replicatir requires you to already have one in hand though, which is a fairly significant limitation in some ways. If MCH worked in this manner it would be much slower than it is at present.
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That might be part of how the FFG internal is meta, but a much bigger part of it is probably how cards and strategies all get equal testing time rather than cards and strategies that will get a higher proportion of competitive play time. The deck was probably played once or twice. After that it was time to move on the the Aryabahta Tech Making News deck and test that card out, and determine that they should switch Aryabahta tech from draining 2 credits from the runner to draining 1 from the runner and gaining 1 for the corp, so they can rez other tracer ice later in the turn, because that’s more fun. And there’s real value in spreading the time equally that way, it optimizes for the experience of the casual consumer, which is the one that skips packs a pack or two when their experience hasn’t seem particularly improved by the packs lately, so is pretty financially important. But the tournament player, who buys every single pack, ignores cards that aren’t competitively useful, and is forced to experience certain powerful cards a larger proportion of time, needs different care. And he does have some financial importance if you can goof things up enough that he decides things are bad enough he should select a competitor’s tournament experience and stops buying packs altogether.
It would pretty nice if we got a separate representative from FFGOP showing up to tournaments and seeing how games are playing out and giving us a restricted/banlist based on that. Having Damon manage it is just giving him an additional job that is totally separate from his main job. He does have some insights as a designer that are somewhat helpful, yeah, like restricting Yog because he has some small codegates planned, and he’s seen how have an ICE getting invalidated can be lame, it’s a little bit nifty, but it’d be charitable to put the value added by such insights above ~5%.
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The biggest downside of not doing significant testing is that you end up with the community thinking they can do a better job at balance.
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To be fair I am pretty sure every community thinks that.
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Fair!
To the extent they start self-balancing the card pool for a tournament series, then.
FWIW, I haven’t lost to IG yet as Whizzard.
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But it’s such an EVIL deck!
Something MUST be done about it!
Or else the sky will fall!
And the seas will boil!
MWL the entire deck!
No, ban the entire deck!
No, BURN the entire deck!!!
(This is what I hear whenever I see this sort of complaint. I’ve played with, and against Asset-spam type decks. This is the first time they’ve been competitively viable. Outside of NEH Sponsorship, which got somewhat of a similar reaction, too. They’re not unbeatable, they just attack on a different axis that has been present ever since NEH existed, at the very least. Jinteki PE was technically the original asset spam, but it wasn’t quite good enough. IG makes it playable since the huge weakness of asset spam is that your deck is trashable; the runner can destroy literally everything about your board, as opposed to traditional Glacier that builds towers of ICE that require specific cards to destroy.
Everything that has been said about this deck can be twisted and said about Glacier, Kill, or Fast Advance. Playing ‘normal netrunner’ is how you lose the game. The big innovation was actually just Bio-Ethics. That card allows the Corp to actually Win the Game with just Assets. If that card didn’t exist, the Museum Asset Spam would be relegated to Gagarin, NEH, and IG Ronins.
I’m just really super tired of hearing all these complaints. I’m just going to actually play the game instead of whining that this card or that card is hurting my feelings.)
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I think you’re discounting Museum’s ability to protect agendas as the other big innovation. Bioethics (with IG) becomes a not terrible way to proactively do damage to runners, that’s a big new thing. Without it museum decks could keep their agendas well hidden, but they were still pretty hapless and it was just a long delay before they eventually lost. Bioethics without museum maintaining agenda density, and reshuffling those future perfects when you are lucky enough to find one but lost the psi game, would lose plenty because its an incredibly slow kill.
Its an OP combo. There have been OP cards in the past, Account Siphon was dominant, Fast Advance was dominant, Caprice was dominant, and I keep seeing the whats different this time? The competitive scene grew through all those other cards and its shunk during this one. That’s a big enough reason to do something.
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Let’s try to keep things civil now.
That’s a fair opinion.
