How about a defensive upgrade that punishes the runner for stealing agendas? Something like:
Trojan: “As an additional cost to steal agendas from this server the runner must take a tag that cannot be avoided or removed until his next turn. This applies even during the run on which the Runner trashes Trojan.” trash 4
Variants could be stuff that the corp trashes a program or a piece of hardware. It’s like ASH or Herrings in that the runner can trash it and run again, but the cost is more Weyland-y.
Forgive me as I didn’t get to all 120 posts but i wanted to remind everyone that when designing ICE for Weyland you have to keep in mind that Weyland’s credit total is also their ICE.
Weyland can’t have too much bad-ass ICE because the threat of their credit total translating into your death is so real that it helps to stave off a run in the first place. I acknowledge that there are cards that prevent this but there are also cards that remove those answers. I’m sure from a design perspective it’s not as easy as some may think.
Weylands trade-mark predominantly revolves around being rich as hell and finding a way to us giant piles of credits to threaten the runner. Core, GRNDL , Blue Sun, and many of the agendas all revolve around money. Argus in its own way revolves around money. Some of the cards that came with Titan are about making gobs of cash. The faction doles out BP as a means to balance the obscene amount of credits they can amass in a short time.
The advancable ICE and cards that compliment them are the attempt to create Weyland decks that operate on a low budget. So I would say if you wanted to make a deck around this stuff you should attempt to create a deck that can operate effciently when low on funds.
If you really want to rush with Weyland GRNDL is probably the way to go right now.
I attribute the downfall of Weyland to the seriously bad balancing of bad pub.
Pricing a Bad Pub at ~5 credits made almost all cards that involve bad pub worthless.
At least we now don’t have to include bad pub agendas that wreck any deck that wants to tax the runner…
A good change to Bad Pub would’ve been to strictly make it each one a single recurring credit on the runners turn as opposed to every time the Runner makes a run. Giving the runner what could amount to 4 credits a turn for 5 credits is a really bad trade. Each Bad Pub essentially lowers the trash cost of all of your cards by 1 as well which makes it almost impossible to play assets in Weyland, especially with their already low trash cost cards.
Given that we’re almost guaranteed to get a Weyland ID in Mumbad (the last two cycles have had IDs in every pack, Weyland and Anarch were the only factions not to get IDs in SanSan), what would you like a Weyland ID to look like. Maybe gaining a credit at the beginning of your turn for each Bad Pub you’ve got? Or maybe a sort of Weyland Foundry - “The first time you play an Operation each turn, you may search R&D for another copy of that Operation and play it”?
While I’m here, a couple more ideas going off the discussion in this thread.
Tell-All
Operation: Transaction
0 cost
Take 1 Bad Publicity.
Gain 3 credits for each Bad Publicity you have. Who cares what they think about us? As long as they buy the book and watch the movie adaptation, we’re sitting pretty.
Trojan
ICE: Sentry
6 rez, 3 strength
Trojan loses a “Trash 1 Program” subroutine for each unused the MU the Runner has.
[subroutine]: Trash 1 Program
[subroutine]: Trash 1 Program
[subroutine]: Trash 1 Program
[subroutine]: Trash 1 Program
That would be extremely brutal for most Criminal decks. I feel like there would have to be some condition that allowed the Runner to avoid it or if the ambush was a bit more costly to trigger than Snare. Maybe 3 credits and the derez a piece of ice?
I think they need to think very carefully about printing a card that has a positive effect in combination with Bad Pub. It’s usually a balancing mechanism to keep the power of certain cards in check and with no method for the runner to remove it if it’s a liability. I’m not saying it’s something they’ll never do (I think there’s a vast design space still to be explored with Bad Pub to be honest), but I think they’ll need to err on the side of caution with it initially.
I think you could do some interesting stuff to mitigate bad pub or maybe make “if you have any bad pub then…” but making something that scales off it can get scary real fast.
Scaling might indeed be too much. I think the card is balanced a bit by also giving the Corp another bad pub, which the Runner can then start putting to use. Also, the strongest Bad Pub punshiment card is Blackmail, which doesn’t care about how much money the Corp has, so giving cards that make money off of BP isn’t necessarily awful.
A program-trashing Snare! could be interesting. Maybe balance it by letting the Runner pick the Program? Or trash a piece of installed ice to trigger it?
Make it take a Trace, and start it lower. 2 or 3 seems good. Also make it take 2-4 cred to fire in the first place, just like Snare. If built like that, you have to have a pretty good cred differential to get it to work.
This kind of makes it useless as an R&D trap, though. Snare! is good because it is always a threat. A trace 2 that takes more money to fire on top of that is okay if we’re talking a piece of ICE that gets run through repeatedly, but sounds pretty bad for an ambush asset.
Weyland isn’t exactly hurting for ways to punish a runner with a huge credit lead. What they need is a way to open a scoring window, and a Snare! that just snipes a program sounds like a good start to me.
What if it instead of trashing the program, the theoretical ambush attaches itself to a program and gives it a few power counters with the condition “while attached installed program has power counters, it can’t be used. At the beginning of the Runners turn, remove 1 power counter.” or something like that.