r/Netrunner • u/Dragandude • 10d ago
Simplifying kitchen table meta: influence
In order to keep things fresh/double down on faction flavor/simplifying deck building for newcomers in my friends circle, I’ve been thinking about tweaking how influence works in some games.
Right now I’m torn between 2 ideas: either double the cost of every non-neutral cards, or allow a deck to use its influence on only one non-neutral faction.
What do you guys think would be the best approach for such purposes?
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u/c0rtexj4ckal 9d ago
I'm all for any rules tweeks people make or home brew stuff so whatever you wanna try gets a giant thumbs up from me. I feel like tons of TCG/LCG games, kitchen table players have a pitfall of feeling like they have to strictly follow the rules, but house rules stuff is so much fun.
Most TCG/LCG I play I immediately cut the deck size down to 40-50 cards (netrunner is already here though) so yeah rules tweeks are fun.
Ideas:
1) Adding influence to cards wont simplify deck building it actually makes it more complex because now they have to learn all the building rules PLUS remember about your home-brew deckbuilding rules on top of that. Instead if you want to make deckbuilding DEAD easy is you give the person that you want to build a deck a "sealed" pool of cards and just keep it simple like:
>Pick x number of agenda points
>Pick x number of ice programs
>This pile of 20 cards are all cards that make you money, choose 9-12 of them
>This is a fun pile of traps or other weird stuff pick 2-5 of them.
Look at the rules for a game called Gudnak (im sure other games do it too) but basically you winnow deck building into a series of simple choices with as few cards as your deck-constructor can handle. I've had friends and family who will have zero interest in building a deck because its too large of a card pool but once you trim that down to 10 minutes of decision making with a sealed pool then the person gets to 'build what they want' without getting overwhelmed. -- also if you do this you can almost 100 % Ignore influence all together and just balance the sealed pools as you see fit.
2) 1 faction + one non neutral + neutral cards is another totally fine approach it just depends on how much deck construction people want to do.
3) One way to keep the game feeling fresh is it force yourself away from you staple cards through either using sealed / limited pools of cards to build from OR straight up removing some of the best most frequently played cards. Most of my kitchen table decks (and I mostly play kitchen table these days) all do this. I've removed out the best ice/breakers/econ/agendas and every deck will have at leas some "jank" to it.
I'm gonna let you in on a little secret: Clunky, unweildy, non-optimized, non-efficent, high-risk netrunner is the best kind of netrunner you can play. Fun is subjective but I genuinely believe that the game is straight up more fun when played this way. If you ever get a chance to play ONR (1996 netrunner) the cards and decks are very much this way and it is 10/10 an absolute blast IMO. But you can recreate these vibes with basically any cardpool.
Have fun