I’ve played the game since inception. I remember the pre-Howard woes, and Siphon domination before any semblance of counters. I was hoping for a restricted/banned list as far back as just before/after Worlds 2013. However, it was never coming, esp. under Lukas’ watch. I love the man, and his designs, but his unwavering stance against a list was his greatest detriment. He continued to print silver bullets, instead, which in a game without a sideboard create their own issues.
I like the MWL. It’s just the first step needed, IMHO. I’d prefer restrictions, bans, varying tournament styles and types, a Core 2.0, faster rotation, etc. Let’s face the fact that there are tons of options vying for our time in this modern world, and people can get bored of a ‘stale’ product quickly and move on. More options, not less, are what I think is needed. Certain ‘unfun’ archetypes restrict the playspace, not expand it. See the preponderance of Whizz currently, as he’s the best to combat the gamut of Corps, esp. asset spammers.
We play a Living Card Game, whose meta changes all the time. Why can’t we be as malleable to change?
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I’ve played since inception, technically. I played it when just Core was out, but only bought into it when C&C came out, because I knew that the lack of agendas was a problem for variety in just the Core game. I remember pre-Howard, I remember Account Siphon only becoming a huge problem once SOT came out. (There were crazy people that played 3x Deja + 3x Siphon before, and that was obnoxious, but when they could add 3x SOT + 1x Levy, that’s when it became oppressive.)
Actually this was predicted back when he came out. He was relegated to binder fodder, with the caveat of ‘If Corps ever get assets that are worth playing, Whizzard will become very powerful.’ Remember, he used to be used 1-3 times a game if ever, trashing Adonis and SanSan. (And making the rare PAD Campaign player sad… Like me…)
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Its an OP combo. There have been OP cards in the past, Account Siphon was dominant, Fast Advance was dominant, Caprice was dominant, and I keep seeing the whats different this time? The competitive scene grew through all those other cards and its shunk during this one. That’s a big enough reason to do something.
Agreed. OP combos are pretty much always harmful to the game (any game!).
With a quickly evolving card pool and a strong player base, the game can overcome this on its own, and counter strategies or silver bullets will eventually phase the OP combos out…
However Netrunner doesn’t seem to be in such a strong position currently to have this luxury.
We need to be pro-active on this to grow the player base, rather than let it shrink, which is what is clearly happening right now based on the Regional attendance statistics.
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Everything that has been said about this deck can be twisted and said about Glacier, Kill, or Fast Advance.
The major difference is that for some reason, the Museum / MCH / Temple trinity got a huge amount if leeway from the designers. They are completely defying any standard metrics for influence costs, rez-trash costs, clicks, etc.
This was already discussed previously and in other threads, so I won’t be including the specific examples and comparisons here.
I assume that the designers wanted to kick start the asset decks by providing them strong cards.
That’s fair. But they went way over the top with that and they disrespected their own baselines on how cards should be costed.
That is probably one of the reasons why so many people are alienated to these decks. IG has just received a free first class ticket, while the rest of us need to earn and pay for our 2nd class…
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Insert stock quote about correlation here.
Given the Regional numbers from EU, I’m more inclined to feel it had to do with the weird schedule in the US, due to them changing their timetables. I saw a lot more people last year at Durham regionals who I don’t regard as ‘competitive’ players, and wondered why they were there. (Don’t worry, everyone on this forum belonged there. ;)) Having seen what happened this year, I’d bet that it had been so long since they had a Netrunner tournament that it drew more ‘casual’ players to give it another go. I know there were a few people who played in the Raleigh SC, that then just didn’t want to play another tournament so soon, and thus didn’t go. It was a space of a month, if that.
Also of note is that SC attendance in the US didn’t really suffer as far as I could tell?
