Originally published at: Revised Core Changes — The Runners - StimHack
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Just finishing reading Shapers, it could have been fine to enlarge the vision and try to see the future, with the 30-something card by faction that will be out of the game, either concerned by the rotation or the coreset rotation.
For Shaper, this it :
Quality Time
R&D Interface
Replicator
Creeper
Deus X
Snowball
Deep Thought
ZU.13 Key Master
Personal Workshop
The Helpful AI
Power Nap
Eureka!
Capstone
Record Reconstructor
LLDS Processor
CyberSolutions Mem Chip
Lockpick
Torch
False Echo
Alpha
Paintbrush
Omega
Sharpshooter
Woman in the Red Dress
Motivation
Most of them have no impact, but things like QT, R&DI, Deus X, Zu, Workshop, Lockpick, False Echo, Paintbrush, Sharpshooter can make lots of a damage to older archetypes.
“Banning” Deus X / Sharpshooter makes me really think they want to remove CC from the MWL.
Of all of these cards, I think I’ll miss QT the much.
-edit- Nice. I think I agree with everything but “Spinal modem is terrible”.
One point about Akamatsu Mem Chip, with its removal, all MU increases are either Consoles or 3c minimum install cost.
With the Errata, Q-coherence chip is playable.
We’ve actually had a Criminal player (who was winning tournaments) playing it. Kinda his signature card, but it worked for him.
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Nice write-up. While Yog.0 and Parasite departing mean that low-strength ICE (particularly code gates) are re-opened in the card pool, I think that R&D lock disappearing as a win-con is the larger strategic shift that these changes cause.
Before rotation, Medium + the ability to make a run on R&D every turn means that the runner has essentially won the game. You make a great point that “Medium was about more than keeping the Corp from having cards you didn’t see, it was about accelerating the end-game if the Runner was favored.” I can appreciate that removing R&D lock makes it less likely for the corp to get into a hopeless situation, but I wonder whether this just means that such a situation will get dragged out longer.
Also, Top Hat’s stock goes up in a world without Medium!
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Yes, I think games will almost certainly be longer, because runners have many fewer ways to close out games from a strong position. I expect to see The Turning Wheel in pretty much every criminal and anarch deck.
The other effect of the inability to R&D lock is that it makes fast advance more powerful, so I expect more of that on the corp side (which in turn favours Shaper because they can exploit Clot the best).
On the other side of things, aggro runners lost a lot. Corps can push an agenda in an iced remote on turn 1, and the worst thing that can happen to them is Deep Data Mining or Indexing, which are not nearly as scary as Siphon or loading up a Medium. We’ll probably see more late-game runners that run less often: I wouldn’t be surprised to see CounterSurveillance or some other combo deck do well.
Corps lose Jackson, though. Unless corps seriously start packing alternative deck recycling tools, games will be decided much sooner, simply because the points will enter play and not be returned to R&D. How much sooner I don’t know, but it’s at least some compensation to losing Medium.
I’m looking forward to HQ access pressure being much more meaningful.
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Well if Anarch get some event like “2c, inf2: run a remote and if successfull, instead of accessing trash one card from HQ + one from R&D then RFTG one card from Archives & shuffle r&d” as their color pie Maker’s Eyes/Legwork, I’ll be fine with the medium/nerve disapearance.
Because by removing their B&B, they go back to where they were sometime around O&C. Most of their ID & archetypes got broke by those rotation and ban choices now. MaxX is sitting quite in a strange place now. Not nowhere, but in janky world (it’s where I live but hey guys, I don’t mind losing : I could play a garbage party like this, it was not OP, very very fun to play and it got destroyed like totally).
I wonder if there is some sort of a core 2.0 “making of”, to see which motivations designers had, since how many time they have this in mind and if Damon was part of that and at what level he was of the selection process.
(to be fair, I haven’t watched that yet, but I saw the link floating around)
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You should be glad Boggs is in charge and not Damon then.
In the Bad Publicity interview (which is interesting) he said he thinks SMC and Clone Chip both should be removed from the game.
That would be because of which combo ?
