It's an assymmetrical two player game where a hacker (the runner) tries to outsmart a big business (the corp) and get away with their dirty plans, while the corp tries to keep the runner out and carry out said plans.
As it is, there's a nice community online and there's even a free browser implemented version of the game where they come together.
Apart from the rules, which are unreadable and makes the game seem way more complex than it is, the barrier for entry to this game is as low as it's ever been.
The online version keeps track of most stuff for you, and after a single game you'll understand what the rules were unsuccesfully trying to explain to you.
Not saying you shouldn't read the rules, but one readthrough is probably enough, then you should try it out
Now the complete cardpool is rather sizable, and although it's not as bad as it looks on first sight, it could be intimidating.
It's not as bad as it looks, because runner and corp cards are subdivided into factions. When building a deck, you'll largely use neutral cards and cards from the faction you chose. There are 4 types of corp, and (largely) 3 types of runner, so in every case you'll be looking at less than half of the card pool when you've found a runner or corp you want to play with.
But this being a beginner tournament, we will limit the cardpool to a few sets.
These will be the current core set (2019 System Core) and the first four "Big Box" Expansion Sets (Creation & Control, Honor & Profit, Order & Chaos and Data & Destiny).
Each of the big boxes focuses on one Corp faction and (mostly) one runner faction. The exception to this is Data & Destiny, where instead of adding runner cards for one of the existing factions, 3 new "Mini-factions" were introduced, each with their own cards.
This means that for each of your decks, most of the cards will come from the Core set and a single Big Box. That said you should definitely look at the cards in the other boxes too, especially Creation & Control has some important neutral ones.
Some helpful links and resources:
For one, I do not advise using the jinteki.net deckbuilder. Netrunnerdb's has a neat search function which also with a couple of clicks lets you limit it to the card pool we are using (to do this, click the "collection" tab in the deckbuilding window). After that, all that's needed to be done is to get the text-list of cards from it, and copy that into jinteki's deckbuilder.
Netrunnerdb also has peoples opinions and rule clarifications about individual cards. The decks shared there are mostly for the full cardpool, however you should be able to find some that are System Core 2019 only (often called Core Experience), which might be helpful if you are looking for a startpoint for deckbuilding.
For older examples of decks, stimhack.com kept track of tournament winning games, and otherwise this site's forum features as the community hub anyway.
The link you probably won't need initially, but should you ever be unable to figure out a certain cards interaction, is project ancur's which keeps card clarifications and rules.
Catch me in sitechat/discord (or post here) if there's anything you want to ask!
Organisational things:
Signups will stay open for at least a few days, we'll just start when we have a few people.
I will decide on a tournament format later, depending on the amount of players we get (Swiss would be easy for everyone to keep track of and also makes it easy to deal with people dropping out, so that would be my preference, but we'll see).
In each match the two players will play 2 games on jinteki.net, each player will play corp once and runner once.
Therefore every participant will need to make 2 decks: one corp, one runner.
Since this is supposed to mostly be a learning experience, you do not have to provide decklists (and are allowed to switch cards between matches if you find that things don't work out as expected). It would be nice if you would keep to the same IDs throughout, though.
If i am around I will try to spectate your matches, but there is almost no chance that i can catch all of them, so please report results in thread.
-OP and idea stolen from mykonion with some edits
/in:
panthaleon
popsofctown
McMenno
flipforty
.