This is really accurate, and it’s easy to identify why. Temple has about a 1-2 credit discount on rez, Museum has about a two-three credit advantage across the rez cost and the trash cost from what you’d expect. This is because the cards cost influence, or, without influence, cost some deckbuilding constraint that directly impacts how effective the card is. 2 neutral influence for a Temple or Museum is actually about what I’d expect to pay for the effect without deckbuilding restrictions.
The deckbuilding restrictions were a little too lenient. Museum’s restriction makes sense, making it harder to actually find the cards you need to win (You’ll note that setup time is IG’s issue.) Museum should’ve been 55 cards, if for no other reason than: “Now they can’t print a 50-card minimum Corp ID.” Temple is less useful because there’s ‘less’ cards that it can be used on with the ICE restriction, but it probably could’ve been 12 without much trouble, and 10 would have it being debatably useful. (IG would still play it since Jinteki doesn’t care so much.)
And as for MCH… It starts to look more accurate if those deckbuilding restrictions on the Alliance cards simply didn’t exist. If they just costed their influence, a 1-influence tutor makes more sense. The problem is that when you combine MCH+Museum, it becomes ridiculous. (Temple really isn’t. It’s good, but there’s better things to do with MCH for money than Temple.) Museum’s drawback in deckbuilding is entirely mitigated by MCH, provided you can find it, which is why you’ll see Tech Startup being run so you can find it. MCH, like Museum, is undercosted by about 2-3 credits across Rez/Trash, and probably 1 less influence than it should truly be.
The designers were pushing the power of Alliance, they wanted it to be meaningful. Of note is that it’s pretty unlikely we’ll see Alliance cards in the next Cycle given the themes, and we may never see Alliance again, which means this is as bad as MCH/Museum will ever get. You have to admit though, that if the trash costs were reduced and rez costs increased, influence increased, and deckbuilding restrictions tightened… These cards may never have left the binder. This is how far they have had to push assets to get them to be a viable deck archetype.
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IG didn’t really become degenerate until after SC season, with Bio Ethics Association. It is a huge factor in regionals attendance being so low in the US. No idea why regionals numbers have stayed high in Europe, but I doubt FFG is going to be ok with losing the US audience just because they kept Europe. It’s their home country, biggest market in the world, etc.
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For months and years I was on the “anti-panic” bandwagon. I too would gloss over the numerous posts demanding a certain card be banned or an archetype obliterated or I would make some comment reassuring everyone (or no one) that the sky wasn’t falling. Now I’m starting to see that may have been a mistake.
If at this point you don’t see the strong correlation between NPE related to numerous cards and archetypes proliferated in the last 6 months and dramatic decrease in interest and attendance at competitive Netrunner tournaments, you’re being willfully ignorant. This far into the game’s lifespan it would be reasonable to expect continued increase in growth. We’re not seeing diminished growth as compared with last year, we’re seeing dramatic LOSSES in attendance and interest. I mean holy shit.
I’m getting frustrated with the people frustrated with “doomsday” posts. Is it any shock that FFG hasn’t changed many of the policies or aspects of Organized Play that has annoyed the community for years? We spend half our time telling people with complaints to stop complaining. I watched some potentially harmful issues go on with the mindset “FFG has the game’s best interest in mind, so surely they’ll act in it’s best interests.” I feel like I was naive at best. The first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging there is one, and there is a serious fucking problem.
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Yep all that. My group has been playing a lot of faustless games. Netrunner is a much better game without it.
That’s great for you and all, but it definitely seems like a significant number of players have decided that they’re just going to actually not play the game. That sounds like a bad thing to me. Maybe it’s just my meta.
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If people didn’t love the game they wouldn’t be complaining. The problem card or two cards have transcended all levels of play and skill level. In the past problem cards had a skill level threshold you could master the new problem cards and archetypes seem to not have that aspect. Also the new problem cards have a damaging effect on not only game play but also seemingly on the social and community aspect of the game.
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MCH wouldn’t be half as bad without Museum. Weyland ICE wouldn’t be an eighth as bad without Faust.
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