Has Netrunner become "boring"?

Disagree: I think the cause => effect is intended to be the other way around: the corp must draw precisely to introduce new cards into the game (some of which will be agendas) and to ensure that the game cannot go on indefinitely.

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What’s the percentage of games you’ve won/lost because of that rule? It’s a vast, vast minority. I see the rule that the Corp loses when they have no more cards to draw more an issue of ‘Now what?’ in the unlikely case that it happens. It’s actually sort of interesting; you don’t need the rule to have a functioning game, but the board state can happen where neither player can win if the rule wasn’t in. You also don’t need the rule on both sides of the table, which is why the Runner doesn’t have the ‘deck empty = loss’ rule. If only one needs the rule, Corp makes the most sense to have it, since at a base level, the Corp controls the pace of the game because of how they score points.

Complaining about Museum making it so games can theoretically last forever belongs in the same category as complaining that you don’t see all of your cards in a game. … of course you don’t see all of your cards, that’s the point of having a deck. of course games can theoretically last forever. But they don’t.

Museum single-handedly enables an Asset strategy because they always come back if you don’t get rid of the Asset that’s causing this. If you look at the game, FFG has been trying for a long time to make this viable. It started with SanSan City Grid, the original ‘Must-Trash’ card. Finally, there’s an Asset that you Must Trash as soon as possible, or watch the game state slip away. They don’t have an infinite number of Museums, and they cannot summon them to their hand at will. They have to sit on the board for a turn before they work. This sounds an awful lot like the Never Advance strategy.

I see this as a step up from SanSan City Grid. If you don’t trash SSCG after they’ve rezzed it, you’re likely to lose the game if they happen to draw an Agenda at the right time. If you don’t trash Museum after they’ve rezzed it, the Corp just gains incremental advantages until you trash the Museum. They won’t just win on the spot. This is the mark of a good Asset: It gives you an advantage, without immediately saying ‘Game Over’ if the Runner fails to trash it for a couple of turns. Heck, Public Support falls into this camp of Assets that Actually End The Game, and no one complains about it.

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Its not about decking. Most people win very few games because the corp can’t draw cards. Its about the corp having to draw and deal with those 15-20 cards over the course of the game, and not getting to hide them back in R+D making it that much harder to find the 4-5 agendas that are still in there. I’ve won plenty of games because the corp was forced to actually try and score or hold agendas in their hand, or hide them in archives.

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People should stop blaming Museum. That card is in 90% of the decks a bad card. If people are putting 3 museums, 1 agenda and other card extra in their deck, it actually makes the deck weaker imo (exception IG). People are recurring important cards with it, but things like Team Sponsorship, Interns, JH or AM do the same thing but much faster. Too often the game will end before you see that card you wanted back. Also you’re playing 3 cards in your deck that won’t help you win. It’s not broken, it’s just another card that should remind you that you won’t win by just trashing every asset they spam.

The real problem is that corps are getting more ways to win, without needing the threat to score 7 points.
Take old butchershop for example (pre 24/7), people were complaining about how strong that deck was. But the fact was that the corp still needed to have a scoring threat, otherwhise the runner would just money up. It made interesting games because you had to consider letting an astro go in order to get an economic advantage. You could say the exact same about weyland.

Ronin and 24/7 were already a pain, but it was not to hard to keep them in check with a plascrete or a drive by. Mushin IG was already strong, and it was the proof that some cards together are making “boring” games (well, it’s fun for the corp i guess).

Bio-ethics is a game ending threat, it doesn’t encourage the corp to score and with all the recusion and painfull trash effects it’s absolutely not fun to play against.

Side note: If people think IG games take ages, than you haven’t played against a good IG.

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This is what kind of worries me. Slums seems incredibly oppressive against a fair number of other decks.

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This is a good thing. In the same way that having “must deal with” assets means that the Runner can’t ignore the Corp’s boardstate and just bring enough resources to fund their own toys, so having oppressive resources means that the Corp can’t just ignore the Runner’s board state and bring no ways to interact with it. Tags are a core game mechanic!

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I don’t think that’s right. There are very few ways to tag a runner that doesn’t run. The corp doesn’t need to trash the runner’s stuff, the corp just stops the runner building up by threatening to score agendas. Besides, there were very few threatening resources in the early game. DLR was scary, but since it required you to be tagged, it gave the corp and automatic way out. Kati Jones was the only one that the Corp would want to proactively destroy.

Its a Lukas stylef silver bullet. It only actually hates on a single archetype and might possibly be enough to help Whizzard vs. 7 pt CI.

