I feel like this is one of the easiest mistakes to make, as a designer, but it’s super important.
Timmy plays big dragons because armies of dragons are cool. If dragons are good, Timmy’s deck will be good. If dragons are bad, so is the deck.
Timmy wants to sit down to have fun and stand up with a story to tell. “That time I Never-advanced a 5/3 and they thought it was a Jackson” or “Dug 5 cards deep with RDI and Maker’s Eye and hit 7 points of agendas the turn before they pulled off the Breaking News kill” or “I Mushin’d out a Vitruviu and they thought it was a Junebug so I got 4 counters and just spent a turn playing Hedge Fund over and over because I could” or “They didn’t think I’d put 4 counters on a Junebug first turn, they were sooo dead” or “I played stimhack seven times that game, with all the recursion, and still had a larger hand than normal” are all potentially Timmy experiences or things they desire. Some of those plans are terrible, others are reasonable or can come out of decent play and deckbuilding.
I actually feel that in many ways Netrunner is a much more Timmy-friendly game than Magic. Magic’s kinda swinging that way a bit (green has removal and card draw), but there are some decent ANR decks that can provide the right kind of experience (Noise, even Leela or Kate). It’s the Timmy-Johnny combos that build the really wonky stuff, I feel like, the ones that want their cool experience to be a ridiculous combo build.
Johnny -> Wants to solve a really intricate problem to get a powerful combo (7 point shutdown)
Timmy -> Wants to do something that has a huge impact on the game and doesn’t worry too much about efficiency or intricacy (stimhack/medium digs, etc)
Spike -> Wants to be the only one having fun because fun means winning. All about the efficiency. (Andromeda-Sucker Siphon Spam)
There’s ven diagrams. When a deck becomes competitive enough spike will pick up regardless of how “splashy” or “combo-y” it is. A combo that’s splashy and simple enough might entice both johnny and timmy.
Its good for the game if cards exist for each caste of player. And that ultimatley means that not all cards are going to be “Good” as spike would see them, nor should they be.
Also, the whining and salt in this thread is obnoxious. I love this game and the number of times we misevaluate cards tells me the people in this thread just like to be armchair quarterbacks.
edit: re: disrupter, if gutenberg is the shape of traces to come who knows, maybe in a year we’ll be playing the card. But even if it weren’t, there’s a local two man meta somewhere where all that one guy plays is midseasons tag 'n bag, and disrupter is perfect for that pair of players. Context matters.
Even though Magic has Limited, there’s still cards that are bad in both Limited and Constructed.
Even if you knew a midseason was coming, it’s still hard to justify a card that gives you a net gain of 5 credits if those credits can only be spent on the midseason and you get minus 1 memory until the midseason comes.
If FFG does spend significantly less time testing cards than Magic does, then I think Lukas’s quote is correct. It’s definitely better to err on the side of caution if you can’t be sure that a new card won’t break the game. People are enjoying playing Netrunner the way it is now. If they print a bunch of underpowered cards, people can continue enjoying the game. If they print a bunch of underpowered cards and one broken one, it’ll spoil everyone’s fun.
I think some of this might just be a perspective issue. Most of the Netrunner players I’ve encountered come to the game from Magic. They might not have much experience with truly unbalanced or broken deck-building games. For instance, the old Babylon 5 CCG started out really awesome, but power creep and lack of testing of the expansions totally broke the game.
The ANR team does the best they can with the resources available to them. Maybe it would be more fair if people were to direct their complaints toward the people who allocate those resources instead?
I think Disrupter is left over from ONR trace mechanics, where restarting a trace would actually require the corp to spend more money.
Guess they weren’t around for jace-hawkblade &! ravager-affinity when those were in standard. Erring on the side of caution is so much better than creating monsters like those two.
Even with rotation we’d be stuck with any deck like that for half of a decade.
In the last 11 years Magic has only had to ban cards in Standard twice. And they release about 800 unique cards every year. I’d imagine that it’d be a lot more often than this if they were trying to push every card to be tournament playable.
Though it’s not the only times they’ve admitted to making mistakes. Some high profile ones include
Dragonstorm in Time Spiral
Reflecting Pool with the Vivid Lands (at the same time as Cryptic Command and Bitterblossom)
Snapcaster Mage with Mana Leak
Thragtusk with Restoration Angel
And in Limited…
Zendikar’s “Bears Win” strategy
Pack Rat in Ravnica
Pack Rat (it’s twice as bad as anything else)
This is with a team of ten people spending two years making every set!
You are mostly right here, hard to be rigorous with an almost full time designer, a couple part time designers, and then just playtesters working in spare time.
However, I have yet to see anyone say it isn’t FFGs fault. Of course it is, who else could be at fault? It is just FFG management that is the issue, don’t blame the designers and playtesters, they work with what they have, and as pointed out do it admirably.
Another thing: The Core set sets the standard for what the limits of power should be. Of course we don’t complain about The Maker’s Eye and Sure Gamble being too strong because we have nothing to compare them to. If they weren’t among the strongest cards in the game, it’d mean we were experiencing power creep where every set has to be more powerful than the one before and old cards are constantly being obsoleted.
Under the NWO they don’t print anything “complicated” below rare anymore, which means their risk is much lower. Game shattering effects don’t typically exist outside of mythic, which means they’re not too worried about more than 68 cards; beyond that most of the work they do now is variations on themes, which are essentially reprints with maybe 30 “new” cards and of those 30 “new” cards most of them still are just rehashing known mechanics. Magic development is pretty formulaic, such that they probably put more energy into theme these days than mechanics. After almost 22 years of existence you’d kind of expect that. Conversely 3 years of A:NR development where there’s no such thing as a rare card… Not exactly comparable, especially when you start considering the number of people on the project, their divided attention, and the probably more limited resources of a game company that’s not producing card-board-crack.
Let’s be honest, they mostly release the same cards over and over again.
Like, the most unique thing about Dragons of Tarkir is that they updated the flavor text on the Pacifism reprint, which they haven’t done since Eighth Edition.
I think Disrupter was originally supposed to work similar to Signpost or Wired Switchboard at a time before they finalized how the trace mechanic works in ANR. It wouldn’t shock me to learn that they didn’t have enough time to playtest it enough to realize just how useless the ANR version of traces make it. If traces worked like they did in ONR, Disrupter would be a usable card.
If they hadn’t finalised how traces work before printing disrupter, then Caduceus would have been broken. It would have been like the runner would have to play a psi game on top of meeting the base trace strength for both subroutines. Data Raven would also have been more powerful, especially with the core set identity. And an Ash protecting a non-agenda would have been as good as a tagless closed accounts.
My theory is that it was probably designed earlier and just didn’t make the cut in the core set. They came back to it to round out a data pack and didn’t test it enough to realize just how useless it is.
Medical Research Fundraiser is amazing in Weyland BABW or would be if you could actually spend a lot of influence to run a huge number of transactions.
I’ve tried it and think it’s okay but not great. If it gave one more credit to you or one less credit to the runner, I’d consider running it in some BABW decks. As is, it’s not even worth one influence.
Edit: this is after trying it in an uncorrodable deck, where the runner’s money doesn’t matter as much. Even there, I eventually cut all three copies I originally had in it.
Timmy enjoys the experience of playing, while Johnny wants to express himself. Johnny is mainly focused on deck building, and the only reason he actually plays the game is so that people get to see his decks in action.
Not exactly comparable, especially when you start considering the number of people on the project, their divided attention, and the probably more limited resources of a game company that’s not producing card-board-crack.