We’ve been asking this for YEARS, so I can’t believe all this mountain of complains. Said that, while I couldn’t ask for a better banlist, the restricted list is far from perfect, but MWL wasn’t too and did some work, I’m sure this will do as well. yes, this will kill a lot of decks (a lot of fair decks too), but this is an unavoidable collateral damage whenever a restriction of this level is made.
Runner economy had to be cut, we were used to run wherever we want whenever we want to, with massive credit pools of 25++ credits, that made no sense, and the game is more interesting when corp gets more scoring windows and the runner has to decide more times per game when to run or not. One of the reasons because almost everybody plays FA is not only because it got better (It really did) but also because commiting agendas to the board is almost impossible in a long term game. Yes criminal got really hurt, but revise your cardpool and you will find that you have more options than you thought (Also new cards designed with this in mind are coming).
The game is always better when corp is slightly stronger than runner,and there are at least viable (not necessary strong) glacier decks in meta.Runner start the game with massive credits certainly do not help that.
I was so skeptical of the list when I first saw it but I’m totally on board now. Such a big shakeup has made deck building super fun. I love playing in a new meta. I’m sure that the top builds will all solidify again, particularly after worlds, but I can look forward to a shakeup again every year or so.
It’s just so much more fun to make decks when I don’t know what the best decks are.
Whether this list is real or not I’m having an amazing time playing with it.
@miek See. Chiyashi BlueSun & NEH spam stuff incomming. Batty Grail. Whatever.
Any kind of corp spam would do, even with cards that lost 1, 2 or 3 cred / click / whatever advantage.
Do they look alike?
Is Marcus Batty in some way like potato salad?
Can you not see Marcus Batty?
Does Marcus Batty have a doctorate in Thuganomics?
Does Marcus Batty do anti-bullying campaigns while having an on-screen character that is a misogynistic homophobic bully?
Clearly the answer to all of these questions would be yes. Marcus Batty invented Thuganomics.He and Keegan Lane are the tag-team champions of the New Angeles Underway Wrestling and Cook-Out Federation.
I had two, almost conflicting, reactions based on the contents of this list.
It has a better eye for consequentiality than the MWL. Instead of simply agreeing to penalize cards in some way, this list appears to consider where players would logically go next, particularly if we look at the case of runner econ. Banning Temujin and Moose seems to lead directly to Magnum Opus and/or Aesop’s as the de facto next best thing. Because of this, it’s natural runner play would slow down and cards that penalize the corp for rushing ahead of a Magnum Opus-based economy—Gang Sign—would be a natural include for more runners. This is the only possible explanation for the inclusion of Aesop’s Pawnshop on this list. I can’t really fathom how Aesop’s could be considered a “problem that needs fixing” in any other context. Unless of course…
However, my first reaction to this list, my gut reaction, was to say to friends of mine, “This list is really opinionated, almost ideological.” There’s something about it that doesn’t sit quite right with me. It appears to target certain kinds of “NPE” over others, and seems curiously allergic to slow but virtually unlimited runner economy. I’ve read and heard online a number of players all voicing virtually identical opinions regarding Magnum Opus and its so-called “NPE” and “inevitablity,” the infamous “Take 8. Go.” (which almost everyone will also repeat when discussing Magnum Opus). I don’t consider this play—boring though it may be—to be a problem in our current era or in the era before Temujin Contract (which seems to have been a watershed moment in runner economy). I don’t think a Magnum Opus economy is enough to “check the remote every turn” (which everyone will say the runner does) while doing the other things runners need to do (draw into multiaccess, set up the rig, manage and respond to threats like currents and HHN, check un-iced remotes). If that’s the case, I have to wonder whether corps are doing a good enough job of running sufficient numbers of taxing ice, pain-in-the-ass assets, never advance bluffs, traps, and the like. Instinctively, hitting—well I’ll say it—traditional Shaper econ seems to me more the subject of an opinion than a fact. As I see it, it’s actually more of a meme or an in-joke than an opinion.
Had I been shown a list that did not come wrapped in other memes and in-jokes, I would have been more inclined to go with reaction #1 (FFG are thinking three-dimensionally about the metagame), but as it is I have to go with reaction #2 and doubt either the total veracity of the list (perhaps some “ruses” have been included for “lols”) or the method in which it was compiled. Boggs is clearly listening, but is he simply listening to people who repeat “Take 8 Go is NPE” or is he listening to a broader cross-section of the player base? Time will tell.
