Might I trouble you gentlemen for a bit of your time?

I'm a long time player (collector mostly) of the Lord of the Rings LCG. In alt the adventure packs (AP) you get mainly 3 categories of cards. Player cards for your decks, encounter cards for the games enemy deck and quest cards for the adventure/scenario. Same goes for the delux expansions only you get more cards in each category. I have all the AP's and delux but never bought them to get the player cards. I feel there's almost too many player cards by now. Would prefere if you only got player cards in the delux and then only enemy and quest in the AP's. I Mainly buy the packs to get the quests as each delux and the following 6 AP's gives you a nice and exciting story to play through. I like the deck building aspect but mostly I just wanna use my time playing through the stories. Unfortunately you are ofte forced to use at least some of the included player cards as the quests gets more and more difficult. This because newer cards makes for stronger strategies. Between making your deck the strongest to beat everything and tailoring it for each quest you can also focus on different themes (dwarves, Eagles, elves etc.). Or you can delve into the different traits (silvan, ranger, Outland, Rohan) Each delux and cycle introduces and focuses on some new traits as well as develope the older ones.

(In Warhammer Conquest a whole new race is introduced with each delux and following cycle)

End of ramble.

SO, what I would like to know is how it is with Netrunner.

Do they focus on the different fractions/a couple of fractions at a time?

Do you get stronger cards or cards that makes for stronger strategies?

Or is it mostly cards that gives you the same but with a broader variety?

(I like the thought about new agendas, ice, ice breakers so you basically can do the same things but so your friends won't get "used" to your cards. If that makes sense?)

Do they introduce new mechanics, concepts or fractions with each delux?

Thanks for your time

Datapacks have cards for all factions. Cycles tend to introduce new mechanics and focus on themes and/or interactions.

Deluxe packs focus exclusively on one runner/corp faction pairing, with the exception of Data and Destiny which introduced mini-factions to the runner side (as there was no fourth runner faction to pair with NBN).

There isn't really power creep in the sense that newer cards are objectively stronger, but having a broad selection of cards to build decks from tends to result in stronger decks than constructing from a more limited pool.

Hope that helps

Thanks. It helped a lot

Also bear in mind that the influence system means that even a deluxe that focuses on one faction by default has cards that other factions can use. For example, the Honor and Profit Deluxe focuses on Jinteki on the corp side and Criminals on the runner side. However, certain cards from that deluxe are VERY good with other factions. For example, Overmind (a neutral icebreaker for runners) is almost necessary to run Adam (a 'mini-faction' runner from Data and Destiny, another deluxe expansion) and Gingerbread (a criminal faction icebreaker) is very good with the new Shaper runner from Kala Ghoda (especially with other cards in that pack).

That's the beauty of Netrunner. Honor and Profit came out just about 2 years ago, and one of the cards in that set is just now coming into its own as an amazing icebreaker paired with the card Panchatantra. It can be very daunting to get into the game this late in the run (no pun intended), but it is very rewarding. I myself just dove in a few months ago, and while my wallet hates me, this game is hands down one of the best I have ever played.