StimHack Draft Cube: Current Lists (Updated for Earth's Scion)

What? I don’t get what you are saying? Do you mean the draft IDs would not be good? Because surely they are all better than a blank ID, so even if you can’t build around a faction they still CAN do something. And why would they need support more than 3 of each card can give? They only care about cards from faction.

Yeah, it’s the only 100% blank 4/2 for cube purposes. 4x 3 pointers and 1x 2 pointer still adds up to a legal 14 points and while I like forcing the players to draft better agendas a lot of new drafters end up getting pretty punished for miscounting points or undervaluing agendas and are stuck with 5/3s.

Thanks for all of the work on these. I may try using a hardwired starter and see how it goes.

Not all the IDs need support cards, but the Weyland one needs advanceable ICE, the NBN one needs tag punishment, the Anarch one needs ways to trash corp cards, and the Criminal one wants tag-me type stuff. Without enough support for these, taking cards from those factions becomes a bit of a risk. It can lead to games where your ID is effectively blank, while your opponent’s ID has an effect. In my opinion this unbalance doesn’t create a fun format.

I’m not saying its impossible, but its something that would need to be carefully designed. If SneakySly, Mediohxcore, and everyone else involved thinks it can work, then I’m all for it!

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Good post.

In addition to those problems, the actual IDs themselves are not balanced between them (which is what I originally meant). The Shaper ID is so far above the other two as to be comical.

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Yeah I just looked at these IDs for the first time. The Shaper and NBN ones are just SOOO much (3 times, 4 times, 5 times?) more powerful than all the rest of them. Whoever designed these, (it wasn’t Lukas) clearly has no idea what they’re doing. If it’s Damon work, I am terrified.

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From my experience the Weyland one is actually VERY strong, free advancements every single runner turn allows for both very cheap half decent ice, or quite strong ice walls. There wasn’t enough tag punishment in our hardwired packs for the NBN one to really mean that much.

That’s kind of the point about the stimhack cube, though. In a draft, the ID powers are entirely environment dependent. The hardwired NBN one isn’t as good as it looks at first because there’s day jobs and liberated accounts going around, and the best tag punishment i saw was traffic accident. The Weyland one is a lot better when you can get your hands on a bunch of space ice that becomes actually free.

Which is why I’m starting to think adding these to the stimhack cube is probably a fools errand. If you put the work in to making your pool fit your IDs, then you wouldn’t be able to add whatever cards you wanted when new packs came out.

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Weird Question:
Is the ultimate goal for the Stimhack Cube to be like an MTG Cube? Strictly 1-of each card? I understand with the card pool that’s available right now that may not be feasible, but I’m wondering if that’s the direction we’re going? Or are we just out to make a Fun Draft Format?

Yes, the ideal form of the cube would be all singletons. However, that goal needs to be balanced with creating a great draft environment, which is why that is not currently the case. As time moves forward, you will likely see more cards as 1 X.

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Personally, I feel less strongly about moving towards 1x, because so many of the good synergy based cards combo with themselves, (NEXT, stealth, scorch) and drafting anything but goodstuff gets a lot harder when everything is one of. I like moving towards one ofs for the more replacable effects (hunter, turnpike / adonis, launch, etc)

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Also, will the Stimhack cube be updated to stay in line with rotation, or will rotated out cards continue to exist in the cube? (I hope the latter, personally, but let that not sway your decisions!)

This. Cube will have no rotation. (giving your rotated cards an eventual home to live in) :smile:

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Theoretically, with rotation, we’ll eventually get multiple types of effects for those sorts of things. Imagine when NEXT Bronze rotates out. Would they reprint it, or perhaps some other NEXT ICE? If they printed new NEXT Ice, you can envision a scenario where the cube would have less of any one NEXT ice, yet have the same total number of NEXT ice.

Still, I see your point. Right now, it tends to be that Synergy in Netrunner is predicated on multiples; there’s very few cards that are individually very powerful. (I could think of Midseasons/Archived Memories/Scorch for cards that can combo together with only one copy of each, but SEA Scorch Scorch is another option. If forced to choose between the two, which set of three cards should go into the cube?)

Agree that the Hardwired IDs do not fit the cube very well. However, adding an aspect of faction / ID is a good thing for drafting I think. I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on an ID power set that might be more balanced / suited to the cube. As a straw man and totally off my head, but something like:

(all based on having more cards rezzed/installed for the appropriate faction)

Criminal - Gain 1 credit after the first successful run each turn
Shaper - Draw 1 card after installing the first program or h/w (downgrading the hardwired one a bit)
Anarch - current hardwired id

HB - current hardwired id ( might be overpowered )
Jinteki - reduce the cost of the first sentry rezzed each turn by 1
NBN - current hardwired id
Weyland - Gain 1 credit after playing the first operation during a turn

Not very inventive but just as examples.

In the last cube I ran, I threw a couple IDs into the cube itself. If you drafted an ID, you could choose to use it or not, but every ID came with the caveat that your minimum decksize became 10 less than that of the ID you drafted. So Cybernetics Division would keep the draft 30 card minimum, but Making News would bump it up to 35. The IDs I threw in were Harmony Medtech, Cybernetics Division, BaBW, and Making News for Corp, Nasir, Maxx, Exile and Silhouette for Runner.

It turned out pretty reasonable. The extra 5 cards was a significant enough disadvantage to discourage automatically running them, while Medtech and Cybernetics had abilities that were mutually risky for Corp and Runner. The only ID that was a strict upgrade over the default IDs was Silhouette, and I don’t think I’d include her again.

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Default draft rules go to 6 points anyway?

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Correct.

Harmony Medtech drops is down to 5.

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I just ran a draft last night (4 players, packs of ten, each select one, then trash the remaining 6). It seemed like the most fun part of the drafting (excluding the games later of course) were the really difficult decisions one had to make when opening a pack with all great picks.

What are the thoughts in regards to adding more strong “staple” cards that one might see in constructed, in exchange for some of the admittedly more “interesting” ones, such as adding accoutn siphon and taking out deep thought, for instance.

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