Would it be incorrect to assume then that your grievance with DLR and the IG bioethics decks lie more in the fact that the that player can eventually stop interacting with their opponent and win?
I actually enjoy playing as DLR and against it, I’m referring to general popularity among the populace.
The “mill 5” phase is really short and I doubt that’s actually what makes people consider DLR and negative player experience. I’m not sure which deviation from traditional gameplay is the most significant one, I just am pretty sure it’s quite different from how any core set ID plays against any other core set ID and it’s rather unpopular
That’s an interesting way of looking at it. The runner has efficient “removal” for the ice but not for the assets. By playing less ice the corps also turn the cards in the runner deck that do deal with ice into dead cards leading to less interaction between the two sides. I wonder if the designers considered there is a significant tax on building the board vertically but no tax on building horizontally when factoring trash costs on this wave of assets.
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Wonder if they’d ever consider adding in the current vertical tax structure to the horizontal.
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In my mind it’s fine to have bad prison archetypes but it’s really problematic for the game when they are a legit tier 1. That burned me out of another FFG LCG, Warhammer: Invasion. They ended up “errata-ing” (read: effectively banning) the key card (Bolt Thrower), but not for a long time after I pointed out that it was a problem. Not because it was too good but because the play experience was so negative. For a competitive player, playing like a hundred games vs prison to figure out the best lines, tech, etc is just really unpleasant.
MoH seems like the lead suspect to me in terms of NPE and I think the best fix is just to ban it. Not because it’s too good, but because the games you get are worse than if it just didn’t exist (notably: shuffling every turn, moving inevitability to corp). I don’t think making it unique would help much.
Yes, you can get around MoH archetypes via silver bullets like Archives Interface but I feel strongly that very narrow answers like that (or Plascrete, FWIW) again make for NPEs and an overall worse game. You get a choice of drawing cards that are effectively blank in most matchups or take the pairing gamble that you happen to not play against the “bullet target” deck.
Without MoH, Noise with all the Imps would be a strong suppressive force on the horizontal prison decks and I don’t think they would be tier 1 any more.
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It could be interesting to make a resource that makes it cost 1 for a corp to create a new server but that would seriously hurt and PE shell game deck.
I think there are a lot of cards you could make that would help, but the trouble is with printing answers is that the lead time is so long. Unless it’s literally already printed and sitting on a boat it isn’t happening for a really long time.
edit: on @Remorhaz 's point that there isn’t efficient removal for assets, there are a bunch. Notably: Imp, Whizzard, Scrubber and Paricia, roughly in that order.
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Of which only Imp (out of a bog-standard Noise deck with aesops and megadraw/deja vu) and Whizzard are really efficient 
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[quote=“Clamatius, post:65, topic:7300”]
In my mind it’s fine to have bad prison archetypes but it’s really problematic for the game when they are a legit tier 1. [/quote]
Its great when “extreme” builds are playable, things like DLR, or Blackmail spam Val, or Asset spam “iceless” Corps are playable novelties, but when they come T1 you definitely have a design issue.
I agree with just ban museum. The doors it opened were not good ones, and its fundamentally changed too much. I’m sure there are plenty of innocuous uses for it, but allowing the corp to extend the game indefinitely is too much. Its the same story as Faust, alone its not a big deal, but combined with defensive agendas, IG, and assets that can proactively win the game its created a bad situation.
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Ban Museum, Faust, Medium, Parasite, and Yog.0, and then get rid of the whole MWL. Problem solved.
Necessary but not sufficient, is probably a better way of putting it.
Someone obviously wasn’t playing when PrePaid Kate was the premier deck.
Edit: I hope you are kidding.
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Maybe the heavy card recursion on both sides has to go, Museum and Levy, to make certain types of decks more playable. I would add Chronos Project and Archives Interface just for safety, so that the light recursion doesn’t suffer too much.
I really feel that the emergence of IG would feel better if the best counters weren’t the decks that were already dominant. I was trying to get a criminal working, but IG shut the door on that and pushed me back into Noise’s warming embrace…
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I absolutely agree. The fact that the answers to IG grind decks cost two influence (Imp/Archives Interface) as opposed to, say, Plascrete, is really annyoing.
I’ve been feeling this way about Dumblefork for the past 2 months. I don’t really want to play it anymore, but new strong archetypes keep presenting themselves that by my reasoning force me to play Dumblefork (or Noise) in a competitive setting.
“Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.” Whizzard, lamenting to Faust
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When people play decks on Jnet that force me to play whiz I just tell them #partoftheproblem after the game 
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Bit late but solid Snow Crash reference there!
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Ban Kate too!
And while I was, I was playing entirely casual in person.
Oh god, I had forgotten about that. Whoever thought a blank 4/4 agenda was a good idea… ugh. Ugh. UGH! Almost like Vanity Project’s a 6/4 for a reason.
Anyway, it would be nice if there were some solutions to the popular decks that weren’t Anarch. Because it sucks that you have to spend the little influence you get for non-Anarch decks on importing things to deal with these decks… and you are at the whims of the RNG whether you’ll ever actually fight them at a event.
You might as well just play Anarch so you don’t have to, and even if you don’t use them you’re not wasting influence at least. And that’s part of the problem, I guess, since no one really wants to be forced to play Anarch.
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