Not really:
Timmy (big splashy win more)
Johnny (interesting, unexpected, I can’t believe I just lost to that)
These demographics began life being much more detailed and in depth but have been stripped down by the game’s designers over time to make them more widely applicable. This is the reason that people struggle to agree about what they mean.
Generally Timmy cares about the actual experience of play itself and they seek out cards that feel exciting to play.
Johnny wants to express himself through the game and be creative.
All the stuff about ‘decisive, crushing wins’ is just baggage.
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Timmy is the guy who doesnt care about winning.
johnny is the combo player.
Spike is the player who wins or bitches about losing to johnny’s combo.
Timmy doesn’t care about winning as much as having fun. Timmy can still totally care about winning.
Timmy builds a deck that’ll be exciting to play, and wants a cool experience.
Johnny builds a deck that does unique things, and wants to show it off.
Spike builds a deck to crush their opponents, and wants to win.
Timmy and Johnny not having their primary focus being on winning doesn’t mean either of them don’t want to win, it’s just not the primary/only source of fun.
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Binder fodder?! Joke is on him, all my cards are sleeved.
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Well, regardless if Timmy is a dolt who likes shiny bad cards or a great natured player who just enjoys all facets of the game, we don’t need Monolith to cost 18 credits.
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I’m just speculating, but Monolith might appeal to some people because its so expensive, not in spite of it.
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And those peoples opinions are invalid.
Usually the idea is we’ve all got a little Spike/Timmy/Johnny inside us, it’s just expressed to different degrees, and in different contexts.
I love winning (Spike!) but I really hate to do it with cookie-cutter templates - I want to win my way (Johnny). And if that way involves playing Government Takeover or rezzing Orion or Wotan or installling Monolith, even better (Timmy).
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If Monolith was costed low enough that it became the cornerstone of a top tier deck, Spikes would play that deck because they want to win, and they’d get bored out of their brains because the novelty of it would wear off after about ten games.
Timmy also loves Blackguard which is only $11, so I think it’s more the flashiness of the card’s effect that appeals than the exact cost.
To a Spike, novelty doesn’t activate their reward circuits - winning does that. Novelty is good when it makes decks they are good at better so they win more often, otherwise it’s bad.
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Monolith gives several emotional triggers that a Timmy might enjoy - sense of achievement when you get the right conditions to install it, sense of security thanks to your big rig and damage protection, sense of utterly devastating the opponent.
Spikes tend to like a close game, challenge, tough decisions, tension, playing around damage with skill rather than just being able to ignore it. They like to win, but deep down it goes beyond just winning even if they don’t consciously realize it. That’s why the current runner decks are suited to Spikes and Monolith.dec isn’t.
Also the thing about novelty is that Spikes usually play a lot more often than the other psychographics, and they play the same deck a lot more often too (whereas a Timmy who plays a lot probably plays lots of different decks). That’s why it’s important for the games to not all feel the same in Spike matchups.
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As a die hard spike, I appreciate novelty if and only if it’s playable at the competitive level. A card that’s an upgrade to a current card is exciting as well, but if it does something new and different, that’s even better. If a card does something new and different but in such an inefficient way that I will never play it if I were trying my hardest to win, it’s just as bad to me as a totally boring card I would also never play.
I dislike the idea of designing with spike in mind at all, as I think attributing value to basically any competitive-unplayable card because it appeals to SOMEONE is a cop out. Almost every card could be costed well enough to make some kind of competitive impact without making it any less appealing to Timmy or Johnny.
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Was going to say that we should just change “Spike” to “Dan” for this forum.
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My personal pattern is to start out in something as a Spike, then get bored and go hardcore Johnny route. Happened to me in competitive shooters, where I eventually got too good at the standard competitive class builds and would use silly shit (and still dominate). Happened to me in MTG, where I played Spike for a few years then eventually just got into building budget Johnny decks for Modern. In ANR, I kinda skipped the Spike phase altogether, as the diversity of the card pool pulls me in too many directions. I likely have some form of ADHD as well, which doesn’t help, but being a Spike gets boring for me. I personally can only win so many times with the good stuff before the win becomes a bit meaningless. I have some sickness where I have to make things as challenging as possible for myself. The only game I never really had an issue was playing TGP/CAL in DOD 1.6, because there wasn’t enough diversity for there to be anything but Spike.
