ISTM that Assets are doing what ICE used to do: increase the amount it costs for the runner to do things. ICE creates a situation for the runner where you can’t afford to run through it (or you just get ETR’d if you try), and once the runner can no longer afford to pay for it, the corp starts winning. Then as we all know, D4V1D put a hard upper bound on the runner’s cost to get through high-strength ICE, Parasite put a low cost and a time limit on low-strength ICE, Faust put an alternate cost on midrange ICE, and the cutlery turned Faust and D4V1D into a one-time payment.
I see a trend that started all the way back when San San City Grid first came out: cards that sit rezzed on the table that are too dangerous for the runner to ignore but really hard to trash. Eve Campaign is another example, but they’re both balanced by their rez costs. I think Sundew was probably the first instance where they explicitly designed in this idea of “you have to deal with this or the game will get out of control”, but at (2 rez, 2 trash) it still needed something else (ICE, playing RP, or both) to tip the resource costs against the runner.
Then we started seeing cards with powerful effects and really lopsided rez/trash costs: Daily Business Show, Team Sponsorship, Turtlebacks and IT Department are all examples of this type. A few things happened here:
- The increased trash cost places a heavier demand on the runner’s economy, which somewhat balances the increased strength of runner engines,
- The economic cost to the runner reduces the corp’s reliance on ICE, and
- Cards like NBN: Near-Earth Hub reduced the corp’s click cost to play assets. A Security Testing Criminal would take 2 clicks to clear a card that cost the corp ½-a-click to play.
The trouble is that Anarch has Whizzard and all the breakfaust club pieces, so corps need to tax even harder to keep up the asset game. Enter Museum of History and Mumbad City Hall.
I think ICE destruction is a good thing to have in the game, but its current form was too easy for the design team to fall into given the templates set up in the core set (Parasite and Datasucker). The strength of modern ICE destruction shuts out a lot of the interesting things you can do with derezzing (e.g, Emergency Shutdown, Forged Activation Orders), a design space restriction that disproportionately hurts Criminal. Let’s take a quick detour into tagging: because SEA Source and Scorched Earth were both in the core set, the maximum game state change a single tag can inflict is “you lose”. A healthier design space for tagging would be something like:
- 1–3 tags: heavy taxing, light meat damage
- 4+ tags: you’re at risk of insta-losing.
Scorched Earth constrains tagging just as ICE destruction constrains derez. The real design challenge here is that the core set versions of both tagging and ICE destruction were quite reasonable, but they have made a hard corner for FFG to design themselves out of. (Similarly, Blackmail has constrained the design space for bad publicity.)
Back to ICE and assets. Assets have become better than ICE at the only thing ICE was designed for:
- ICE is only a tax (strong AI makes facechecking less scary); assets generate corp benefits and tax
- ICE taxes a few credits (or a couple of cards); assets tax clicks and credits.
What does this mean for ICE? I think ICE are cards that hurt the most when considering deck slots. For ICE to be relevant in the current game (especially against the perverse incentive of Mumba Temple), it has to become more versatile:
- ICE that provides economy has existed for a while (Caduceus, Pop-Up Window, Special Offer). Of those, one is easily broken, one is easily Parasited and one self-treashes.
- ICE that is also a trap is new (Archangel), and ICE that has a trash cost is a new experiment (Chrysalis). This is encouraging but still has the fundamental problem that the runner can just break it.
- ICE that always does something, even if broken. We’ve seen some amount of this with on-encounter effects (and good counter-play in the form of bypass), but it’s part of NBN’s faction identity. That could still be a thing but it’s probably worth broadening so that other factions get a taste too.
- ICE that does something even if it’s not run. ICE that accumulates power tokens at start of turn (to a limit)? (God knows that Helium-3 Deposit needs more love.) ICE with paid abilities? There are a couple (Data Raven, Mamba), but there should be more.
- This will increase the incentive to use ICE destruction, which should probably be nerfed anyway.
In conclusion, I think that FFG should do the following to make ICE great again:
- Relax the hard cap on ICE taxation potential by doing something about D4V1D,
- Make ICE competitive with assets on the deckslot level by adding features beyond subs-that-never-fire, and
- Neuter ICE destruction to make ICE a better investment and open up the design space for derez.