Faust was, in my opinion, a massive design error. It fundamentally changed the basic economy of the game, and flirts with decent balance being practically impossible because it flies in the face of all the fundamentals of Netrunner. Make money, buy ICE/breakers, score/run. Now I can eschew income in favor of cards, hugely increasing the relative strength and weakness of all draw, and I for one, think that sucks. The ‘assetspam’ meta is, imo, an attempt to correct the balance back towards actual credits, but all that did was eschew the fundamentals even further. From the bleachers, there’s some serious problems that need solving. And I don’t see how without the ban-stick.
8 Likes
Does this really belong in the same list as Foodcoats, Andysucker or Prepaid Kate, though?
3 Likes
no it doesn’t - the dominant corp deck right now is NEH FA and its many variants
9 Likes
Well Mumbad would have been off to the printers before feedback from SanSan pack 4, so I dunno if asset spam could have been designed with an overpowered Faust in mind.
Besides asset spam on its own isn’t even a counter to Faust because Faust saves you credits rather than demanding it - operation combos, defensive upgrades, and damage strategies are the counters to Faust.
Don’t misunderstand. I’m saying the fundamental economy of running was credits, for both sides, now it isn’t for many runners anymore. That’s flirting with disaster IMO, it breaks the basic game design. I would be very surprised if some designer hadn’t said, well how can we make runners spend money again, if we’re going to do this. It’s the first question I asked myself when running Leela that had 3 armitage codebusting, 3 Dealers, no other economy, and winning 80% with her. Now I can’t play that build because I can’t trash anything with it.
1 Like
The Netrunner of BioLock is a kind of Netrunner plenty of people have been playing or have played in the past, it’s just that Museum has given the lategame strength of horizontal play more time to flex its muscle. You usually had to either get the board state up and running fast or have a win condition that you could pull out quickly (meaning FA or big kill shots). BioLock is just another way that’s been opened up with new corp recursion tools.
“Normal Netrunner” doesn’t have to mean get money, build servers score agendas. Even when that’s a good summation of the corp’s gameplan, the strongest decks have often included tools to circumvent a straightfoward econ battle. RP had Caprice, Nisei counters, and TFP to make playing real netrunner a losing prospect for many runners. You may also be forgetting that Andysucker was a dominate force in no small part because of Datasucker+Parasite invalidating many of the corp’s ice choices. Andysucker would often struggle playing “real netrunner” if they couldn’t adequately deny the corp. Dumblefork might turn the ice destruction up to 11, but you still have to manage your economy and be judicious in your runs or strong players are going to dunk on you.
Asset spam plays into the same dynamics you’re calling real netrunner, balancing the runner’s rig building with keeping the corp from going out of control and getting accesses. It just does it in a different way that different corps are able to leverage better than others.
6 Likes
Andy didn’t tend to run many Parasites (there was always tension between it and RDI). Her biggest and best Parasite was called Yog.0.
4 Likes
Yes, but these were a direct response to a spiraling runner economy that the corp had no chance of countering. And by and large, still can’t. Economy management and fundamentals have been forgotten in a quest for ‘alt’ gameplay and Faust is the poster child of that slippery slope, followed by Museums and the card that fetches all of them installed at will.
4 Likes
@Dragar Yea, Yog.0 was a big part of the rig. I just remember Worlds 2014 having a lot of discussion about Parasite vs. R&D multiaccess to give Andysucker an edge over glacier vs. Fastrobiotics. Yog.0 also fits the general tenor of my message (since it invalidates an entire subtype of ice) that even when we were playing “normal netrunner” we weren’t playing normal netrunner.
@Badeesh I agree with you that those tools were important for countering a dynamic in the runner’s game, but that’s the point in what I’m saying. The notion that there is a “normal netrunner” that has only recently been ruined by BioLock and Dumblefork seems to ignore that many tools have been in circulation that made normal netrunner a losing prospect for many different deck types. I don’t begrudge anyone their preferred style of gameplay, and I understand people feeling like Museum of History makes the game boring for them. I would just hope people would have a little more perspective when it came to these “alt” gameplay mechanics, because they’ve been around since well before Mumbad cycle, and before Faust.
Fair enough. But I’m not saying ‘normal’ netrunner. I’m saying fundamental netrunner. I loved playing like, Cambridge PE, for example, with and against. Because it was interactive and fun. It leveraged a standard economy that cards were ‘health’. This idea led to one of the most thrilling world’s finals games we’ve seen. The fundamental economy of the game has been mismanaged over time with poor design. And yeah totally, it wasn’t an issue before, and you could do some sneaky asset combo builds, but when it’s the overwhelming majority of the meta, something has gone wrong imo. Now cards are more important than credits for runners, and assets are more important than ice. It’s fundamentally different to the game I started playing, and that seems, wrong. I do think it’s boring, but I’m trying to vocalise why.
