...finally!
I was pretty familiar with the rules and basics, but having never played I didn't know what to expect in terms of how the game actually played out. As it happened I did pretty well as a shaper and scored most of my points against R&D--stumbling across either 3-pointers or (goddamn) Snare most of the time. I won two and lost one (against Jinteki, starter decks) but we were both learning the ropes. I had a couple of solid, effective runs where I was- able to perfectly break all the things I needed to (e.g. a blind tinker on innermost ice, outermost ice proves to be Chum, and I have Battering Ram to break both of them) and one of those ended in a loss (surprise! A Junebug with two counters).
There's definitely a lot of planning involved in playing it safe, but I liked to gamble since running aggressively (esp. R&D) seemed quite profitable early when he didn't have much to stop me. Pulling random VPs from R&D felt pretty cheap, winning that way before he had scored any, moreso. Though apparently he was having trouble drawing ICE that wasn't super expensive.
In two of the games I had magnum opus out early, but he had PAD campaign to match me, and we drew a lot of those 9-credits-for-5 events/ops. In the other game neither of us had much money most of the time. It made for a very different game! All in all I think I got a bit lucky as the runner (not quite flatlining a few times when I probably should have), in addition to having more experience with the rules (hell, he didn't even know how ICE worked exactly the first he was spending a ton of credits rezzing it in front of me).
But man I am excited to do some deck building and play some more... maybe next time as the corp.