I came across this on the site https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/fc/98/fc981ac0-3ef5-4175-a1c3-c6740e03deb3/adn01_demoguide_eng.pdf and it looks like a great tool for teaching the game. However I can't find a deck list for what should comprise a "demo" deck and other than a sale on ebay, I can't find the demo decks anywhere.

I'm currently using a core set that I don't have any extra cards in at all to demo the game. I figure if I can show someone what the core set offers and get them interested then maybe they will get invested in the game.

Any word on how jkayati's escalation league is going? That sounds interesting and it gets people in the door for not too much money.

Running the same type of league over and over tends to make play repetitive. I've run achievement leagues back to back, and I noticed a drop off the second time around. I'm currently running a simple Identity league where you get points for attendance, playing different IDs, and winning games. Top 16 get an alt art card, top 8 qualify for end of the league tournament.

First of the year, I'm going to run an Escalation league where we'll start with Core Set only decks, then add cycles and deluxe expansions. We'll end that round with a Store Championship. I'm hoping the Escalation will attract new and less experienced players, since it will add cards to the eligible pool over time.

So, the usual rules apply for league play. Regular nights and times that always happen, but it's also important to mix up how the league operates. Finding ways to draw in new players helps out immensely, so demo nights and friendly teachers are big.

There is criticism for both competitive league and say bonus point achievement leagues. The achievements are good for breaking up the usual top meta list. (Oh goody another Near Earth Hub I haven't seen that ID the last 20 matches [/sarcasm]). However with achievements decks are built not to win but to get certain achievements and often they make for poor one sided matches.

I think the best thing to do is to sort of break it up into both achievements and competitive matches in the season. Say a league last for 4 weeks. The week before have a warm-up week sort of like a pre-league match were all participants get 1 league point. The first 2 weeks are standard matches with the usual competitive set up. The 3rd Week match is a "Wild Card" match which adds in achievements for that night only which could give bonus points. The 4th and final week be like a semi-finals/qualifier with extra league points for wins. At the end have a end of league tournament with match-ups based upon the league points won but league points have little to no effect on tournament winnings. The 4th match is supposed to be a tournament practice.

Also you could use this set up to control the number of players you have in a tournament. You could split up the tournament brackets into two. One open which anyone can participate in and one League Finals which entry has to be bought with League points. You would league point limit set it up so that the possible entrants are those that win both of their semi-finals matches or at least 50% of the all their matches within the first 3 weeks or both semi-final/qualifier matches.