I always loved, oooh, what did he drop in that server. What’s that outermost ice? Can I run it?
Now I’m like. Get cards to run centrals, save money, blow up asset, blow up asset. There’s no element of surprise, bluffing, guesswork, topdecking a code gate you know you can score behind, bla bla. That is all gone in these decks. These new decks turn Netrunner into maths and work.
/endsrant
7 Likes
I appreciate you articulating your frustrations and I don’t want to minimize your (and many others’) feeling on this. My personal preference is for a netrunner where spectacular plays are punctuation to games of intense management, and I think there’s still plenty of that available even in a world where Museum of History exists.
I was able to cast some very well-played asset spam games this last regional in Utah where 3 of the top 4 were all playing Temple NEH. None of them were on Museum, but Team Sponsorship provided more than enough recursion. And all 3 of these players were also playing some version of Val (2 were on Apoc, 1 was Good Stuff). And those were great games that came down to a lot of feisty plays on both sides. I also had the pleasure of playing against the winner earlier in the last round of swiss where I was the only IG player in the field (I was playing BioLock). And that was also an intense game. The game came down to a lot of luck and the card knowledge to know how to best use it. Without a lucky Lotus Field top deck I was liable to get creamed by a turn 1 Keyhole. When I saw a Queen’s Gambit on 2 different Injects I knew to rez all my cards to deny them the econ they could use to trash the 1 Hostile Infrastructure standing between me and an Apoc boardwipe.
The game has been changing, and I’m sorry it’s changing in a direction that you don’t enjoy. I want everyone to enjoy netrunner because I think it’s still a fantastic game. I think there are still many pleasures to be found even in a meta that has many abusive decks.
7 Likes
Nah, it’s all good. I haven’t collected any part of the new cycle and neither has my playgroup so we have ‘closed’ meta that is still lots of fun. I came second in store champs as well with old school ideas.
You can have intense and consequential games against asset spam…if you not only play the Runner faction with the best trashing mechanics but you play an ID from that faction with a built in way to mitigate asset costs.
PE was harsh, but it put all runners on pretty much the same level against it.
NEH FA is harsh, but every faction has lines of both deckbuilding and play against it.
BioLock and other Museum Decks are harsh, and you have to play one of a handful of anarch IDs or put a huge chunk of influence towards even being able scratch it. If you like those anarchs thats fine (I certainly do) but I’ve been seeing people who favour shaper and criminals getting very disillusioned and leaving.
Kill decks and Fast Advance can be terrifying, but they still need to draw their pieces. You can include counter cards and have a chance to get them before the Corp gets theirs. 60+% of BioLock decks are nasty things with trash costs, 50% of Temple NEH are nasty things with trash costs, etc. To fight that you want an effect turn 1 and every turn thereafter, so you can’t use counter cards but instead have to go for counter Identities…all of which are anarch.
4 Likes
I feel like if we didn’t have Whizzard, we’d be getting totally wrecked by the corps, but we’d at least have fun doing it. We wouldn’t trash the Mumba/Mumba/DBS because we can’t, we’d just try to guess whether the corp chose to DBS an Astro into hand or not and run the free-to-rez ICE judiciously to get as many of our random accesses as we can, probably something far short of the benchmark 18 (16? whatever it is) before we lose. We wouldn’t take turns playing Employee Strikes over Cerebral Statics against IG and trashing stuff with every other click, we’d agonize over whether to Amped Up for just one more Medium run before the net damage lock became even stiffer and either win right there or blow ourselves up.
I suspect in playtesting that powerful cards were frequently reused in the test decks, but the same philosophy wasn’t applied to IDs, which had an unforeseen interaction with Whizzard where the new cards create matchups that feel like lawnmower versus lawn, landscaping unleashed. Playing Kate against the new NEH builds feels fine, you can’t trash any of their crap now, you couldn’t trash any of their crap before either, the ice they can rez off Mumba temple instead of a PAD is a smidge more unfair but the interaction is much the same. The intended design for a deck like Gagarin or Brewery (brewery instead of IG because, again, I think disproportionate ID variety got used to reflect a perception that a lot of players will play their favorite ID even if it’s not the most powerful, more so than they will pass up a powerful card), it’s not nearly as bad either. You can trash those “not allowed to be iced” assets to keep them honest and for tempo, and if Gagarin gets to infinite money on more honest assets like Pad Campaign and Indian Union Stock Exchange you can just trash the Mumbad Construction Co. In the Brewery or PE, bioethics is a source of burst damage that punishes the runner for making poor reads instead of an unassailable wincon.
