That’s a pretty good article (admittedly 13 years old) about why there are bad cards.
There’s still the question “why are there really bad cards?” (Disrupter, Salvage etc)
I can think of a few answers to this, though ultimately I don’t think they’re that justified.
Sometimes it’s just hard to find the middle ground between total jank and potentially too good. If a card would be really un-fun if it was too good, you might over compensate in the other direction.
It gives people something to talk about. It helps prove as a case study that not all cards are good (to the bad-card Johnnies who insist that all cards can be good).
If there are some cards that are going to be bad anyway, why is it worse to be really bad than just bad? It’s still not going to get played either way.
They have to give you 20 cards every data pack. Would you prefer them to make it 19 card data packs just so that Salvage and Disrupter wouldn’t exist?
I’m surprised at the Corp bottom 5. They don’t actually seem horrible. Rework is obsolete now because of Jackson, but did no one use it before then to hide away an agenda? Isabel on the other hand got printed at the same time as Interns, which (if you don’t care about repeatability) could do the same thing but better most of the times you’d want Isabel (not hard to get a card into your archives once it’s outlived its usefulness in a corp deck).
A lot of Rosewater’s justifications aren’t too persuasive. For one, screw Timmy. Catering to him can’t be good for the game. Timmy will find something he likes in any card pool.
I think Moistloaf’s frustration is from the clearly bad utility cards that can’t see play.
Disruptor, for instance: would it be playable if its effect occurred after the Corp committed credits? How would that change the game? Would Anarchs never play Plascrete? Would it just be a weak but viable sub-par option?
It’s fun to reimagine how certain cards could be tweaked to work, and it deepens our understanding of the game. Also, there may be a reboot someday…
Most decks that want Plascrete are going to go tagme with Vamp/Siphon, and others are still going to want Plascrete because of Breaking News or Posted Bounty or Snare or running through tracers into Scorch, or because they don’t have a free MU lying around. If the goal is to have a Scorch counter, then your version still doesn’t get there IMO.
The exciting thing about your version would be to keep Ash in check, which it would be very strong at. In fact it probably needs to be 2-3 influence just to avoid buffing Shaper even more, as they’ll be able to get it out when it matters much more often than Anarch.
Disrupter after committing credits would hurt any deck which relies on landing one powerful trace, like midseasons. I think it’d be too frustrating for the Corp even if it wasn’t that powerful in a vacuum.
The funny thing about you saying “screw Timmy” is that back in the day people used to say “screw Spike” - they didn’t think they needed to design cards specifically for tournament players because those players would just play whatever the strongest cards were.
Catering to Timmy doesn’t hurt the game. For one thing, the majority of players of most games aren’t tournament players. Games would die out from lack of money if they didn’t appeal to casual players. For another, if you know that not every card can be good in tournaments, why not make a few of the non good cards be giant monsters that the casuals want to play?
Not sure what “Giant Monsters” we have in Netrunner though. Leviathan, lol? That card would be fine if it cost less, and maybe even a little fun, somehow. Monolith? Could cost 12, be actually playable with Moddeds, and provide a cruise ship worth of fun to boot.
Even bad giant Ice like Wotan and Janus would be fine and more fun if they were a little better or a little cheaper, respectively.
I never played Magic, but I suspect the big creatures in that game aren’t apples to oranges to the high-priced cards in Netrunner.
Magic is different for a few reasons. The biggest is the way the cards are sold. With random packs you really have to have filler. But the biggest reason its okay for MtG to have bad cards is that a lot of bad cards are really solid in limited. A vanilla 4/4 is trash but it might be just the piece you need for your draft deck.
There’s a joke in physics academia: “Theory is never wrong, just sometimes inapplicable.”
Bad cards are not always bad. Metagames change, and new cards appear. I’m deeply hoping we see a card (probably an ID) that makes these mechanics better.
I can’t remember when I saw OAI and Curtain Wall in play before Blue Sun. And it’s difficult to release Blue Sun without printing those bad cards first.
Unless you put them all in one pack, but that’s not how buying Netrunner cards is supposed to work.
Most people know its pretty shitty even at $14. Didnt someone reveal that FFG though Dawrain was going to define the meta? It’s pretty clear that FFG does not have the resources to playtest their cards as much as everyone here would like.
Personally I think it would go in a real deck at $12. I used to play “Big Girls Play With Monoliths” and also Stimhack + Workshop with it and it felt like those decks were only about $6 away from being legit.
Another fun tidbit - I heard they nerfed Medical Research Fundraiser in testing because it was a Transaction and they thought it would put Weyland BABW over the top.
And then they go and print a Weyland deluxe expansion with 0 Transactions in it… poor BABW.
I think the biggest mistake I continually make is assuming the playtesting for ANR is rigorous whatsoever. Everything I’ve been told and read about the testing process is that it isn’t nearly as rigorous as it should be, due to work-force issues. Most claim that isn’t FFG’s fault, while I say that it is.
There is a reason MtG R&D has separate design and development teams and irrc will bring a fresh set of eyes on board late in the design process.
When you only have a few play testers and a few games groupthink and overvaluing the results of complex events can have a major impact: Is card X overpowered or did the playtesters playing against it not figure out a counter/didn’t have time to play a full gauntlet of decks against it? Is X overpowered or was it just in the same deck as Y and Y isn’t even going to be printed now but all the testers remember getting their faces kicked in by X*Y?
[quote=“Dis, post:117, topic:3667”]
Is card X overpowered or did the playtesters playing against it not figure out a counter/didn’t have time to play a full gauntlet of decks against it? Is X overpowered or was it just in the same deck as Y and Y isn’t even going to be printed now but all the testers remember getting their faces kicked in by X*Y?
[/quote]Or hell, does one tester have a pet style/faction they’re particularly good with (or that other testers are bad against) which leads to overestimating how much trouble that style/faction has in the wider meta? Feel sometimes like someone at FFG is some kind of Weyland Savant or something.
I disagree completely. Timmy aspects keep the game viscerally fun. He’s actually the least flexible psychographic, card wise. The key is then to make fun Timmy cards that are also good (or least playable or niche), like Wanton Destruction, Mushin No Shin, and Stimhack. Timmy is never going to find Kati Jones or Sure Gamble exciting (he’s not going to hate them, either).
The reason Timmy is stereotypically associated with giant creatures in Magic is because smashing your opponent with a giant dragon feels awesome. Conflating Timmy with expensive things is inaccurate. Timmy is about cool experiences, not about numbers being high.
I would clarify - this isn’t the fault of the designers or testers, this is the fault of management.