hey all

i hear nothing but positive responses to this game and as a card game lover i will be getting my hands on a copy as soon as i can here in the netherlands .
Just dont understand 1 thing every boardgame/cardgame news has something positive to say about netrunner but its a redesign of an older game right ? how come the older game wassnt such a succes ??

That is very good question, one i have been asking for many years. still haven't got a satisfactory answer.

It was made in the shadow of Magic the Gathering, which occupied most of Wizards resources. They felt like the modest success of Netrunner simply cannibalized the market for MTG. The company was focused on supporting MTG and it came at the expense of several other card games they developed. The people that played it loved it and it has endured.

Beyond that, there were a couple of specific reasons:

1) Cyberpunk wasn't a particularly popular theme at the time, and the early 90s CGI art didn't do the game any favors.

2) Many of the game's mechanics were ahead of its time - facedown play, asymmetrical mechanics, etc., all made the game much more difficult to play out of the box than Magic.

3) While the game mechanics themselves were always solid, certain additional elements weren't - specifically, the lack of limits on copies of any particular card made for some broken strategies. Also, some specific mechanics never quite gelled - faceup but unrezzed cards, bad publicity, and traces never really worked particularly elegantly.

You will note that FFG cleaned up all of these problems with the LCG.

Also back then the CCG market was saturated with various games, like almost a new one every week. Nowadays it is much smaller market as most of the "class of 95" has died. All that is left is Legend of the Five Rings. Which is now the second oldest ccg after Magic.

Voidy said:

Simple answer: Not everybody did love it back then. It's funny for some, Netrunner was a contentious title back in the day, but perhaps it was "before its time." This happens with films often -- something will release to moderate success (or less) and disappear, only to turn into a cult classic years later. Netrunner is a cult classic of a similar stripe.

I think Zelrig is closest. WotC had ambitions at that stage of making hobby gaming huge, making it mainstream, making it as big as chess or sports.

They made big bets on Jyhad aka Vampire the Eternal Struggle, and Netrunner, the 2nd and 3rd ccgs Garfield did. Printed enormous amounts of both games. When those games didn't explode, they gave up on them. Pokemon was really the first game after MtG that succeeded like they hoped for..

Meanwhile huge amounts of original Netrunner cards were sent off to be destroyed at an incinerator, so that the market wasn't glutted with extra product like had happened to them with Jyhad / VtES.

Don't forget that outside of the WotC empire, there were dozens of other CCG threats popping up in the form of games such as Legend of the Five Rings, Star Wars CCG, Middle Earth, and Star Trek CCG 1e. All this along with the fact that WotC was making too many CCGs at once (Magic, Pokemon, Battletech, Netrunner, Jyhad) and someone had to go. Netrunner ended up being one of those someones.

I bought a starter set when it was new and liked it. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anyone interested enough to play in my small town, as they were all too busy with drinking the MtG kool-aid.

So that was the problem I ran into with the original Netrunner…MtG keeped most people from being interested in it at that time.

now i understand (never been a fan of magic never played it actually ) my first CCG was pokemon followed by Lord of the Rings from Decipher (still in love with that game) started on wow tcg also a good game but my local playgroup stopped playing and i dont like going to tournaments alone so stopped aswell . then the game of thrones hype started for me and been playing that since launch of the HBO series and LOVING IT. on the side i play lotr LCG a bit.

And i intend to start with the netrunner and star wars LCG aswell

i LOVE CARD GAMES

I always viewed the disappearance of Netrunner as a combination of all of the above. Wizards sacrificed (correctly, from a business POV) other projects to strengthen MtG. (The coming acquisition of TSR might have influenced things as well.) Everybody and their dog had a new TCG, with too few dollars chasing too many cards. And cyberpunk was a fringe theme.