Much like a disgruntled programmer leaving his IT job with HB, Lukas has left “Easter Eggs” in the code – time bombs to explode. I know what you’re thinking. “Faust isn’t that bad” and “MWL sorted out the chaff”. But it’s the hidden ones, the ones you haven’t seen yet.
Museum of History breaks the fundamental clock on the game. That inexorable journey to the end of the deck is now an unbreakable LOOP subprogram, designed to make Netrunner so boring that the new designer can do naught but fail! I know what you’re thinking. “But Lukas is my friend, he wouldn’t do that to me”, but you need look no further than the Game of Thrones game line to discern his true event. Once a lovely person, he has been corrupted by the cards. If you play the Game of Game Design, you win or you die. One point for a draw. No, wait, nothing for that now.
I’ve caught this one trap, but I’m sure there are others. I know what you’re thinking. “How can I possibly catch all the nefarious plots that House Litzsinger (Suffer No Weyland To Live) have laid, so long in the making?”.
Fear not, your Bannermen stand by you. I have alerted you to the Milk of the Poppy that is Museum of History, others shall comment here on the other cards that will need to see the Hand’s justice.
I remain, Ser, your faithful and obedient servant,
IF runner = 'Noise' THEN
WHILE card <> 'Hades Shard' LOOP
fnc_mill_cards;
END LOOP;
IF agenda > 6 AND jackson = 'N' THEN
fnc_runner_wins;
fnc_gg;
ELSE
fnc_ragequit;
END IF;
Hark not to that gent Ser Damon, yond filthy rabbit is a trait’r to our Johnny causeth.
His moth’r did smell liketh a potato and his bawbling dog hast strabismus. Eke, that gent has’t a coat yond is red, and a coxcomb yond is did wet.
I kinda of feel like the game is on a clock anyway, even with corp decks having infinite cards, in that a well balanced runner deck with sustainable econ and a considerate pilot (anyone who doesnt blindly “run lots run early” basically) will invariable win. Inevitability can mean the corp just mills out, but we got that from noise, and its a bit of a shallow definition i think if you dont also apply it to other runners.
Rich runners can get accesses. Enough accesses, even with the corp deck being shuffled every turn, will win the runner the game. Faust altered our definition of “rich” but the concept remains the same.
Very true but we are talking very abstractly here in cases where the corp deck is infinite and runner accesses are equally infinite. Or maybe not infinite, thats probably a silly way of describing it. From 0 to one side winning the game. I was just trying to define the game “clock” as something better than the corp running out of cards. In that sense museum doesnt alter the clock.
You should actually need less accesses against a recursive deck.
Way back in the mists of time when the Netrunner universe was young, someone did a little analysis that determined seventeen accesses would, on average, win you the game as the Runner. It is based on a few assumptions, but that serves as a useful little metric in general.
The most important assumption to note for now is that such a calculation is based on the raw agenda density of the starting deck. If the Corp is playing to score out agendas, that is not too unreasonable, since we can assume that every card type is equally quickly “used” when drawn (assets and ICE are installed, operations played, agendas scored or stolen). So the remaining cards available to access have the same agenda density as the original deck.
Contrast this with an endlessly recursive deck style which doesn’t aim to score agendas in such a prompt fashion, but build board state to some win condition. To build the board state requires cards which aren’t agendas. As the board state builds, the agenda density of the places you’d be running looking for agendas increases (you’ve taken out all the assets and ICE, but left all the agendas). So as the game progresses, you should need less and less accesses to win (less than the “standard” seventeen) as each access becomes more valuable.
Now, the one caveat is that you obviously have to be running the right places! The really useful thing that endless recursion lets you do as the Corp is play with where you keep your agendas. If you only run R&D, the Corp can hide all the agendas in HQ/Archives, for instance. If you lock down HQ, the Corp can quickly cycle any agendas drawn through Archives and back into R&D. So as the board state builds, the value of your runs on central servers improves, but in order to make sure you profit, you have to keep the Corp honest and make sure that you run all of them frequently enough. It’s no use if the agenda density of HQ has massively increased and you keep running R&D (and if you keep running R&D only, HQ will get more dense because a sensible Corp isn’t going to put those agendas back in R&D!).
That I think is the only real benefit of stopping the Corp clock and it relies on playing to the Runner’s weakness, in the same way that a PE shell game player can adjust their play based on the reticence/overexuberance of a particular Runner. A clever Runner needs to mix up their central play.
I think this analysis is sound, however it’s ignoring the fact that Corp can play pretty unfair agenda selection these days with really low density and built-in protection.
IG plays only 8 agendas in 54 cards deck, and 6 of these are TFP and GFI.
So the expected number of needed accesses will be way higher than the normal 17.
These cards have the same impact in a non-recursive deck though. I think the big thing that the endless recursion itself brings is the ability to decide which centrals to stash your agendas in. And any cards which allow instant speed switching of cards between servers compound this benefit. So cards like Jackson Howard, Allelle Repression, Disposable HQ (especially with Kitsune) become even stronger. I played IG at the pub the other day and groaned when Hacktivist Meeting was played by the Runner (there was no way I was scoring an agenda to trash it), but then I realised it was awesome HQ protection, as I needed only to leave as many unrezzed assets as cards stored in HQ for an instant disappearing HQ. In the end my opponent was the one who wished he could get rid of it!
You can even confound things further by reaching boardstates where there are not enough points left to finish the game. Artist colony, data dealer, shi kyu and news team can mean accesses are meaningless.
But generally i the point is that there is consensus on what timer we are working to, and museum doesn’t effect that timer like it seems it should.
