This is a Creative Commons work, under the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. TL;DR: Share, remix, and do whatever so long as you give credit. Live that punk rock life.

Day 1A. I showed up to the FFG Center with a satchel stuffed to bulging with my weapons of choice — an early-aggro MaxX deck and an AgInfusion concoction, both of my own design. The setting was familiar, and effectively unchanged in the year since last Worlds: the illustrated cafe section, the front-loaded shelves of gaming products on sale with a chest-high demo table to test something new, and the solid blue polo shirts of the cafe employees busily filling in drink orders.

You had to squeeze through a bit past that line, and past the product shelves — and into the cavernous main room, bisected between the miniatures and roleplaying front and the walled-off tournament grounds. For about four, five hours I was pitted against my last-ever opponents under FFG’s control of the game, first taking their signatures for my mat, and then taking games off their score.

Well. One game, out of two. I split a LOT. Turns out my MaxX was firing blanks half the time — expecting a CTM-dominated meta, I went with a fast-start Hijacked Router/Mining Accident approach that worked really well when it did, and really horribly if they just burst-econed their way through. In contrast, AgInfusion won an impressive supermajority of its games, since not a lot of decks are designed to stop Jinja City Grid from setting up 4–5 ICE-thick remotes off Rashida Jaheem hiding behind a cheap Thimblerig. And then doing it again on HQ. And then watching helplessly as a Lady Liberty behind an Endless EULA ticked upward, letting me score game-winning 5/3s from hand as their econ crashes helplessly against my indomitable glacier, with the ice under their foot cracking off and sliding into the lightless chasms of an Excalibured Archives just as they thought they found their way through.

I really like that deck.

I was extremely ready for the break after Round Four, though, and more importantly, the Chicago folks were waiting for me in a sunlit corner by the gargantuan Game of Thrones mural by the back exit. Reed Wilson and Benjamin Schapiro were hunched over a netbook, compiling stats and data — they’d earlier reached out the Netrunner Dorks and other outlets of the community with surveys in the aftermath of Reign & Reverie’s release, and the approximately 800 responses they got helped illuminate some otherwise buried facts about the community — the reveal of which I’ll leave to the Chicago community to disseminate.

Which they will, I have zero doubt. The Chicago group is vibrant and active in a way that’d elicit envy from others — boasting not just sheer quantity of active players, with 14 accounted for just at Magnum Opus, but veterans and newcomers alike.

“So, for me — a lot of people in Chicago ended up following this route because we had such an active and large community,” said Reed Wilson, introducing himself. “But I found the game from a Terminal Directive review that Kotaku posted in their sparing commentary on boardgames and not video games. So I read the review on Terminal directive, which was not very good, but I said ‘this game sounds fun!’ So I got a core set, I went to Facebook — I think I maybe went to Meetup.com first to try and find…”

“You were super into Meetup for the first four months, which was really weird,” interjected Ben.

“Yeah, I tried to find a way to start playing with people, because my wife decidedly did not want to play this game with me ever.”

“We will crack that nut someday,” promised Asher Stulhman as he joined the group.

“Yeah, someday,” acknowledged Reed. “So I found our Chicago Facebook group; Asher was the first person to respond to me, then Daine, and I think Ben. We do Bar-runner. We go to a bar on Wednesday nights in Chicago and play casually. Met some folks there, and ever since then I’ve been part of the group!”

“My memory is that it was very early days in Shut Up and Sit Down, and it was one of their news broadcasts where they were like ‘FFG is releasing this game, and it was originally designed by Richard Garfield, the Creator of Magic!’” recollected Ben. “It solves the problems that Magic has! I read some early reviews that this is amazing, bought the core set; one of my friends bought the core set, and the two of us played. We were the only people we played for about four months.

And then I, like, was at a game store and they were like ‘Oh, we have a Netrunner meetup on Sundays.’ And this was before Genesis Cycle started — this was core set only Netrunner, because that was all that existed! I have been with the Chicago meta since day one.”

