I always regretted not getting into Netrunner at its peak. Needless to say, I was extremely excited when its community responded to the game’s cancellation by creating its own free-to-print sets in a rebranded version of the game called NISEI. While I had a lot of fun discovering the game in this format, I quickly grew frustrated with the time it took to construct and deconstruct decks every time I wanted to try something different. Getting more sets (in order to have enough basic cards that are used in almost every deck) would result in many duplicate cards that I would not end up using and a larger collection than I wanted to own, so I decided to create my own set of proxies instead.

So what cards should I print to be able to make as many deck combinations as possible? That sounded like a great task for a Python script!

I ended up throwing two Python scripts together:

• a script to let me know which cards are more popular than others and how many copies are needed for them to be functional in a deck, and

• a script to calculate and output the combinations of decks any given collection of NISEI and proxy cards can deliver, and to suggest which cards and how many of them would allow to increase that number of combinations.

While I ended up writing mostly spaghetti code for time reasons, they worked very well and the result was a collection of 180 proxy cards that cost about $45 including shipping and that open up a NISEI collection to over 324 4-deck and 703 3-deck Corp combinations and 988 3-deck Runner combinations. That's a lot of combinations to be tried out.

The cards themselves were easily provided with bleeds (for professional printing) using Photoshop’s content-aware fill algorithm, and to make the set even better, I also printed them double-sided. They are sleeved from playing anyways, and being able to flip a card to a different face allows for some future proofing in case some cards see far less play with the introduction of new NISEI sets.

As for the pictures above, I used an old board game box with some 3D printed supports and an old laser cut insert to make a makeshift storage system for the game. I also ordered some blank poker chips online and printed vinyl labels for them to serve as tokens for the game.

Always be running!

Edit: I revisited this project and turned it into an 8 player game night set. For more information, please refer to the following Reddit post: Printing some proxies to turn NISEI Netrunner into an 8 player set for game night