As for the topic itself, banning a card can do a few things.
It can reduce the variance of the game and increase the skill of the game, making it better. A good example of this is how Black Lotus is banned in Legacy in MtG even though everyone can use it, but Wasteland is allowed even though it’s almost as ubiquitous (that’s a bit of an understatement and oversimplification, but bear with me here). Totally separate from deck variety, cards of a certain power level can reduce the outcome of a game to a headcount of how many copies of each power card were drawn, mitigating the impact of good or bad player choices.
Astroscript Pilot Program would be the flagship card for this type of impact, with players sitting side by side in Swiss rounds making extremely similar decisions, and one of them drawing Project Beale in place of Astroscript Pilot program, and outright losing off the difference and having different positions in the cut.
Account Siphon has this weird status where the corporation installs ducking assets, HQ ice, or crisium grid even if the Account Siphon was never actually drawn, so in practice it doesn’t increase variance as much as one might think given its raw power level, which I think contributes to a lower number of complaints.
It can shake up the game and change what people are playing next month the same way a new pack release or a natural shift in ecosystem and meta can do so. Games with format rotation are essentially extracting this benefit from banning, and choosing which cards to ban for convenience/economics instead of power level to do so in the best way. This is probably the only benefit MWL also conferred onto the game in actual practice. There’s an argument to be made that the specifics of MWL’s implementation caused inverse impacts on my reasons #1 and #3 for banning things, and that that outweighed this benefit.
It can turn out that banning the card removes strategies built around that card, but opens up a larger number of alternative strategies that were either countered too hard by that card, or overshadowed by that card. There’s a number of game genres where banning confers this benefit very easily, but in customizable card games with complex card interactions you’re the least likely to realize this benefit. Generally the more elements, the more options, the more health. With a strong enough understanding of a specific card and how that card is overshadowing or countering other strategies, it’s possible for an intelligent banner to make a strong, solid guess that more archetypes will be created than destroyed, but with blind banning of cards just because those cards are powerful, it’s unlikely. As an example, suppose Biotic, APP, and SanSan were banned. This would be a huge positive impact on reason #1, but the ecosystem would be damaged. What little appeal there was left to playing traditional shaper and being able to recur 999 clots is eroded in favor of reg ass anarchs, etc. Now that the corps know the runner will be preferring a faust rig to an SMC-for-appropriate-breaker-but-sometimes-clot rig, the corps add less variety to their decklist to specifically address faust, not even adding the occasional ichi 2.0 for how it annoys shaper. Removing the entire archetype probably reduces overall card variety, even though there are fewer outlier power level cards left, because some of the potency of complex interactions between powerful cards is removed.
As a positive example there’s an extremely strong argument that MWLing Prepaid Voicepad opened up more justifiable economic strategies for shaper than it removed. Proco is very popular, but I’ve made second at two SCs without installing a Proco, and Stimshop and Mopus behind a Security Nexus don’t seem like hard sells.
My conclusion overall is that people think reason #3 is what we need, because it pops up a lot more in video games, and because they think it’s actually achievable, but it’s actually pretty difficult to get and, from top 8 ID spreads I’ve seen, not actually the number one issue. I think we need more of #1 and #2, which requires rotation policy change or something that functions similarly to help out, and for #1 requires a much smaller list of cards to be banned than OP is proposing.
I would love to see the need for variety reflected more in official netrunner rules (like the constant variety dominion enjoys, or at least rotation that’s half as fast as MtG’s), but I’m not sure I’d want to go all in on an alternate format because I’m concerned the community can barely support one format of play.
If corps are forced to play “fair” decks with ice, stealth seems like a pretty good option again. Especially with Kati/MO banned, runners can’t out money the corp so you’ll want the most efficient ice breakers possible.
Nerve Agent seems like your best option for HQ pressure with legwork being banned. I’m not a major fan of legwork being banned while maker’s eye is still playable to be honest. It’s asymmetrical and multiaccess events are already hurt by the banning of Same Old Thing.
I think that it’s a cool idea to explore new formats. New formats will generate new archetypes and new matchups and games that play out in new ways. Any new format, viewed by competitive players, will create a new metagame with new best decks. It’s going to be novel, but when an analytical and competitive community gets into it, the metagame will probably be equally stale, just different. There will always be best decks and players will find them. Then the top table matchups will be predictable and normal, just different from the standard format.
This is not a bad thing, and if you change restrictions often enough, it will keep the game fresh. It will award a different skill set however, promoting innovation as opposed to refinement.
I’m on board with this idea. It’s not like top players would ignore normal tournaments to play in tournaments with different restrictions. Seems interesting.
(Here’s my crack at a Dominion analogy: Any set that comes up in which a player can tell within 10 seconds that it will be big money is changed. Yeah, we would rarely see big money, but we would also lose those skill testing games where people commit in different ways and we would lose those games where big money barely squeaks it out or barely loses. In effect, we would have more variation in games but lose some of the games that really test the analysis and timing of skilled players.)
