With JH cycling out, ABT’s risk increases significantly, since you lose your main clickless means of rescuing any agendas it tosses before the runner can get them. I’d consider it less powerful because of that.
Also, I think having a big gamble card like that in the core set is a good thing. Some players may like the careful play of, say, a Project Vitruvius you can overadvance to recover spent cards, but others like the thrill of taking that chance, and it’s important to give new players that opportunity.
A reprint of Jackson at a neutral with 1 influence would be ideal for Core set – he is vital to the game and simultaneously hitting all of yellow for 3 influence would be a good way to rebalance the factions at the moment.
So, Weyland is the only faction that lacks a non-rotating 3/2. If there was going to be a new core, giving Weyland a permanent 3/2 and making NBN/HB/Weyland all have a “3/2 that has to be over-advanced for a bonus” would make sense in terms of achieving a better balance of agendas across factions. Given that the only 3/2 we’ve seen since H&P is Merger, it seems pretty clear to me that the designers recognize 3/2’s as being extremely powerful, and it would seem equally silly to remove them entirely (killing FA) or to deny a single faction access to any of them.
I guess that Jinteki is the odd one out with a non-rotating, non-over-advanceable 3/2.
If they make any changes along those lines in a new core, I suspect it will include making other factions’ 3/2s one-per-deck. Philotic and AstroScript both have that restriction now, and if Merger is the new baseline for 3/2s (1 influence and a serious downside), I doubt we’ll see anything like the Projects become evergreen.
Maybe HB will get an exception so there can still be a FA faction, but even then I’d still expect a downside rather than a bonus if it’s not a one-of.
I’d like to see a version of Director Haas’ Pet Project that’s a one-per-deck 3/2. Its a very HB-ish effect, got extremely cool flavor, and adds a lot of tempo for the corp. Great card, can’t play it as a 3/1.
How do you feel like they have sent her off though? last we saw she was sad about her parents fighting. are you assuming she gives up running? what if she tried to use her hacking knowledge to set things right again
While it is less of a final send off then Whizzard getting boomed, it did seem like she was bowing out given that she was one of the runners directly involved in the 23 seconds incident.
I’m not necessarily saying she won’t come back in some fashion and I wouldn’t entirely be surprised to see her as a future runner at some point. But I don’t see a direct reprint happening. But this is entirely my opinion.
If you were going to replace IDs from the core I could get behind Kate for CT, and I think your other priorities would be ETF and Noise. ETF because it’s so strong that almost no other HB ID is able to compete. Noise because he’s a bit too weird for a core ID. He’s almost like his own mini-faction, and he warps the design space for virus cards just by existing. You’d need to pick other IDs that are relatively straightforward and don’t require a bunch of support cards, which makes things harder (and also which aren’t from big boxes if the idea is to avoid duplication in cards that won’t rotate). But ETF->The Foundry and Noise->Reina or Null might work.
Who knows if it’ll ever happen, but it’s fun to speculate!
I would rather they release a tournament pack which completes the core set. Forcing people that wants to be in a tournament to buy 1 or 2 extra core sets is an incredibly short-sighted strategy.
All the folks who are theorizing should consider support cards and consoles. Seems more likely in the case of CT—RIP Toolbox—and very unlikely in the case of Reina who has all those clunky breakers.
I still remain dubious about this whole thing. Even if they did release another core set which handled certain problematic cards/mechanics, why wouldn’t they just creafe 3 new runners that they can balance however the hell they want given the last four years of the card pool and metagame… Seems like a smarter and more self-contained idea.