Android: Netrunner LCG

Android: Netrunner LCG is the 2012 Fantasy Flight resurrection of Richard Garfield's legendary 1996 cyberpunk CCG, and it is one of the most-loved two-player asymmetric card games ever made.

The game

Designed by Lukas Litzsinger (building on Richard Garfield's original Netrunner design) and released in 2012, Android: Netrunner pits a Corporation against a Runner. The Corp places ice on its servers and tries to advance agendas face-down; the Runner digs through that ice, trashes ICE, and steals agendas by running the servers. The asymmetry is total: the two sides have different card pools, different win conditions, and different rhythms of play.

The context

FFG took Garfield's cyberpunk engine and dropped it into their Android sci-fi universe (also home to Android the board game and Infiltration), updating Jinteki, Weyland, NBN and Haas-Bioroid as the four Corp factions. The game launched in 2012 and ran for exactly six years of fixed-distribution expansions before FFG lost the Wizards-of-the-Coast-derived rights in 2018. It is the canonical LCG cycle that proved the model could build a sustained competitive scene.

The collector angle

Core Set plus six full cycles (Genesis, Spin, Lunar, SanSan, Mumbad, Flashpoint, Red Sand, Kitara) plus six Deluxe Expansions (Creation and Control, Honor and Profit, Order and Chaos, Data and Destiny, Terminal Directive, Reign and Reverie) make up the complete run. Reign and Reverie (the 2018 swan song) is the rarest because FFG wound the line down in its first print and stock vanished fast. Worlds-champion alternate-art promos and the foil Tournament playmat-card sets are the prestige pulls. The community-supported Project NISEI continued designing cards after FFG's exit, and the NISEI print runs are their own collector category.