Even early on, though, the SS Chicago had difficulties staying afloat at times. “We formed a league in one store — that store is now out of business. We formed a league in another store — that store is now out of business. Both of which were really traumatic. It used to be you could play Netrunner four out of seven days a week in Chicago at different stores; now we’re down to two days a week at a bar or one store, but the result of that is that we got really aggressive about protecting — sorry, two stores! — protecting the spaces we have for this game.”

“And I love the people in this game,” continued Ben. “I love all the friends that I’ve made. People that I played Netrunner with were at my wedding — I didn’t know any of these people when I first started dating my wife! The community is incredible, and that’s what’s kept me here.”

Furthermore, at the intersection between an extremely close-knit group of players and the sheer flexibility and expressiveness of the game lied the emergent seeds of a reputation. “This is my main memory of what the Chicago meta in Netrunner is like,” said Ben. “It’s like — ‘what are we? Oh, we’re a lot of Shaper bullshit; oh, we’re a couple people that built these weird off-meta decks.’ Back in Store Champs 2014 Season, Chicago was notorious because we were the meta that produced a deck called Notorious Daily Quester that was all about running all three centrals and then playing Quest Complete to access remotes to score advanced agendas. It was a terrible deck — but it won a Regionals in Chicago, and that was our reputation.”

“And Rob basically never makes mistakes,” said Daine Stevens, joining the group. “That was Rob; he played it perfectly.”

“And it shouldn’t work!” exclaimed Ben. “We go through all of these things — Daine going from this place of ‘I want to build a deck — all I have is the name. It’s called Congress, and all it does is sit there, do nothing, and make money,’ to like nine months of this deck refining to the point where it is an absolute force of nature.”

Reed, whose relative newness to the Chicago meta and whose job keeps him on the road for most of the week, has a bird’s-eye view of just how weird and specialized their Netrunner culture can get, and takes the lead in exposing Chicago weirdness to Orlando and elsewhere — as well as bringing back tech from the regions he visits. A prevalence of Chronos Projects is just the tip of the iceberg — “I will keep track of how many people have run into remote Snares over the past several months, which is not really a problem for other metas,” said Ben.

Specific players’ tendencies to stick to deck archetypes also affect meta-wide deck choices. “I will say, one of the other big things, is that myself and one other person in the Chicago meta has basically not altered our deck decisions in about four years,” said Ben. “Will Brown has been playing Force of Will in Blue Sun since Blue Sun was printed as an ID — at every tournament.”

“He’s never played a non-kill winning deck in any tournament ever,” said Daine.

“At a Chicago store championship one time, he was forced to score out, and almost literally flipped the table,” said Reed. “He very much despises scoring.” He’s also single-handedly responsible for why much of Chicago traditionally packed two Plascretes while the card was in rotation.

The vibrancy and quirkiness of the Chicago meta spills out from its borders too — perhaps egged on by Android fiction. “We have a good friendship with the Louisville meta,” started Daine, only to get interrupted.

“Oh, God, we haven’t talked about ChiLo!” said Reed.

Said Daine: “So, ChiLo is, in fiction, a megacity — I believe, in theory, they’ve never specified if it was St. Louis and Chicago. But we looked at it, and were like ‘That’s Lousville!’ We like those guys!”

The real-world ChiLo alliance started off with a near-tragedy in tournament operations. “They call came up during the Plugged In Tour in Chicago in 2013,” said Ben. “And stupidly enough, they drove up and got paired up against each other in Round One.” Grassroots scenes like the fighting game community had traditionally gone out of their way to seed specifically against these sort of scenarios — but luck was not in the cards for the Plugged In Tour players, with Louisville pitted against the people they practiced against, and Chicago facing off the folks they always did at their game nights. “It was really Dodd Harris, Ben Proctor — decided ‘let’s start a tournament! The ChiLo City Grudge Match.’ and we’ll put our thumbs on the scale.” They ensured that their respective cities’ players would, at the start, only need to worry about facing their counterparts in the other city — and a rivalry and friendship was borne.

