Netrunner: Printing Cards While I Waited for the Real Ones to Arrive

I've been playing TCGs for a while. Magic the Gathering is more something I'm still trying out - there's so much going on, so many layers of rules and exceptions, that I still feel like a beginner every time I sit down with it. Pokemon TCG comes much more naturally, which is great since that's the one I play with my sons - simple rules, quick rounds, perfect for a game night together.

Then I stumbled onto Netrunner, and it immediately caught my attention for doing things very differently from what I was used to.

What surprised me about Netrunner

Netrunner is an asymmetric two-player game — one player plays the Corp, the other the Runner, a hacker trying to break into the Corp's servers. The two sides have completely different decks, cards, and playstyles; you're not mirroring the same game from across the table, you're playing two different, interlocking games at once.

The other thing that threw me: no mana, no energy. Resources in Netrunner come down to two things — credits (money) and clicks (time). The Runner gets four clicks per turn, the Corp gets three clicks plus a mandatory draw. Clicks pay for actions, credits pay for most of what those actions cost. It's a simple system, but most of the game's interesting decisions grow out of it - you're constantly weighing whether you have enough time and enough money to do what you want to do.

First I tried printing the cards myself

Before ordering an actual set, I wanted to try the game out with cards I'd printed myself. I've got a laminator at home, so the first attempts didn't look half bad.

Double-sided printing with a proper card back wasn't very satisfying, though - I could never quite get the front and back to line up. So I switched to something simpler: printing just a repeating pattern on the back, the same for every card. That worked a lot better. With a paper cutter and a corner rounder, I got results I was pretty happy with.

But printing and assembling around 200 cards by hand eventually felt like more effort than it was worth, so I gave up on that and just ordered a set.

Studying the rules while I waited for delivery

I used the wait to study up. I read through the rules on the official Null Signal Games site, where Netrunner is now developed and maintained by the community. I also ran through the tutorial and played a few games with the starter deck on chiriboga.sifnt.net.au, which helped the rules click before I ever had physical cards on the table.

And finally — System Gateway

The System Gateway set I'd ordered finally showed up — it's the current starter set from Null Signal Games. All that's left now is printing credits, clicks, and a card box on my Prusa 3D printer, and then there's nothing standing between us and playing this for real on the table.

And the size of the cards is precisely the same like with Pokemon TCG cards. So all boxes, covers and albums work fine...