Damon's six month rule

If you want to take the cynical view, any cards that went on the MWL or were otherwise nerfed in less than six months, would be tantamount to the designers saying “we got this card horribly wrong and need to fix it now, we didn’t do a very good job”, so that’s unlikely to happen.

A more positive view is that as with anything added to a game, there’s a certain settling in period needed, to see if the game self-regulates. A pause between Regionals and the next big events to say “what did thinks look like in the competitive environment?” and take stock is entirely sensible. I’m sure there are cards like Faust or Museum that may well end up on the list, but it makes sense to have a few weeks of a highly competitive tournament environment to shake out if and what needs to be done to change things for the future.

Scanning down Store Champ results we see a metric funk tonne of Anarch IDs, so that would indicate something could be done there, on the Corp side it’s a little more diverse, but there are still clear winners in familiar NEH territory. That could lead to more yellow restrictions - but remember that most FFG word on the matter is they’d rather nudge things a little bit and see what happens than make bigger changes all at once.

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I think you are severely underestimating the restrictions which PPVP puts on the deck. To use it effectively, you need at least 15-17 non-zero cost events. Most Shapers don’t run nearly as much these days. So many of the events are not “already there”. They were included exactly because of PPVP (e.g. Dirty Laundry, Quality Time, etc).

Also realistically, you really need those Lucky Finds to turn PPVP into really viable econ engine. I was testing it a lot after MWL, and losing those LFs hurts the deck a LOT. There is a reason why everybody switched to ProCos…

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The big difference is that the player has total control over the benefit of PPvP (cards). The corp holds the majority of control over cards that add link (traces).

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The thing about Mumba Temple is that it already contains a much more elegant, interesting method of restricting deck-building without resorting to the MWL. The problem is that the numbers might have been wrong: 12 or even 10 ICE would have made for much more of a conundrum in deciding whether to accept the deck-building restriction or to pay the influence cost. By the same token, Museum of History might have made for more interesting choices at 59 cards rather than 54.

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15 ice was just such a strange limitation. The winning 2015 foodcoats deck, a deck you could reasonably argue relied on ice the most, only had 17 pieces. I would bet most decks don’t use much more than 15 anyways.

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Account Siphon is like Astroscript. They are staples of their factions that other factions have little to no access to. I don’t feel like it is a problem.

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Oh god please no. On a related note, one of our locals brought a 60 + card asset spam etf deck to casuals a while back and it was the worst thing ever. Bad in that it took forever and that I stopped caring after unable to get through tour guide and caprice with my sad Geist deck. Casuals right?

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I’m a player, and I would like cards to be printed that have heavy game/meta warping effects. I find it far more interesting than releasing binder fodder, or cards that are very similar in style to previous cards but with slightly different numbers.

Maybe I’m just an unusual player? I also don’t mind strong cards warping the meta for a year before being put on the MWL either.

100% agree on how PPVP works though.

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I think the comparison between PPVP and UWC is kind of a false equivalence.

PPVP helps you burst creds beyond common thresholds to accelerate your game and it warps those credit thresholds.

UWC requires another card, (unless you play Sunny) in order to have anywhere near the level of efficiency that PPVP has. Without it, it is completely dead.

If PPVP also required a second card to be playable, it would be a fair comparison.

Regardless, I think PPVP is fine. Its going to rotate eventually anyway, I say if there is going to be a 6 month rule anyway, give PPVP one last moment to shine before it’s sun sets.

I don’t think it’s fair to only look at PPvP as a credit drip per turn with event deckbuilding restrictions. Some events are costed higher either to make it more difficult to make a lot of money at once (Sure Gamble), or to increase the risk of play involved (High Stakes Job). PPvP money is essentially money that the Corp can’t tax, and since it’s hardware, it’s significantly harder for the Corp to turn it off. And at only a 2 credit install, it’s much less of an investment than a Liberated Accounts for example. For a Corp that focuses on taxing out the runner, that makes PPvP money much more valuable than real money because you can, say, play a Sure Gamble from 2 creds and go to 9 instantly. Ask any Spark player how big of a deal it is to rez that first campaign and drop the runner out of Gamble range. Stuff like this is a big deal in balancing event costs and the “drip credit per turn” argument doesn’t factor that in at all.

PPVP requires a second card each turn. UWC requires a second card only once. They both have upsides. It’s just that the corp meta was largely quite fast at the time of the PPVP’s reign. If Glacier was the order of the day, Sunny or some other UWC deck would be fine, maybe better.

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Yeah I cast the player base as a monolith, when the reality is we have tons of different desires and wants from cards. However as a whole players tend to be more concerned with interesting and diverse play experience.

I for example thought dlr was a sweet deck that was really interesting. Ig is kinda interesting and is mainly problematic in that there is basically one way to fight it (whizzard).

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Spark is basically the only tiny exception to this, but there’s no difference between dripping up to 3 with underworld contacts and then lucky finding vs using prepaid to lucky find.

In 99.999% of cases they are functionly equivalent. The cases were they’re different are edge cases and are tangential to the main function of both cards.

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But they are cards you arguably would be playing anyway…?

While you probably wouldn’t be slotting + link in other decks for anything else with UWC?

So the install cost + click cost of the card is a huge draw back.

UWC still doesn’t really have a solid slot in a tier 1 archetype. I think that alone is indicative of the cards relative power level compared to PPVP.

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In related news…

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Some of them are cards you would be playing anyway. Like people said, earlier, you’re not playing 3x DL and Lucky Find in a non-ppvp shaper deck. You’re not playing 2-3x SoT, or Maker’s eye over RDI. Old Kate decks were running some 20-22 events. Shapers now run 3-9 events, so I really don’t think this is true.

And UWC not having a top tier archetype isn’t UWCs fault - it’s NEH’s fault. If NEH weren’t a constant in the meta, you’d see a lot more slower runner decks. Sunny durdle decks can crush most slower decks, but no one plays them, because of the threat of NEH.

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I’m not sure Museum / MCH is craving enough for influence for any 6 inf hit to hurt.
MWLing Faust is stupid since dozens of cards in each faction exist to hurt it.

NEH doesn’t need to be hit any harder, outside errata to 15 influence. NBN is paying for their FA tools and it is fair. NBN FA is also a fair deck, and healthy for the meta. It keeps incredibly oppressive and slow Runner strategies in check, specifically at the competitive level.

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I like that you guys have different rules than ffg. Now you just need to start rotation earlier… :slight_smile:

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Beginning of your turn with 3x UWC, you have 2 creds which puts you up to 5. You Dirty Laundry and faceplant a Tollbooth, losing all your money. Now you can’t Lucky Find. Now with PPvP, same scenario, only now you can Lucky Find after the Tollbooth and gain tempo back.

Let’s say you facecheck a Hunter and the Corp rezzes a Keagan Lane. He boosts to your max money amount. So, you can spend all your money and avoid the tag or take the tag and lose a breaker. In a UWC deck, you spend all your money and now you have to click for creds to get back into Lucky Find range. With a PPvP deck, you pay all your money to dodge the tag, and still have the ability to Lucky Find, gaining your tempo back.

There are two non-Spark examples which show that the two cards are not functionally equivalent because the Corp is able to leverage a tax against the runner to keep him/her out of bounce back range. I’m sure these aren’t the only examples, but they aren’t edge cases at least.