He did not say. It was a one-liner after he said he had no influence on future decisions about revising the deluxe boxes. He said that then said that if Boggs was listening that SMC and CC should go. And that was the end of the discussion.
This is pretty much exactly what I was hoping to see because of the article. I’d seen lots of people talking about it in Slack, but I wanted to get a place where we can discuss specific nuances of the Revised Core… It’s the main reason I chose to focus on Runners, and on Standard Post-Rotation (not Core-Only).
If there’s interest, I might try writing up the Corp changes in a similar way…
Did you know you can get a Spinal Modem without playing Spinal Modem or suffering the Trace downside? Two Cyberfeeders! Oh, I guess you might need MU, too? I’m not actually sure you need more than 4 MU anymore in Anarch…
I would posit that if Spinal Modem weren’t terrible, Cyberfeeder would see more than niche play. Recurring credits to pay for using Icebreakers isn’t worth it. Wasn’t, perhaps, now that Anarchs have to pay credits to break finally.
That’s… Actually a good point. Huh. With Hunter-Seeker in existence, it’s a little… questionable. But still playable.
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Why does Damon hate netrunner so much? 
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I think Damon regrets “fast” action installs and effects like SMC, Clone Chip and Jackson.
Clone Chip also is a recursion card, which Netrunner design has been trying to reign in recursion for a bit now, especially after the mistakes of Friends and LARLA.
With Test Run being evergreen, you have similar options that work better with different breakers. You also have Code Siphon, which isn’t great, but it raises in value a bit in a meta that plays cards like Test Run.
I don’t know. I would personally rather not see SMC and CC go in the future, but considering the treatment Anarch and Criminal got, I kind of think it will happen eventually.
I fully agree with Damon here. They really hurt the ice-game in terms of bluffing, because an SMC/Clone Chip makes a runner prepared for anything.
Also, instant speed effects are awful in terms of priority rules. Nobody passes priority back and forth explicitly, and there are real issues there in terms of clogging down the game or failing to give the runner/corp time to react.
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Some people agrees with that in France too.
The thing is, with Core 2.0 + all things up to Mars, I don’t really know what card is problematic now, and nobody can explain anything else than “well, dunno, Damon said so”.
SMC, I don’t really cares if that stays or not. I can understand CC-SMC synergy is op though, but that’s in a world with huge threats on ice. There is none left.
I like that synergy, and find it fun, even played against when the guy play CC-SMC to pop up say an Equivocation just before the run success. Because that may have changed all my rez plan, and that’s netrunner.
It’s less fun when the guy pops up a Parasite pre-encounter or a Crescentus-while encounter, and instakill you 5c.
The usual clic 1 SMC clic 2 run in shaper is a signature move. Why would you want to kill that in such a nasty ice environnement ? I’d rather that than T1 draw draw cred cred until you found breakers or test runs ?
Phase 1-2-3 days are very blur today, and very much to the advantage of the corp if the runner rely on tools nobody used in tests & balancing where modern ice was used ?
I think Spinal Modem for Grimoire is an oddity, unless there was a mandate to remove all Core 1.0 consoles. Spinal Modem never was great, an with all the high trace ice NBN has accumulate over the cycles, it can be downright suicidal. On the flipside, there have been additional 3 cred 2 MU consoles.
However, removing Grimoire opens design space for more limited use powerful viruses like Imp, and I think that’s a direction we’ll see in the future. With Grimoire in rotation, you’d have to worry if +1 virus counter might make an effect too powerful when designing new cards.
That’s just because they forgot to put back Compromised Employee in Core 2.0. 
If they put Reina & Spinal, too bad the one card that works isn’t there.
That’s the second uncomplete synergetic module I see (the other one is Celebrity - Subliminal), and I guess there is plenty of those.
With the spoiled Friday Chip, I don’t think there will be too much room for that. Virus Breeding Ground always had a downside of needing a virus token on the program already (and the solution of purging). Friday Chip seems easier to trigger with Kim and Imp.
I’m actually glad that we kept spinal modem. I’ve recently started to enjoy it in combination with some bad pub as an engine. Until you hit that Macrophage ofc.