Absolutely this. And you know, sometimes, the Magnum Opus deck does get to $60 and you just don’t have the resources left to tax/bluff them out. But if they got to that point, they were allowed to do so, and maybe it’s an NPE when you get to that point, but you had a whole game to do something, and losing after playing a full game where you probably had a chance if you were willing to take a loss or two isn’t really an NPE is it?
Glacier should be a functional archetype with good matchups against aggressive runners, but for the sake of the game retaining some kind of pace and tactical quality it has to inevitably lose to “traditional shaper” big rig stuff. The game absolutely has to force both sides to take risks starting very early in the game or it becomes less of a game and more of a probabilistic math puzzle :).
In all fairness bluffs, traps, and the like were somewhat suppressed by the presence of Account Siphon (and Vamp) in the card pool. That may well change.
On a loosely related note, FFG France just cancelled the french version. They’ll keep retailing the english version. French translation is very lame and many players, including me, prefer english version.
I’m curious to see if this list comes like spoiled. I’d prefer the list being taken not that harsh. A ban/restricted list would be great as an addition to MWL, but only half of the cards on this list really need a ban. Bloo Moose, Temujin? MWL3+ should still exist for this kind of things. Friends, Aaron, Faust? I’m completely fine with them being banned. Aesops on the restricted list? Lol, you forgot you rotated Noise.
I’m interested to see some of the responses here, particularly regarding Runner econ. Temujin is probably the biggest example. There’s a few suggestions that Temujin is ok because it came out when Crim was weak, fits in Crim colour pie and would be fine if it was an exclusively Crim card. The thing is, though, that it’s maybe the second most broken runner card in the game apart from Faust and is probably the most broken econ card. Putting it in a weak faction doesn’t make it any less completely broken, it just means you can’t print strong cards for that faction anymore. Making it MWL3 doesn’t help either - Faust is MWL3 and still sees tons of play. Realistically, it just means all decks get less diverse because you are absolutely gong to take the most broken econ card in the game over other interesting options.
Bloo Moose is the same. It’s probably the second most broken econ card, fits in almost every deck and gets you absolutely absurd levels of money for a single click. Once it comes down, the Corp has a lot of trouble ever competing in the economy war.
On the restricted list, Aesops and Magnum Opus aren’t banned! It just means that if you want access to a powerful source of infinite money, you can’t also have access to Clone Chip Clot or Levy. If you’ve done any amount of trying to find strong decks, you might have discovered that Hayley Pawnshop and Noob Kit are absolutely god tier when they can make tons of money, remote lock and stop fast advance. Durdle Shaper would be the stand out deck and it wouldn’t be close.
A few comments have said that Netrunner will be boring now. One person I saw said that they now commonly end games with less than 5 credits. How can this possibly be a bad thing? You could argue that if you end up with any more than 0 credits, you’ve been inefficient with your resources! We’ve been spoiled by access to broken econ - we shouldn’t be able to just run everywhere all the time. This makes the game much more interesting because you have to be much more careful with your resources. I can’t count the number of games I’ve played where I’ve made misplays out the wazoo and still won because I had absurd numbers of credits from Temujin and Moose.
Finally, remember that the testers operate a couple of cycles in advance. Kitara is the first opportunity for FFG to reprint fair versions of old cards. Give them a chance. Play some games. This might be the best thing to ever happen to Netrunner.
I was saying that in my brief time in C2R before the ban/restrict list, I was ending with 0-5c with an Omar deck, with Moose averaging like 26c per game. Traditionally many Criminal and Anarch decks liked to run often and right out of the gates, to keep the pressure on the Corp. I don’t want to see the slow-rolling, controlled style of Shaper forced upon the other two factions. The loss of Moose and Temujin coupled with the Core 2 changes has me wary about the future of aggro Runner decks. Every faction shouldn’t play the same; and it seems like the style that was targeted was aggressive, run-often Runner decks. Sure, we still have the great economic engines of Aesop’s and MOpus–but both of those are in Shaper, and suit a very passive, controlled style of Netrunner that not everyone wants to play.
Mining Accident is a strong card for Anarch, but it’s a card for the longhaul; it’s not an aggro card. It does suit the run-often style, but I’m not sure it can support the blue and red breakers in the glacier mups like Moose, Parasite, Siphon, Temujin, and Desperado did.
So far on JNET, most of the Runner decks across all three factions are looking very similar. They give up the early and mid-game entirely to set up their drips, breakers, and a few silver bullets, and hope to be able to lockdown the Corp in the late-game. This is precisely what I expected and not a Runner playstyle I enjoy myself. I have seen some people experimenting with Gabe. It remains to be seen if aggro, tempo Runner is viable. These are just my fears and speculations.
