Blackmail is the worst.
It basically stole Inside Job from the criminal color pie, and put it in the faction with the most oppressive late game in the form of Wyldcakes with bad pub.
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Blackmail can be countered by:
Good play and never advance (probably most important)
Ash
Caprice
Splashing EBC / cards that rez ice
Including Bad Pub removal
It doesn’t seem that bad to me right now, certainly not enough to put on this list. I guess we’ll see with the new card pool.
Believe me, if you sit across the table from a good player that is used to blackmail/bluffing you will see how limited Blackmail is. There’s a reason @tmoiynmwg went down to 2 in his Pasadena regional winning list even with limited recursion. Often the fear of Blackmail alters the play style of your opponent which can contribute to the outcome of the match more than playing the card itself.
I’m wondering if people are just so salty at the Val DLR build that they lump blackmail into the reason that deck is successful when it’s just (really delicious) icing on the mill/denial cake.
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No, you used the term so I figure you meant decks that are for fun (which may or may not include defensive upgrades). You don’t need defensive upgrades to beat Blackmail if you’re playing low ice decks that don’t plan on scoring off the stopping power of your ice, like FA. You don’t necessarily need defensive upgrades if you have ways of killing the runner or baiting runs or if you have advancable traps. Rush has a hard time against it, but you can still win off a strong draw.
They don’t ban anything. You can still include these cards in one package. They just make you have to sacrifice some stabilities when you use these cards together.
Comparing to many other games, this “restricted list” is way more “soft”. Also in other games, ignoring the initial complain, they usually becomes better balanced and better diversed after the restricted list being released.
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You can play around SEA Source and Account Siphon with gameplay adjustments. You don’t HAVE to include SPECIFIC CARDS in your deck. SEA you just make money. Siphon you just hold expensive unrezzed ICE on HQ or protected unrezzed assets.
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While you can play around SEA Source, you can’t always play around the Scorch kill anymore. Remember that 24/7 exists. Essentially, all you have to do against that is not let the corp score two agendas, one of them being a particular 2/1. I’d say that’s pretty difficult.
Should 24/7 or Breaking News go on that list now too?
I remember playing against that for the first time and wondering if I’d be required to pack multiple Plascretes because of it. I probably would. Other than setting up super fast for a medium dig to score one agenda per turn, or tearing the corp’s hand apart with Imp or something else (for example: Demolition Run; or Wanton Destruction), I’m not sure there’s an easy around it other than packing everyone’s favourite meat shield.
With Blackmail, on the other hand, the card doesn’t win the game in a single turn (unless you already have a few agendas), and despite the number of ways we have to bring it back, cards that were generally good without its existence (like Caprice, ASH, Executive Boot Camp) are fairly strong against it.
24/7 warps formats. Faust warps formats. Blackmail? Not so much.
Again though, I think the list should only exist to promote diversity instead of making particular cards “unplayable.” I can live with any of the three cards I mentioned on or off the list. But if every Anarch and everyone else really does just jam Faust in all their decks, then surely Faust matters more for the MWL than the cards that really only see play with one ID, like Blackmail (and, to a lesser extent, 24/7, which I have seen elsewhere, but not that many elsewheres).
It concerns me that with yog on the list, Force of Nature is your only free decoder. It feels like we’re overdue an orange one.
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So here’s some speculation: will FFG balance future cards around the MWL or not? Say they decided that the Clone Chip nerf hit Exile/MaxX/Geist too hard and printed a hardware that did the same thing but required a click and had a slightly higher install cost. With MWL that would make sense- are you willing to pay influence for a instant-speed install or do you just need recursion in general? But then you have issues if they decide to take CC off, since you now have a card that’s strictly worse than the other.
Also I wonder how far out this was planned, did they know they were gonna nerf Desperado when they designed Reflection? Certainly makes the “it’s not Desperado” problem easier.
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24/7 is probably one of the only cards that is MORE offensive than Blackmail, for precisely the reasons you stated.