That turned into a tradition between the two metropolitans — one backed by their own spending and the creation of community tokens, cards, and art pieces, with Dodd Harris credited heavily by his meta mates for the creation of such community events, though folks like Ben would spend over $100 every tournament as well to help with prizing.

“That was the other thing,” said Ben. “We had store champs season, we had regional season, we had Worlds prep, we had ChiLo prep — we run our own in-house weird tournaments occasionally.”

“ICE Wide Shut?” reminded Reed.

“ICE Wide Shut,” acknowledged Ben. “Wherein decks re scored differently than players, and the top players get the worst decks and have to keep playing.”

“It’s always about momentum,” summed up Daine. “At the height, there were probably two dozen people coming. There were enough of us who were interested and eager to play the game that we had a regular game night every Friday, a regular game night every Tuesday, and Sundays we would play usually every other week — and also Bar-Runner. There were three or four events every week!”

It also helps a lot that Chicago practices a radical form of inclusivity amongst its Netrunner community too. “Gay Space Netrunner Communism, to be perfectly precise,” said Reed. “Anyone who needs a deck or doesn’t have cards, we without question — in fact, if people tried to buy or used capitalism on those cards, we get somewhat angry. So we’re very open with helping people build decks, getting people cards, so they can participate.”

“You don’t have this perspective!” interjected Asher excitedly. “That started with the Opening Move scarcity! Opening Move sold out really quickly; Jackson was a strictly necessary card — we would share Jacksons. For store champs people weren’t going to, they’d lent out their Jacksons.”

Ben Schapiro would outright build decks for over a year on behalf of a member that left his collection back home in Michigan, and such a practice was shared among the wider community — allowing for people to leave the game for months at a time, and still find both friends to play and cards to play with even after half a year of falling behind on releases.

“It was also a way of solving how, for a long time, FFG could not crack how to release something at Gencon without making the local meta hell,” said Ben. “There would be a line between people who could pick things up in Gencon and people who wouldn’t see anything for three months. Sharing helped with that a lot.

ChiLo Communism proved a lifeboat during darker moments in the game’s history too — especially during the heavily maligned Mumbad era. “We had a gentleman’s agreement not to play IG54,” explained Daine. “In Store Champs, fine, play it — but not Friday nights.”

“Then the agreement sort of broke down in hat we lost about half the active players during that phase,” admitted Ben. “We were clamoring, writing Damon letters ‘please ban this!’ We made a bunch of Ban Museum t-shirts — Asher brought them to Gencon. We would create our own meta — this is the Chicago-specific MWL. We’re not allowing this card or this combo to be played, because it’s degenerate and it’s not fun, and if you’re the type of tryhard MTG that’s going to be butthurt and not come because you can’t play Infinite Siphon Recursion or IG54, I don’t care. I will sacrifice one person that wants to be the Spike MTG in exchange for the fact that there’s a dozen of us that don’t want to play against that even once.”

“I think the real impact that had was when the ChiLo tournament made Astroscript limited to one per deck before the MWL made that an official rule,” recounted Asher.

“If I were to summarize the Chicago meta in any one way, it would be the fact that while you were talking to the two of us, two more people have come over to reminisce about the Chicago meta,” said Ben, laughing. “We enjoy spending time with each other, and if two of us are doing something, more people are also ‘I would like to do that thing!’ We’re really good about generating enough people to be interested in anything — including, it’s Saturday morning, and I have to be at home dogsitting. ‘Somebody come over and help me prep for Worlds.’”

Daine explained the groundwork for how to avoid a common problem with getting a community together as such: “when we post on Facebook and say ‘who’s interested in Bar-Runner?’ it’s a 50/50 shot whether anybody comes. Instead, what we often do is we find three to four people who desperately want to do it and say ‘me, Ernie, and Richard are going to be at Emporium at 7 PM — come,’ and you end up with a dozen people because they already know what’s going to happen.”

