Howdy, folks. I’m Slapdash. I’m not a member of NSG, but they’ve graciously allowed me to write a guest blog post to tell you about Run Together.
For those of you who know what this is and just want to order the cards, we’ll start with some store links:
- DriveThru Cards (best for customers in the US)
- Make Playing Cards (best for customers in most other regions)
If you’re looking to apply for funds, you can fill out this form.
What is Run Together?
Run Together is an annual fundraiser that helps people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to travel to Worlds by offsetting the cost of doing so. We collect alternate card arts donated by the generous, talented, amazing, dashing and very clever artists within the Netrunner community. We then collect them into a pack that people can buy, and all the proceeds go into the fund that we use to help people get to Worlds. Last year, we raised and distributed $10,439, helping 18 people afford to travel to Worlds in San Francisco.
Run Together is not part of NSG (though many of the folks helping run the logistics side and artists are also NSG members), but NSG has helped us out in various ways over the years.
You can support Run Together by buying the pack of alts through one of the print-on-demand stores linked above. Likewise, if you’d like some financial help getting to Worlds, you can apply for it at the form also linked above.
How can I get involved?
If you’d like to help out, you can hop into the #run-together channel in the Green Level Clearance Discord server, where we organize commissioning art for the packs. We are hoping to put together a second pack of alt arts this year, so if you have any interest at all in producing art for us, please do throw your hat in the ring. If you’re not an artist, ping Slapdash in there to ask how you could help with logistics.
Why isn’t there a pre-order like last year?
Last year, NSG ran a pre-order through their store for us for the US, UK and EU (where they had just started direct sales). This gave the fund the biggest cut per sale compared to DTC and MPC, which was really great. It also meant we could take advantage of their existing distribution network. However, as most of us are aware, the NSG distribution networks in the EU and UK ran into some big challenges almost immediately after that. Some folks in those regions didn’t get their Run Together pack 1 orders until pretty recently, which was understandably frustrating for them.
In the US, recent wild fluctuations in tariffs have made it hard to predict shipping costs. In discussion with members of NSG’s distribution team, it seemed pretty likely that tariffs would eat any extra money we would hope to raise by using NSG’s printing deals and distribution network in the US.
For both those reasons (and to help give NSG staff a break right after the Elevation launch), we decided to just use DTC and MPC for this Run Together release. Once the new NSG distribution networks outside the US have proven themselves reliable and sustainable for NSG to operate, and if the tariff situation in the US improves, we may do a pre-order in those regions for future releases.