Any card that is good enough to be competitive will edge out some other card that was good enough to be competitive. Maybe not enough to make the card not see play anymore, but it at least turns good all the time cards into niche cards. And sometimes that means cards just get outclassed with time (yog.0/femme/cyberfeeder). But, we see the other side happening too where cards we thought we’d never play gain value as they gain friends.Cyber-Cypher was good and then binder fodder for a long time. Crypsis had a big comeback with noise, as did wyldside which no one wanted to play for the longest time. Box-E was universally panned and yet it keeps showing up and look, there’s Opus again (which I thought was too slow). Mimic similarly faded and came back when architect got printed. Crescentus now shows up in headlock. Feedback filter is a huge one that everyone thought was garbage (outclasses netshield or we might have been talking about that card)
there are others too… (Leela)
And everyone things jinteki is dead until min shows up to worlds. 
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These examples are really bad, and your timelines are off (mimic faded away when?). Pretty sure no one thinks of Crypsis when they think of unplayable crap. I went undefeated with Crypsis back during the Plugged in Tour days… It is the Salvages and the Data Hounds that people complain about, not the cards that are weaker but see some limited play.
Edit: Renamed this thread.
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I was under the impression that this thread was about how conservative power level on cards was making the playable card pool too small. Am I right to say that you think ANR has greater diversity in the card pool compared to other games but not compared to its potential? Or something to that effect?
I don’t think I’ve complained about a single one of these cards ever outside of maybe Box-E, which I think could have and should have been costed at $3, (also, just because you can play a card in a deck and win with it doesn’t mean it was optimal. I don’t think I’ve seen a Box-E deck that I didn’t think would be better off without it).
It’s just not true that any card that’s good enough to be competitive makes another card noncompetitive. As the card pool expands, the number of competitive decks can increase, therefore increasing the overall number of competitive cards. If you’re talking about competitive at any given time, sure, sometimes one card overshadows another, but that doesn’t mean that the overshadowed cards are FOREVER constructed unplayable or suboptimal. It’s totally fine to have cards in the pool that don’t have the right support yet or just aren’t good in the metagame at the moment.
The problem cards are the cards that will never, ever be seen in the top 16 of a World Championship. They are the Salvages and Data Hounds, and they most certainly exist.
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Assuming there are just good cards that exist in sets you’d always include/pick from (economy/breakers), there are probably at most 30 flex spots for those other good cards in top 16 decks and if every player brings a unique deck, that means 480 possible cards, but consistancy says that those decks will mostly be playing 2-3 ofs which means we’re looking closer to 192 “worlds-class” decks’ cards and only if every player brings a different deck. More often we see 25-50 of a top 16 playing the same deck because there usually is a strongest deck, and that’s going to drop us down to 120ish possible strong cards in a top 16. Maybe this gets better over successive years; but if we’re going to judge a card pool by top 16, then we’re going to limit ourselves to less than 200 cards (and probably less than 130) per side as “Good Cards”. There are almost 400 cards per side now and with over 180 cards coming out each year, its unlikely that every card will get a chance to be in the top 16 of worlds.
I think there are cards that have been panned that have come back into the metagame: Darwin, Scheherazade, Tinkering. And cards in those classes do not look like data hound (at the moment), but not knowing what the future brings its hard to say that bad cards will remain bad.
I want to point out that the original “Cards Are Bad ARGH! MTG Rant” that Rosewater responded to featured prominently Lion’s Eye Diamond. Cards you think are bad probably are bad right now may not be later, they may just be waiting for a deck. Even little old data hound may some day be a decent card. How? I have no idea, but it happens. We for a long time said grim was a bad card, then it showed up in NEH decks. Eureka was awful until someone found a way to make an event only shaper big-rig deck and it combos nicely with test run there.
I’m pretty sure that something drastic would have to happen in the case of data hound or disrupter; but we don’t know that the cards won’t some day be valuable. Saying otherwise is just ignoring card game history.
Right after red coats came into the game a lot of people were panning Crypsis as having become too click intensive to run. Mimic did continue to show up in andromeda decks (everyone thought noise was dead and anarch in general, though they’d play mimic), but I wouldn’t say it was common in shaper. In shaper you splashed for femme for a long time and that was it, maybe onto a dino, but probably just scavenging them around.