Aidan Friesen and I ended up playing 3 games of Android: Netrunner. So far, I’ve been the Corporation and he’s been the Runner. In the first two games Aidan lost – once to Net damage and once to the Corporation advancing enough of their agendas.
In the final game of the night, Aidan and I switched our base decks. And things got interesting. I was playing a Corporation that expanded with greater ease (after all they utilized cloning). Aidan was playing the Anarchists, who made ample use of Virus software.
During this game, I was always struggling to find more $ as I was brining assets, agenda, and ice into play, but unable to quite Rez them (make them active); Whereas Aidan was burning through his deck by drawing 2 cards per turn by paying one action point (instead of the customary 1 card per 1 action point).
Things were looking grim for Aidan, and he even commented that it looked impossible for him to beat some of my Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics (ICE 📖). But he soldiered on. Steadily I was picking up victory points, while Aidan was skirting around and building the best runner he could. But then the attacks came, and they were furious; Parasites were eroding my big - all the while as installed viruses were chipping away at my R&D opportunities.
The Runner breach corporate Head Quarters (HQ 📖) on a few occasions, netting a single Agenda. And then I pounced…gathering a tremendous amount of coin so I could being advancing my final agenda, while protecting it behind some serious defenses.
In one run, Aidan played a fantastic card that gave him tremendous resources at the cost of taking one point of Brain damage – discard a card at random and reduce your maximum hand size by one. A risky move, but with his regular drawing of 2 cards per turn, that disadvantage was almost entirely mitigated.
Aidan, seeing he had one last turn before the Corporation would advance their final agenda, made a risky gamble. With 2 actions, he began his run on a weakened R&D. And came up empty. But his viruses were spreading, and R&D’s servers were more porous for his second run, which netted him two agendas with enough points to steal and win the game.
At one point, I was wondering if Aidan was going to attempt to deck the Corporation by running them out of cards to draw. I wonder how valid of a tactic it would’ve been?