So I’ve been thinking about it, and why isn’t the card pool large enough to support this type of format? For those who don’t know what commander is in Magic the Gathering, it’s a format where you can only include one of each card by name, you have more life than you start out with usually in the game, and you start with a certain card of your choosing at the beginning of the game you can always pay for, like an identity kind of that you can turn on later in the game with your resources.
So why not this for Netrunner? I love playing commander against the computer in Forge MTG, and I’m sure it would be great to have this type of game in Netrunner as it’s easier to create a type of themed deck that is more about fun than pure efficiency. The runner could start out with a console in play, and there would be no influence limit, since you are only playing one of each card, I can’t see how that’s terribly broken. To prevent people from just playing astrolabe or desperado or turntable all the time, there would have to be a restriction tied into what cards you can import into your deck from the card pool. For example, if you pick Desperado, since it has 4 influence, you can only play cards that are worth the remaining influence out of 5 the card isn’t using, from out of faction. So therefore with Desperado, you would only be able to play cards that are 1 influence if they aren’t criminal. However, if you were to use the Toolbox, you could include any 3 influence cards in your deck from another faction. For corp, you can still only add agendas from your own faction, except how about you can also include one each of any other factions agenda, but 3/2’s are treated as 4/2’s if they aren’t in your faction. That way Astro can’t be out of control, and we don’t have to ban it.
Since corp cards are more easily disrupted, the way the commander ability would be handled there would be something like, you can start with 2 Jackson Howard tokens in your imaginary score area, that let you either tutor for jackson clicklessly for 2 tokens, let you shuffle cards in your archives into r&d, 2 for each token, or let you search your deck for jackson for a click with 1 token. That way, since Jackson is pretty much necessary, the one copy per limit doesn’t hurt the corps as hard. You could start with a global region upgrade that is installed in your HQ but unrezzed, and has it’s effect replicated on all centrals while rezzed, and has it’s trash cost increased by 1 for every 2 credits it costs. A Ruhr Valley would therefore cost 3 extra credits to trash, as it costs 6 credits, and a Surat City Grid would only be increased by 1, or you could choose to start with it in your command zone, where you would be able to play it to a remote for a click, but without the trash cost increase, as this would make SanSan City Grid pretty unbearable. Each time the runner’s console, or the corps region gets trashed it goes back into the command zone, which is like a removed from game zone that you can play cards from. So it’s not installed there, but you can install it after it gets trashed, but each time you install it, the rez and trash cost are increased and reduced by 1 respectively.
The way netrunner works, the game would probably go smoother with Draft IDs and 30 card decks, but playing to more than 6 points, as Government Takeover is one of my favorite agendas, and I’m not going to invalidate the inevitable Exchange of Information decks people would obviously want to make, (:p) and it’s a different format that is supposed to focus on interesting card interactions, rather than blasting through the game. So therefore, I think playing to 8 points should be alright. 3 pointers would be less auto death for the corp, and it would be just a little harder for fast advance to overwhelm the runner. I also think that the Shadow and Masque should have the ability to play a single card as a 2 of, or start with an extra card and money or something, nothing huge, but something to make it worth playing over the Mumbad Draft IDs that isn’t broken. Weyland certainly gave us enough tutors to make whatever kind of deck you would want to make possible, at least I think. I’d like to start thinking productively with fellow stimhackers to really develop this idea, if everyone thinks it’s good enough.
I basically want help with deck building restrictions, and making the game balanced.