If you are planning to constantly change restrictions in order to maintain freshness, it’d be better to just take a Chess960/Fischer random/DXV style approach and announce random subsets of the cardpool that are required and or banned the night before each tournament, to increase variety and reward deckbuilding skill (which could definitely be supplemented by its own banlist, “even if we roll ‘core set agendas’ for that particular week APP is always banned”, but is a better idea than a repeatedly tweaked banlist if you’re resigning yourself to the need to adjust the banlist for variety’s sake anyway)
Marcus Batty seems really good here. Without Clone Chip and Levy, I’m wondering what Runners will be doing for the recursion of their programs once trashed. Going back to Weyland Glacier with barriers and Will-o’-Wisp seems decent as well.
I think this new format will likely be more stale that the current one, to be honest. Some IDs (like Geist) seem almost unplayable now. We’ll be seeing more cards that we don’t see enough of, but the overall variance in strategies is likely going to go down, I think. Would be willing to try it out though. I’d love to be proven wrong.
Councilman is here and trumps Batty (and Keegan Lane) unless they pre-rez the Batty, at which point you can run somewhere else.
Test Run, Scavenge, Deja Vu, Retrieval Run are all still available for recursion, as is the time-honored practice of just playing extra copies of breakers.
This is why the format is super interesting - I looked at this card pool and thought that Geist is probably the best Criminal now. Re-evaluating everything in a new context is great fun.
His only predator (NEHFA) is mostly banned and he still has a relevant console. Sure, you can’t Levy but you can easily beat early gearchecks (which Shaper struggles to do now without SMC) and transition into a permanent late-game breaker suite fueled by Underworld Contacts.
I think that lists like these are a lot of fun for people who especially enjoy the deck building and theory crafting aspects of netrunner, and would make for a great tournament format. Post a large banned list a month in advance. Next month, change the list. And so on. In such a format, any overlooked errors are short lived, and up to the players to find and exploit.
I stand corrected. These are fair points. Though, looking at the list, without the Siphons, and without Scorch, is there anything that makes Forger better than Reflection? From my limited experience with Geist, I know I’d appreciate the Dyson at $1 discount, and if you’re not popping the Forger, I see it as something that forgoes 1MU for $1, which can be annoying at times.
I like the point about Councilman. I haven’t seen him in action much, so he’s slipped my mind. I think I still like Batty regardless though, since I doubt people will be playing that many Councilman, and running on Batty every time you’ve hit him down with Councilman can be very annoying.
Regardless, I’d be interesting in trying out this format at some point. I love different deckbuilding constraints, and this one is certainly a pretty big departure from the norm.
I’ve experimented with Geist a fair bit recently. He is pretty good, probably even very good for a criminal. The problem is asset spam is impossible for him to keep up with. Unless I’m missing something there isn’t really a good criminal card for trashing assets.
This is only a problem in metas, like our current one, where asset spam decks are commonplace. The last thing that was holding him back in the glacier matchup was limited options for dealing with upgrades, but Pol Op makes them nearly trivial.
Just the fact that this thread has 55 replies means that I have exceeded my expectations for this format. If people really go wild for this I will work really hard to maintain the list based on feedback.
My problem with such a format with a banlist is that the list is pretty subjective for the most part. These cards are problems you perceive (and with feedback it’s problems the vocal part of the community perceives, aka the sky is falling cards - which aren’t necessarily even problem cards in the end)
One big issue is that by banning playstyles you’ll take diversity away from the game (no FA, Scorching, Jinteki shell or Glacier)…you’ll be left with basically only the rush strategy on the corp side, which means runners don’t really need to beat more than one deck - this is simplifying a bit, but maybe it gets the point across. I really don’t want to play a format like that. Not that I need to, ofc, but I also don’t like splitting the playerbase (not seeing much interest for something like this in my meta, though).
Edit: one thing I would love about the format is no Noise, though.
Again, get out of the box. Who’s to say that with so much power gone there isn’t an ENTIRELY NEW way to play? Don’t just cross existing strategies off of a list and say “wow so few left”. Get in there and explore!
Eh, the cardpool is what it is, if there’s some profoundly new way to play the game then it’s possible to build that deck now as well. It may be that it’s beaten to a bloody pulp by Dumbleforks, but it’s still possible to discover it without this format.
This format reminds me of the the way smogon.com (what I would call the Stimhack of Pokemon) structures tiered banlists for the Pokemon video game. They have a standard format that is balanced by a committee and a sub-format called Under Used (UU) where the ban list is based purely on usage in the standard format. The criteria is a Pokemon is banned in UU if “a typical competitive player is more than 50% likely to encounter that Pokemon at least once in a given day of playing (20 battles)”. In practice they end up banning like 5% to 10% of Pokemon in UU based on usage. However, at some point they did start banning things in UU for the balance of the format itself but they still kept bans based on usage the primary driver.
Now obviously Pokemon teams are made out of 6 unique Pokemon where as Netrunner decks have 40+ cards in multiples, so I’m not saying to copy this system directly. But, I think using some system for statistically determining which cards are in the Top-45 would make it easier to form a consensus around a list.
It turns out my current favorite jank corp deck is already pretty close to being legal in this format (just need to lose 2 Jacksons and 2 TFP), so might as well participate to see how it pans out. I also built yet another Kit deck. With all shapers losing SMC, Kit’s ability to facecheck anything with just a decoder seems stronger. Besides, it’s Kit, and I can’t not play Kit.
