And the sad part is, most of the cards in the deck are actually interesting by themselves! Like, if Museum and MCH didn’t exist, and Bio-Ethics was just another tool for Jinteki kill decks to punish runners for not checking remotes (and risking Psychic Field or Snare!), a la pre-Mumbad Hinkes IG, it’d be really cool. Even MCH would be cool if it wasn’t automatic click compression - if it just found cards, rather than finding and playing them at once. What annoys me personally isn’t the deck’s relative power, or its grinding win condition, but the fact that it takes a lot of cards that would be additional interesting tools in “traditional” decks, and instead runs them in the least interesting manner, which also amounts to the best manner because FFG made a mistake in printing Museum and MCH the way they are.
The sad part is, I think Museum could be okay without MCH. It’s weird to think of “the good days” back before Business First, but at least then the deck was only somewhat consistent and debilitating (not to mention that the Jinteki decks played like, well, Jinteki decks). But MCH, unlike Museum, is almost impervious to what the MTG in me would call “power errata”, i.e. making it unique. And at only one influence, it’s not easily MWLed too. The more I think about the card, the more I feel like it can’t be treated, only cured - give it a big dose of Banitol.
Yeah, this is the bit that baffles me. The numbers on Localised Product Line show that FFG clearly appreciate the power of strong tutor effects, but this one is outrageously efficient and 1 inf because…? I don’t think anyone would be upset if it had been 4 or 5 inf - and the Gagarin Museum spam deck, while strong, is not nearly so miserable to play against (or with!) as the IG version.
Because they don’t rate any of the Alliance cards. It’s the only explanation.
Most of the “search out something from R&D” assets are trash-to-use. Lily Lockwell doesn’t trash, but spends a tag each search, and takes two more clicks than Mumbad City Hall (click to draw, click to play/install). So the Alliance subtype is two clicks and a tag more restrictive than the Operation type by that logic.
The other one is Levy University. By the same logic, searching for the subtype Alliance is worse than searching for the type ICE by one credit and a click.
We know how much play those two cards see. If the comparative utility of searching for the different subtypes/types as given by all of these card effects was a true assessment, Mumbad City Hall would be seeing the same amount of play…
A ton of the Alliance cards are well off the power curve. It’s really strange; I’d have expected them to be weaker because of the ease of getting them influence free by meeting deck-building restrictions. At their natural influence they remain strong (of course) but the influence hit really is meaningful.
We haven’t seen powerful MCH decks that don’t use Museum yet. If you have to choose to ban one of them, regardless of whether MCH has more raw power, it’s better for game length and NPEs to ban MoH. MCH actually thins R&D. MoH provides all the most plausible infinite game length games (Slumsing each proactive damage source against a deck that can’t score) of Netrunner and the vast majority of the extremely long games too.
I suppose you could argue for banning Museum -and- MCH if you are just really that sick of asset spam and want to be extra heavy handed, but I don’t really see it. Without Museum archetypes available, the single most powerful thing you can do with MCH is fetch Mumba Temples and install them. But then with Mumba Temple also being a 1/3 that’s pretty much a must trash and MCH’s power being referential onto Mumba Temple’s, it seems illogical not to ban Mumba Temple itself.
The second most powerful thing you can do with MCH is go fetch Consulting Visit for meat damage combos. But if there’s anything available in the card pool, it’s specific answers to meat damage combos. Generally when meat damage combos get a new more powerful accessory we don’t complain and just realize we do always have the option of playing double plascrete anarch if we don’t want to lose to it (like with 24/7’s surge in haarp kill popularity, and the Worlds Runner meta adjusting to it very well).
Grabbing Salem’s ties into that, you’re kind of marrying the meat damage strategy answers that are already available.
Summary, out of 1/3s, the banworthiness goes MoH>>>>>>>>>>>>>Mumba Temple>MCH. Yes there’s some very powerful alliance cards, but they each tie you to some specific strategy or other with attackable components.
Museum of History provides a virtually new kind of effect and enables a new way of playing the game. Mumba Temple and Mumbad City Hall take existing effects and do them arguably much more efficiently than previous cards for a negligible downside.
If you are going to analyse the design strategy, then if you are the sort of person who likes your LCGs torpid and worry about the introduction of any new ideas, you ought to be worried about Museum of History. If you like your LCGs to be alive, but worry about power creep, you ought to be more worried about Mumba Temple and Mumbad City Hall.
I like to compare ‘Mumba Temple’ to ‘The Root’ as they have similar effects for the purpose of how IG uses Mumba Temple. So 6 rez 4 trash 3 reoccurring for ‘The Root’ vs 1 rez 3 trash 2 reoccurring for ‘Mumba Temple’ seems, well pretty bonkers by comparison. Lets not forget that with MCH MT is now tutorable. MCH is the epitome of busted design. Its so brokenly efficient. Tutors in most games come with high cost to counter their powerful effect. Allowing a tutor to also have click efficiency on top its already powerful effect with no additional cost is insane.
Now compare it to Dedicated Server: it’s even worse!
If you play it in a faction that isn’t Jinteki, it’s the only example I can think of a card that’s strictly worse than another. Not just worse for all practical purposes outside of some weird combo, but definitively worse under all situations.
I TO’d Regionals over this past weekend and every single game that I watched and walked past made me wish I was playing. We had 25 players (same as last year), and after my deck list checks I was surprised to discover 1 deck with Museum of History, no decks with Mumbad City Hall, and no IG decks. 50% of corp decks were Jinteki (mostly Palana) and the predominant runners were Hayley and Whizzard (no surprise, they’re just good). When I’ve got more time I’m going to write up a ‘regionals’ report from a TO’s perspective and discuss why I fucking love the players in my area. Grats to @snake3yes for the win.
For pretty much all of 2016 I have had a hard time taking the online community for Netrunner seriously. The sheer number of posts complaining about the current meta are growing tiresome because it’s not something that my area is experiencing. Everyone knows the problem cards, and they don’t want to play them because they tried it once or twice at casual night and didn’t have fun. So they stopped playing it. It’s as simple as that. I’m sure that the MWL needs to be revisited from time to time, but surely I can’t be the only one that’s sick to death of it dominating discussion of the game.
Sorry popeye, I am the master of obscure esoteric card knowledge and corner cases, and I am going to find a weird combo where Dedicated Server is better:
You’re playing an Asset Spam Political Dealings deck that goes broke every turn, then trickles its econ back up from campaigns, making it able to score agendas if they are topdecked. You cleverly included 2 Dedicated Server in your deck instead of 2 Mumba Temple. When Silhouette with Blackguard Inside Jobs HQ and exposes your extra copy of the unique Political Dealings, and extra copy that’s protected by weaker ICE, you just smile and point at your credit pool: You can’t afford to rez it, and Dedicated Server only rezzes ICE like the ICE you have on R&D. So you don’t have to rez it, and trash the well protected Dealings, like you would be forced to with Mumba Temples up.
With Consulting Visit, you can now search for singleton operations with Mumbad City Hall (which can be a Tech Startup target for seeing it even quicker), letting you save influence, deckspace and be able to much more reliably use strong out-of-faction operations. I can see that becoming strong in some decks.
Sorry, but this is a pretty poor argument. Just because your meta chooses not to play IG doesn’t mean there aren’t other areas where this is a real issue nor does it take away from the fact that these cards and this deck is in need of serious revisiting. That would be like claiming homelessness isn’t an issue just because my area doesn’t have homeless people.