Also, Ash does nothing against a dedicated noob-stomp blackmail recursion deck. Blackmail SoT Blackmail takes care of it.
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Fair enough. If a Val deck is dedicated to playing Blackmail, it will play Blackmail, and Blackmail will be good. It is definitely annoying.
However, to me, it is only offensive in Val, who does not need to set it up. And yet, while Val is annoying, I don’t find the card to be unbeatable, nor do I think that Val decks show up enough to warrant any sort of action in response to it.
I could be wrong though. Haven’t been to an actual tournament in a while.
Re: Blackmail and oppressive cards
I am of the opinion that a game should not be balanced around what “stomps noobs”. There are a lot of decks that are not fun for a beginner to play against.
If someone is playing Siphon MaxX against a new player and relishing in their inability to do anything – that’s a problem with the players. Get out some teaching decks or more standard archetypes and go from there.
If you are a new player in a tournament setting, you will get rolled by a lot of strategies, especially if it is your first time experiencing them. That process can be “unfun” but it should be expected if you want to play the game in a competitive manner. A new player should take those losses as a learning experience and try to identify how to prevent them in the future.
For a more in depth look at this idea:
“It’s Not Fun To Play That Way”
There are plenty of games that become more fun as you get better at them, rather than less fun. With a good game, getting better and better at it reveals more and more depth to you, rather than exposing the game’s shallowness.
Consider two groups of players who play a non-degenerate game: a group of good players and a group of scrubs. The scrubs will play “for fun” and not explore the extremities of the game. They won’t find the most effective tactics and abuse them mercilessly. The good players will. The good players will find incredibly overpowering tactics and patterns. As they play the game more, they’ll be forced to find counters to those tactics. The majority of tactics that at first appear unbeatable end up having counters, though they are often difficult to discover. The counter tactic prevents the first player from doing the tactic, but the first player can then use a counter to the counter. The second player is now afraid to use the counter and they’re again vulnerable to the original overpowering tactic. (See the Yomi Layer chapter of my book on Playing to Win or this more visual summary on yomi layers.)
Notice that the good players are reaching higher and higher levels of play. They found the “cheap stuff” and abused it. They know how to stop the cheap stuff. They know how to stop the other player from stopping it so they can keep doing it. And as is quite common in competitive games, many new tactics will later be discovered that make the original cheap tactic look wholesome and fair. Often in fighting games, one character will have something so good it’s unfair. Fine, let him have that. As time goes on, it will be discovered that other characters have even more powerful and unfair tactics. Each player will attempt to steer the game in the direction of their own advantages, much how grandmaster chess players attempt to steer opponents into situations in which their opponents are weak.
The group of scrubs won’t know the first thing about all the depth I’ve been talking about. Their argument is basically that ignorantly mashing buttons with little regard to actual strategy is more “fun.” Or to be more charitable, their argument could be that the game becomes less fun if they use tactic X, or character X, or whatever. That might be true temporarily until they figure out how to beat whatever it is, but ultimately the experts are having a more nuanced exchange, more opportunity for expression, for clever plays, for smart strategies, and so on.
The scrubs’ games might be more “wet and wild” than games between the experts, which are usually more controlled and refined. But any close examination will reveal that the experts are having a great deal of fun on a higher level than the scrub can imagine. Throwing together some circus act of a win isn’t nearly as satisfying as reading your opponent’s mind to such a degree that you can counter their every move, even their every counter.
And if the two groups meet, of course the experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics they’ve either never seen, or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules. The actual game really should be more fun if it’s not degenerate.
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Everything you said is true but unrelated to MWL.
Even if we have MWL good players can still push the game to the boundaries, and they would still beat those scrubs.
The only difference here is that whether we can have so many possibilities to explore if there is no MWL.
Take AGOT1e as example. Almost everyone agrees that if there’s no restricted list the meta would be dominating by a few decks and combos and there is no chance for other cards to survive. Every time some cards hit the list many complaints come out but it soon turns out that the diversity is truly improved.