The Weyland in me disagrees. I basically see pancakes and Asops (in most decks) as must trash, especially if drawn early. I know that slots are tight in corporation decks, but with how integral some resource pieces are to many key runner decks… I am making the effort and I’m happy for it.

Weaker and more boring are not mutually exclusive. Most museum decks aren’t too hard to beat, eventually, but dear god they are dull.

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Can you explain dull? Is it more exciting to access R&D or HQ 1-2 times every turn than checking a facedown card in a server?

Talking about long game. No one talks about it much but Levy stretches games out on the runner side. You can basically out play someone through an entire 45 card deck and then they get to levy. And levy is in almost every deck at this point and every faction. It’s like well I didn’t beat you with my deck the first time I get to try again now.

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I don’t think it’s accurate to say that Levy stretches games out, because different decks are playing it to the ones that didn’t play Levy. The reason Levy is played is that it offers consistency, by letting you aggressively draw through your deck to find your pieces quickly without worrying too much about what you discard. The realisation that you could use Levy to aggressively draw like this was the key insight that made Prepaid Kate work, when, based on spending two years of the game playing mostly Criminal, many players were stuck in a mindset that overdrawing too much was bad (and I include myself amongst those players).

I’d be willing to bet that modern Shaper and Anarch decks go through their decks twice quicker than a traditional Criminal deck went through it once.

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Yes I think the levy in Kate was quite a beautiful thing, you didn’t always need it but when you did it was close to game over for the corp. it play as function of having played a great game before hand. Now it’s just become Faust fuel, and I’m not complaining about Faust, I dont mind it to much. At this point I can out play it but can’t out play the levy. Now even noise is in on the act.

The problem with Levy is that it invalidates certain strategies like attrition damage, reducing damage to a binary dead/not dead. (And damage as a tax that slows you down, but that’s not very prevalent).

The problem with Levy AND Museum is that now both sides have lost their clock. Yes, runners had a clock - if your deck is empty you’re out of option and dead very soon if the corp has any kind of damage. Levy removed one clock, and then Museum removed the other. I wouldn’t mind it if both were gone.

Runners could perhaps get something comparable to Jackson (Jackson adds 9 cards to the corp’s clock, it doesn’t continually delay it).

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At a Regional I got to listen to an IG player giving this speech, then he made the cut and went to time on all of his games at the top tables.

What you mean is: it’s possible for “good IG” to win quickly, but a great player with a runner deck that isn’t specifically teched against IG has to take a long time to score 7 points. Lots of clicks are spent just drawing back up, then when running they have to calculate not only two possible trash costs in money, but also in cards due to Hostile vs leaving Bioethics on the table.

Nobody wants to big-deep-dig R&D against a deck full of Snares and Shocks, and the deck keeps getting shuffled every turn due to Museum, and if you find a Future Perfect you usually psi for it. So looking at games in which the runner does win, they often take a long time.

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Yes both gone would be good, the problem also is that now you can out play a Faust deck with Glacier deck not doing net or meat damage but they get to levy at end game.

[quote=“Damien_Stark, post:136, topic:7300”]
[…] a great player with a runner deck that isn’t specifically teched against IG has to take a long time to score 7 points. Lots of clicks are spent just drawing back up, then when running they have to calculate not only two possible trash costs in money, but also in cards due to Hostile vs leaving Bioethics on the table.[/quote]

Maybe your experience differs, but I don’t find that takes a long time at all. It might take a lot of clicks, but that’s not the same as a lot of time. If the Runner hits a Snare! on click one, then resolving “draw, draw, clear the tag” takes three clicks, but it’s probably the same time as it takes to resolve the first piece of ICE on a run (less time if the ICE needed rezzing). What takes a lot of time in matches, in my experience, is players prevaricating and over-analysing situations, and to a lesser extent runs with a lot of ICE and ability windows to talk through. Basic actions like drawing, clicking for credits, or ditching tags shouldn’t be taking up a lot of time no matter how often you have to do it. In fact, if you’re playing against a deck that just reduces your cards to simple hitpoints, “click to draw” should usually be taking less time than resolving whatever effect you would have been using that card for if it weren’t just a hitpoint!

That’s because the top tables have a far more stringent time limit than normal rounds.

I have played IG in 8-9 tournaments and I’ve only gone to time against people I would have gone to time with any other deck.

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There’s also something to be said about top players knowing they can go to time against (BioLock) IG and win in elimination. Without much threat of them scoring points, as the runner you can linger on every click once you’ve stolen 2 or 3, abd unless they start calling a judge for slow play you can take the game, on purpose, to time. It’s not that IG is much slower than other decks, just that the runner can safely go to time without much to worry about.