My continuing hunt to complete the set of Star Realms promo cards has taken one more step towards completion. This morning two copies of the Starmarket a Trade Federation base and The Ark a Machine Cult card arrived.

The nice thing about the Star Realms app is that these two cards are in the Gambits expansion, so I'm used to playing with them.

The Ark is an amazingly powerful card and rightfully expensive. It definitely is one of my favourite cards in the game.

I also like the Starmarket probably in my top five bases in the game.

Below a photo of all the promo cards I have for Star Realms so far.

To complete the set I need to get/find two Battle Barges and a Breeding Site. But I'm a patient man, I know these will turn up and when they do I'll be there. I know there are some alt art cards that have been done for promos at various cons. However I try and avoid them because that way lies madness and stupid high prices.

8th Casual Sunday Star Realms Tournament

Oh for those interested I once more lost in the first round of the 8th Casual Sunday Star Realms tournament. I lost 2-1, all three game were close. I actually won the first game to my surprise! I had made the tactical decision to buy bases and follow a bases strategy, which is unusual for me as I normally buy maybe two or three bases at most. Towards the middle of the game I accidently scraped a Trade Federation Trading Post (I think it was), which is easy to do. As soon as I did it, it was “oh crap I didn't mean to do that”. I needed to keep that base as part of my big plan. “I've bloody lost this” kept running through my head afterwards. But I hung in, stuck to the plan, kept buying and fielding the bases, and slowly chipped away at my opponents authority to get the win.

Games two and three were much more aggressive hardly any bases! In the second I hadn't scraped enough so that when I got my opponent down to under ten authority I wasn't able to finish them off, because as so often happens in this game you then draw scouts or non offensive ships. Which then gives your opponent the window they need to get back in the game and steal the win.

I'm not a store champion

We all know I'm a noob at the game, struggling to find games locally. Heck none of my local stores even run Netrunner events (but I have a plan for solving that).

However FFG do produce some rather cool looking play mats as prizes for stores to use. The fact is I'm nowhere near good enough to enter let alone win a tournament (this will come). So how does a noob or pleb like me get their hands on such good looking mats?

Well you can sometimes find a complete store kit on Amazon for around £70 plus. While eBay you are more likely to find individual bits like the play mat on sale for silly money. The play mats alone on eBay can be £40 or more. Then sometimes on the Netrunner Facebook pages stuff will pop up for sale.

It was this last place that I got the above play mat from and deck boxes. Usually the Facebook side isn't too far from the eBay price. However recently there has been a spat of sales on one of the groups from people located in Poland. Not only that they have been selling at a really cheap price compared to the other places I've mentioned above. Naturally they tend to sell very quickly. That playmat cost $15! Yep amazingly low. The three deck boxes were $5 each. Plus the postage was rediculously low as well.

So now I have two great play mats for Netrunner. Back now to trying to play more games.

Posted by me using my iPad and the Blogsy app