Originally published at: The Board plays…Restructure! - StimHack
Discuss the latest article here.
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“Players can no longer use prevent/avoid abilities to stop a cost from being paid. Previously, costs could be prevented, and this would stop the associated ability from resolving. It was possible to trigger an ability such as the one on Bankroll, prevent the card from trashing itself with Sacrificial Construct, and thereby get Tech Trader triggers. Now this use is prohibited: an ability that would trash a card (as its effect, not its cost) must be about to resolve in order to trigger Sacrificial Construct’s prevent ability.”
It seems weird that you would institute this rule yet at the exact same time say that you are considering allowing the use of abilities that themselves have no effect on the game state (which you would only want to do to cause triggers on other cards). The above seems a classic example of doing that in a roundabout way!
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Favorite entry in the change log: “Issued non-functional errata to Inversificator so that its ability forms a grammatical sentence.”
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I’ll get one of the rules team to clarify, but it read to me that you can only prevent effects, not costs.
Oh that was my reading of it too.
If I didn’t make sense, I was trying to get at the fact that what is being outlawed here is triggering an effect to prevent the cost so that nothing actually ends up happening beyond triggering something on a “third party” card (the card you use to prevent the cost, or something that cascades from that). For what it’s worth, I think outlawing that is a good thing!
But the “no-change-in-game-state” rule is a more wideranging rule that is also designed to stop precisely these kinds of situations where you just trigger an effect just to get a trigger on a “third party” card and not actually do anything with the ability itself.
So while cracking down on the prevention of costs thing on the one hand (which I see as a being a kind of loophole to the “no-change-in-game-state” rule), it seems odd to me to talk about considering rolling back that main rule itself, which is based on the same apparent principle. Does that make sense?
What you’re saying makes sense to me. However, while those things may seem in contrast to each other in that sense, I suspect it’s less about changing the game in terms of what you can and can’t do, and more about making rules intuitive in the various different circumstances they appear.
I for one am actually pretty excited about the rules update - netrunner seemed to really struggle with consistency and intuitive rules from the mid-point onwards and often our games would require various googling and lookups which took something away from the game for us at least. Everything I read in the NISEI article was very re-assuring and was all the kind of things I was looking for from FFG at the time, so yeah well stoked for this. 
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Does the “fail to find” ruling apply also to cards in hand? I’m mostly thinking of Ultraviolet Clearance, where you run into the same “have to prove you don’t have anything to install to a judge” scenario.
There’s also the Street Peddler with 3 Events conundrum. Is trashing Street Peddler to install nothing an option?
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Not official, but I consider Ultraviolet Clearance in the same boat as NEXT Opal. Printed text implied it was mandatory, errata quickly made to show that it was optional. For much the same reason.
I thought UVC was still mandatory? I’ve lost a game at UK Nats thanks to that 
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Oh, huh. UVC doesn’t have an errata… Iiiiinteresting.