And actually a MWL is a way to distinguish experts and scrubs. When I win a lot of games just by no-brainer astro trains using a netdeck, does this mean I am an expert? Now Astro train is no longer a no-brainer strategy because if you want to use it you have to sacrifice some protections, and you should be more precise in timing.
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@andrewaa My post was in response to the idea that Blackmail should be restricted in some form because it is not fun for newer players to play against. I agree with you, MWL is not balancing around fun factor.
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Sorry I shouldn’t reply in a so long post without following everything 
Regarding some of the, “why isn’t Popular Card X on the list because it’s in every deck,” the list makes much more sense when you read it not as about limiting overly popular cards, or even overly powerful cards, but cards that are limiting choices in deckbuilding and design space. Astro and Desperado make a lot of sense in those terms, because they eliminate other in-faction options due to their power level.* PPVP didn’t make any sense to me at first until @JTG81 mentioned how it makes it difficult to print new operation economy since it would be sooo good in Prepaid Kate.
No one can really claim to know whether this makes the meta more or less diverse. Yes, some second tier archetypes got crushed along with the major ones. But did others emerge as competitive in the meantime? All I know is that, personally, I immediately started considering corporation decks for store champs that I’d ruled out previously (Chronos Protocol, Weyland) as poor matchups. Building still-potent versions of the current best decks also seems like an interesting challenge. We’ll see if it works out but I’m optimistic. None of these specific cards were what made Netrunner great; you could ban them all and still have an excellent game.
* though honestly, I see a fair degree of Box-E & Forger these days, I think Desperado was going down in faction and up in usage elsewhere. Desperado Val was my favorite runner deck at the moment & it got crushed as bad as Kate.
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I think PPVP is the most controversial pick on the list. At a global one influence, I can’t imagine ever running PPVP again. Even in an event-heavy deck, you’re probably better off just running 3 more economy cards than PPVP as long as it’s on the MWL. I think that’s unfortunate. Sure, PPVP Kate was a strong deck, but it kept the meta in check in many ways, and was still “real Netrunner.” You can still lose with that deck on bad decisions and bad RNG.
IMO, PPVP is a card that enables deck-building by its very nature. As an example, I have been playing a PPVP Comet Quetzal in casual games for awhile. Deja Vu’ing into a 3-click Wanton Destruction is super fun. I’m disappointed that I can no longer play this deck; the influence requirement for PPVP is now too prohibitive. I already couldn’t afford 3 copies of Lucky Find; now the entire efficiency of the deck is shot.
I think putting Clone Chip and Lady on the MWL nerfed Kate enough. I am still dumb-founded by the inclusion of PPVP. To me, it feels spiteful.
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I think that Yog is on the list to tidy up the color pie. Lady might not be on the list because of the same reason, but it being on the list also tidys up the color pie.
Force of Nature is bad, to be sure. But so are Pipeline, Creeper, Inti, and Battering Ram. That’s how the color pie works. I think that Yog is just a little too good to be in a faction without code gates as their focus. Zero to break is pretty iconic. Lady has the same problem, but is quite a bit better.
This is the only explanation I can think of for Yog being on the list, and provides some additional motivation for Lady being on there as well.
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I happened to notice that last time they print an decent neutral econ event is lucky find,in the last pack of Spin Cycle.Through out H&P,Lunar Cycle,O&C,Sansan Cycle,the only actual econ event they printed an econ event is day job.I guess there is something to do with PPVP,especially Kate.
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Yeah, PPVP does seem like a weird include. The only argument I see for PPVP is could have been limiting the design of future event based cards.
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I don’t like Blackmail because it invalidates gear-check rush as a meta game counterweight to powerful but slow / inconsistent Anarch econ engines. NBN FA is the counterweight to orange in this metagame.
(I say this because I tried to play Weyland to beat Anarchs in regional season, including against you, @zolend)
And, so, yeah, you can put 2 OAI in your Supermodernism and you just straight up hand-check for Blackmail, but at the end of the day the matchup (which should be a good one in my opinion, due to the speed and consistency of Supermodernism) becomes pretty crappy.
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