Leaving it up to chance, and fielding a general inquiry, lets a few people say “no, I don’t know if I want to do that,” and casts doubts on whether they’ll reach critical mass — and adhering to that meant that even while under the darkest shadows cast by Mumbad, where the Chicago group lost half of their regulars, they were still able to field 12–15 players every Friday night.

“We, at 2018, for a Store Champs that was announced three days before it was happening, had 23–25 people playing,” said Ben, boasting of their recovery rate. “Basically no out-of-towners, only people who could get in from the suburbs.”

But a far more terminal shadow does loom over them now, and they acknowledge that their unique situation might not be a particularly helpful lesson elsewhere. Said Reed: “We’re especially lucky in that a huge part of that being feasible is that we have enough interested and active players to do it. I can definitely imagine how the Jacking Out announcement hit metas that were already struggling. I can totally see the wind being taken out of their sails — ‘it’s already hard enough to keep playing even with another datapack every month, and now we just gotta find another game.’”

And the news of the end of Netrunner didn’t land comfortably in Chicago either. “That’s a 9/11 question,” groaned Reed when asked about it.

“We were really sad for a week,” said Ben.

“I found out — at the time, one of our meta mates had left our chat, which sometimes people do. They need a breather from chat, so they left chat. I got a message from him, and he was like ‘did you see the news?’ And I was like ‘oh, are you back in chat?’ And he was like ‘no, dead game.’

People had shitpost like that before as a joke — as in, FFG made some stupid announcement, and now the game is dead or something. So I was like ‘oh, haha, very funny,’ and then he linked the article.”

“Genuinely, the range of emotions over the course of the first week was that we’re all sad, to we’re all angry, to what did FFG do to piss off Wizards, to what did Wizards do,” said Ben.

“Conspiracy theories, yeah,” responded Reed.

“At some point, I think that I broke first. It was either me or Richard — somebody was asking ‘what do we do now? I can’t remember if Richard’d already talked about ICE Wide Shut, but I definitely went through it and was like ‘here are the top 10 formats I want to play next. We’re going to do an ICE Wide Shut, we’re going to do a Reign & Reverie format. We’re going to do No Banlist Netrunner, we’re going to…

The game is Not Dead. This game is only limited by whatever we decide is going to be.”

He compared it to a classic Looney Tunes skit — that they crashed into the wall, saw stars and was totally confused. And then they snapped back to reality, dusted themselves off, and ran into the wall again — only, this time, it was made of cardboard, and left nice cutouts in the shapes of their bodies.

The ChiLo Netrunner spirit stubbornly refuses to die, even in the face of imminent Fimbulvinter. But, grimly, behind their enthusiasm, there is the realization that they may be the last bastion amid the cold — and will not be able to find what they have here elsewhere.

“Not to put down people who play other games, but the people I’ve played in Netrunner have been consistently some of the most enjoyable people to play games with,” said Asher. “Some of the best adjusted card game players I could play cards with — I’m not mentioning names, but I could name more than two. That’s lightning in a bottle. We could all move to another game, but it would still be us inserting ourselves into another game’s scene. And without Netrunner as the glue to hold us together, we’re probably going to disperse into other hobbies and interests.”

“We are still going to see each other still,” contested Ben. “We are going to do other things. The problem is that the store we play at — the main store is called Dice Dojo and they’re fantastic. But they’re definitely a Magic shop. They care to 120 people playing Magic every Friday niht, and if all of us showed up every Friday, we would be 15% of the audience.”

“Normally, we have to go to the basement because upstairs is entirely populated by Magic,” said Reed. “And whatever, we get that. It’s revenue, FLGS, there’s a reason for that.”

“But we know that we can’t transport our style into a new game,” said Ben. “Because there just aren’t enough of us.”

NEXT: Boggsfather

Edits: Attribution errors should be fixed.

James Chen is an editor for Infinite Esports & Entertainment, and directly oversees OpTic Gaming’s Greenwall.gg. He also really loves Jinteki mindgames. Tip him at https://ko-fi.com/obscurica