Hello All, and welcome to the show! This thread is designed to chronicle the experience of a 30ish year old couple who decided to get the starter box of Netrunner on a whim while at the FLGS. Will this utterly revolutionize the meta, like what The Terminator did to rom-coms in the 80s? It's too soon to tell. But we CAN promise an honest review from the point of view of a typical suburban nerd who has played a ton of card games over the years, and his enthusiastic but completely inexperienced partner.

Me: Love all card games. All playing card games, dabbled in: mtg, pokemon, lotr, 7 seas, lo5r, vampire, munchkin, etc, and most recently conquest, which is what led me to first becoming aware of netrunner.

Her: None.

Prologue: We visit two friends out of town for a housewarming, and introduce the lady friend to marvel munchkin, which she loves and we play deep into the night. On the drive home she says, "Are all card games that fun, and I've just never known?"Montage of us driving to store, rummaging through the games racks, me saying, "i thought this seemed interesting, but i dont know anything about it.", us getting netrunner and going home.

Step 1: Read the rules!

We make the two suggested starter decks (shaper vs jinteki), both briefly scan the rules and try to play a game. Instantly bogged down with confusion.

Step 2: Watch the videos!

We find the learn to play videos and watch about 20 mins worth, things make sense and we are able to awkwardly hobble through our first game. She likes the corporation, so i play runner. We run a few games, and then switch through the factions following the 'starter' rules, meaning all the faction's cards and all the neutrals. Once we have played all matchups a few times (and she has won a few), we decide we have leveled up and take a break.

Our consensus was that the Shaper and Anarch factions are fairly even, with both being clearly a tier above Criminal and that Weyland seemed below the other corporations. Our rankings at this stage would be: (1)Shaper, (1)Anarch, (3)Criminal; and (1)Haas, (2)Jinteki, (2)NBN, (4)Weyland.

She wants to try the runner next time, so we will try a little role reversal!

It's a fun ride! Just bear in mind that the default "All faction cards + all the grey cards" decks are pretty bad. You can shore up individual factions' weaknesses by importing cards from the other factions using the Influence system. I'd venture to say that Gabe, rocking the Anarch breakers and Datasuckers, is one of the strongest decks out of the core set.