Hey there Runners! Hope you’re all enjoying any festivities you partake in, and now I’ve got myself wondering if kids in the future believe in Santa… anyway, that’s something for me to ponder when I don’t have an article to write for you.

We’re making a small change to our publishing schedule here at NISEI Plaza, with the main updates from yours truly moving to Mondays. In order to make this transition smooth, we’re going to be publishing four articles in rapid succession. Here’s the schedule…

28/12 - 2018 Replay

29/12 - NISEI Art update

30/12 - Community Retrospective

31/12 - NISEI Retrospective and 2018 Learnings

So I’ll be doing one of these Replays each year, which will basically be a tl;dr of everything that’s gone on in the wonderful world of Netrunner and is intended to make you go “Holy time lapse Batman, is it really only X months since that happened?” - if you cast your mind back to this time last year, we’d just had the first pack of the Kitara Cycle, Sovereign Sight, and as far as we were concerned it was full steam ahead for Michael Boggs as he was close to his 1 year anniversary of ANR stewardship.

Down The White Nile came out in Feb, just in time for the end of Store Championship season, bringing the corp such wonders as NGO Front, SSL Endorsement, Jinja City Grid and Economic Warfare, as well as the staple of Pirate Decks everywhere, Kongamato.

March’s release of Council of the Crest finally gave Crims a decent in house current in the form of Corporate “Grant”, along with No One Home, that usually cheeky-one-of, while the corps got Anansi, aka CEO of Legs, and made a six agenda NBN deck viable with the addition of AzMari EdTech and Degree Mill - which on a personal note made for one of the more amusing plays I’ve seen this year where #UK resident @swabl rescued both their Levys from event-loaded Street Peddlers by stealing a Degree Mill.

April brought us pack four, The Devil and the Dragon, which included the very notable Rashida Jaheem and 419: Amoral Scammer, followed by TWO packs in May (Whispers in Nalubaale and Kampala Ascendent) which kicked off that whole “no, the corp is not allowed any cards” meta with the release of Zer0, along with Engolo, plus Mti Mwekundu: Life Improved, Surveyor and High Profile Target for the Corps.

Which brings us to June… on the plus side, we got Reign and Reverie - which includes so many good cards that I’m not going to list them all here - but on the downside, FFG made us all cry with their Jacking Out article :( Personally, I was numb for about four days, it felt like my best friend had just told me they were moving to the other side of the world just before my birthday. However it didn’t take long before a whole host of people were all “No, I will not accept this” and started the groundwork for what would quickly become known as Project NISEI, with the application process for the leadership positions beginning two weeks later.

July’s Regional events found us still firmly in the CV/0 meta (which would last all the way up until just before Worlds), meanwhile the NISEI Selection Committee were hard at work reviewing the 57 applications for what would become known as The Board.

August… well, that was a busy month. Nationals was this month for a lot of us, and not only were 400 of us around the world in prep for Magnum Opus, but also the Selection Committee announced their choices for the people to lead NISEI, myself included. We immediately started planning our final structure for the organisation, began recruitment two weeks later, and Austin laid out their plans for Organised Play in 2019. Meanwhile FFG announced a new MWL that firmly murdered Zer0, meaning corps were once again “allowed” to have more than one card in their HQ.

September featured Magnum Opus, which was one of the highlights of my year and a very fitting final hurrah from FFG, and included the release of the Champion cards, plus the very weird OrgCrime pair that will never leave my storage boxes. On a NISEI front we finished the recruitment - letting us start ramping up to full speed - and launched the Community Champion scheme with recognition for Spags and Johno.

We then reached October, the final month of FFG’s control over the game, and alongside naming Dodgepong as our Community Champion we released seven articles in seven days (which is a mistake we will never make again, cos that was a nightmare). Highlights include...

Our first product was launched, 2019Q1 GNK, and was a great success We announced that we’d be “releasing” a new core set every year, and that the first would go live in November. The Rules Team shared the first version of their new and updated rulebook, a ninety-seven page document that fixed all the stuff they’d seen as a problem Creative shared both a section of the story, and some of the art assets they’d been beavering away on nisei.net went live We took formal ownership of NRDB

November saw CodeMarvelous become our fourth Community Champion, Vesper launched his series of short-form interviews under the tag of “15 Minutes”, Translator and Web Developer recruitment finished, and not only did we drop the details of the new SystemCore2019 and MWL, but we also gave some little teasers about the direction for each faction in what was known at the time as NISEI-1.

And this finally brings us to December, which if you are lost in time is where we are now. As of last week SystemCore2019 is now part of the official NISEI Standard format, Kevin Tame is the last Community Champion of 2018, we’ve put the 2019 Store Championship Kit up for sale, and we also ran our first Jinteki.net event with an Eternal tournament, which you can still find the streams for on Trace5 and Metropole Grid.

Phew… it’s been a busy year!

Come back tomorrow for day two of the 2018 wrapup, where I’ll be showing off all of the art that has been made under NISEI’s careful eye - both in-house and commissioned. Until then…