Just my speculation, what with Damon saying he frequently plays Cybernetics Division because it’s his favorite.
2 Likes
The only deck I lost to the whole day was a Ken
Tenma deck. Criminals can have a good match up against asset spam decks,
just not a lot of the criminal decks that came into vogue once Clot
dropped and scared away a lot of the NEH decks. Now that those decks are
coming back there’s an opportunity for different runners. Personally
Criminal is my favorite faction, and the meta right now isn’t as bad for
Criminal as RP Glaciers and Foodcoats made it. Leela has a bad time
against BioLock, but Andy and Ken can have an advantageous match up, and
those games are fun.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, playing Whizzard or Val is a great head start on
BioLock or Temple NEH. But I think people are overreacting to BioLock
specifically and asset spam in general. I’m also not trying to tell you
to have fun with something you find unfun. I think some of the attitudes
people have about how the game should be played get in the way of them
enjoying the game for what it is.
3 Likes
Every month or two I watch a couple netrunner games with strong players. (Dan D’argenio, etc).
Almost every time I do this, the game I watch continues to make me not want to play Netrunner right now. For a while it was things like Val DLR, and more recently its Industrial Genomics.
I watch the game, and I think ‘that is not a netrunner meta I want to play in’, and I go back to thinking about Thrones, or Through the Ages, or Hearthstone, or whatever else is interesting at the time.
To me there is one thing that Netrunner needs to be about, above all else: The runner running, the runner encountering interesting Ice, and the Ice sometimes working and having an interesting effect on the runner that throws a wrench in their plans. The effect could be trashing a program, or damage, or tags, or economic damage, or whatever. Just as long as the game feels like you are playing Shadowrun, and you are venturing into the net, and you can never be sure that something terrible isnt going to happen to you.
The very best games, the most fun and exciting of all, are the games in which a program trash effect manages to kill a runner’s key breaker, and then the runner has to try to continue on and win anyway, with a mangled and unusual rig. And they somehow pull it off. That is the BEST.
The key elements that need to be present is that the corp needs to feel under pressure, that their servers are not completely safe and that the runner could get in and possibly steal agendas. And the runner must also not feel safe, must be under pressure, knowing that the run they are taking is a risk, and might blow up on them in a variety of ways.
Netrunner is about THE RUN. Its about the run being exciting, and having a wide variety of potential outcomes, some of which result in one or even both players suffering some terrible mishap! Nothing is better than a result where the runner managed to get in and steal that agenda and is now close to a win, but in the process they ran into Ichi and lost their only Corroder. Both players are now on the brink.
Any time when the game is not about the runner encountering Ice, and trying to get card accesses, the game is not as interesting.
A lot of the ‘alternate strategies’ have the downside that they result in one of two things: Either they are not competitive, in which case you try them once, and it was interesting for a bit, and then you never play it again, or it actually is competitive, which is even worse because now the entire game is warped around this deck that no longer ‘plays Netrunner’, and instead does something different, where the game hinges around certain cards or silver bullets.
Original Netrunner also went off the rails as card supply increased (or if you gained access to many copies of certain ‘rare’ cards, and were able to build decks as a resulted that were never intended to be possible. Core set ANR was amazing (even if Weyland and HB were much more viable than Jinteki/NBN at first), and the game stayed great for a while after release, as cards slowly came out. But eventually the expanded card pool inevitably causes the game to jump the shark, and veer away from ‘balanced’ netrunner where things are interesting and both players are frequently in danger, into very extreme directions that many people will not find as fun.
I think the only solution is to maintain a ‘standard’ format with only recent cards + core (as well as updating the core set over time, because sometimes problem cards can be in the core), and restricting or banning cards if needed. All CCGs/LCGs seem to need this, not just Netrunner. It is not possible for designers to maintain balance while printing interesting cards, over a long period of time. Its just impossible, and no designer should be expected to do this.
Hearthstone is in a great place right now, I’ll be playing it some now, even if its not as complex or deep as Netrunner. They just rotated out cards and released a new set, and the meta is wide open and interesting again. (Wide open metas are awesome!)
Sometimes taking away cards can be as good or better for making a game fresh as adding new ones. I certainly think it would be for Netrunner.
35 Likes
Definitely agree with this post. You put my thoughts into words. Except for the Hearthstone thing. Hearthstone is too simplistic.
2 Likes
Yeah, but I find it fun for a time after a new expansion.
1 Like
Totally agreed. It’s why I love no-recursion Criminal. There’s nothing better than scoring an early 5 points, losing the last copy of one of your 3 breakers, and then having to figure out how to use a femme or an inside job to grab that last 2 points.
3 Likes