That’s actually really nice to hear that the two factions that most seemed to have gripes within their new design space won. I’m kinda curious how the overall balance within the box feels throughout the factions. This is mainly for me to try and market the game to newer peeps. In addition, the more I hear about other people in my situation, I’m left wondering if the rotation should be sped up a bit?
I’m looking back as a lapsed player, as much as I hate to say it, I think we should be capping out at slightly less. It would make getting newer players in so much easier. The biggest concern with me currently is how insurmountable 3 cycles of cards is, and I can’t even imagine with people just starting how awkward it must be.
As much as I love how deep and competitive this game can be, we really need new blood to keep the game sustainable. One of the biggest things that FFG could do to address this is really give solid release dates. I’ve had people leave just due to the fact that they’re excited about new cards, and the response to when they’re coming out is a shrug of shoulders. This is really egregious when considering this standard practice for many of their contemporaries.
Another thought, after getting my hands on Terminal Directive, and having more fun than I should of with the Legacy component. My mind started turning, and I would really like to see it become standard practice to include a legacy component in any of the standard big box release, or release campaign add-ons to turn each cycle into a Legacy game. One of the biggest draws of a LCG is the completionist aspect, not dissimilar to a board game. Why not show people this?
Finally, Netrunner has always been mechanically and thematically interconnected, and really FFG could easily exploit this connection to draw in more players who don’t want the hard-core competitive experience. I really wish more people would see that the core mechanics of this game is equally strong as both a Board Game and a LCG.
P.S.: Sorry for the long response, but the more I look at how FFG is handling their own LCG printing format, the more I’m disappointed in how much opportunity is missed for such an excellent product.
I agree that rotation should be more aggressive. I would go as far as to suggest that cache refresh should become the standard with the current standard becoming equivalent to extended in pokemon. And I can’t see how that would damage the bottom line for ffg either because if someone got into the game for CR they’d still be buying everything that is easily available - I mean the early cycles are not easily available new so if people are buying those they are probably buying them second hand so ffg aren’t benefiting from that anyway. It also means new packs have a bigger impact on the meta so people are less likely to skip packs. Then they could tie gnks into new pack parties…
Another thing I think they really need to do is to explicitly cater for the casual market. In the recent interviews Damon has given he’s said multiple times that kitchen table players outnumber competitive players so lets have more big boxes aimed at them like TD and can it please start with a multi player expansion.
If we compare Netrunner to CCG’s, many of them have multiple ways to play and many formats to play in. Netrunner has one standardized way to play (though an all-in format will likely emerge due to rotation). Look at Magic, they Standard, Modern, Pauper, Legacy, Commander, etc. This not only allows people to use cards that wouldn’t see play normally, but also decide on how they play.
I hate to keep ragging on FFG, but this really feels like a failure on their part. Everytime I’d played in a tournament, it feels like they both want the community to self-regulate, but refuse us more than the most then the most archaic of instruments. Going back to Magic, or even the Pokemon tcg, look at how much more in-depth they go into with both their judges and player base. Whilst, I may not always agree with certain decisions, these companies at least try to keep interest flowing through the community. FFG literally feels like a company that is only grudgingly in the card game market.
Add me to any chorus for continued and more aggressive rotation. I would like to see a one-in/two-out policy, designed to shrink the existing card pool, until we got to just three-or-four trailing cycles. If I understand current plan (un-revised since the announcement so many years ago), in future days we will be getting back to a place where we have 7 legal cycles (Lunar-SanSan-Mumbad-Flashpoint-Red Sand-Kitara-Kitara+1).
I’m not sure what the exact tipping point is for what is Too Much for attracting a decent volume of new players to replace the inevitable attrition of older ones. But I’m pretty sure that Core+Deluxes/Legacy+7 cycles is WELL beyond that point. The game had a thriving following with very few cards in the pool. It is a Living card game, and the idea of cards coming and going at a brisk rate is a feature.
Admittedly, such a super-aggressive rotation of the game is asking a lot of work and responsibility from the design team.
At 5 years old, Magic had 2 official formats, type 1 and type 2. There were a few smaller player-created formats that would see some play in smaller, regional groups, but were not widely recognized or officially supported.
I don’t think it is fair to say FFG is not supporting ANR adequately because a 25 year-old game that generates ~$250 million in revenue has better support than ANR. FFG’s total revenue is probably in the range of ~$25 million, about one tenth what mtg generates feeds the entire company.
Looking at those numbers, even if ANR were generating $25 million/year for itself, and being as old at mtg, I would still not expect ANR to have as much official support for alternate formats as mtg.
We do have terminal directive, which is a clever attempt at legacy play (though I acknowledge that it has some flaws) and the Cache Refresh format that FFG offers some support for. We have just received our first ever ban list and just rotated our oldest sets. Official support is there. The pace may seem slow, and the communication to players is very poor, but steps are being taken to keep the game healthy and expand its appeal.
Finally, please note that several of your listed mtg formats only exist because of ban lists and rotation. We have only had a ban list and rotation for 1 day. It will take a little more time than that to develop formats for these play styles. People certainly played legacy mtg formats, but they were not officially supported to my recollection.
ANR is emerging into the next stage in its lifecycle, which will present new challenges to FFG. New formats will emerge in time, so long as the community sticks by ANR to keep it alive for long enough. But I will never expect ANR to be as large as mtg.
Well said, Mr. Goat. One of our fellow players once said, “FFG is a board game company that accidentally found itself in the competitive card game business.”
I also find it interesting that we (as a group of players) are only into the 5th year of the game. Netrunner just made it to kindergarten
For me (as a grown kid in his later 30s), I hope to be enjoying this game in 10, 15, 20 years time. What will be the test of time is if the game can remain interesting and fun. As it stand right now, in this brave new world of rotation and bans, I can say that I’m definitely interested AND I think this game is really fun.
You can’t directly compare MtG and ANR as the models are different, but keeping it at 7 sets plus deluxes, Core and TD puts the ANR cardpool at just over 70% the size of MtG’s standard Cardpool (1237 for MtG and 889 for ANR). Once we add in the 2 new sets and assume they are 120 cards each, we are still over a hundred cards less than MtG’s standard environment. If you want a faster rotation, we need cards to come out faster to still keep a decent sized card pool available. Otherwise we’re going to just end up with a few viable decks due to the lack of choices in the cycles.
On the other hand, rarity effects in a CCG mean there are probably more binder fodder cards in the MTG cardpool than we’d strictly need in ANR, right?
I recall asking some really-into-mtg friends about how many “playable” cards there were in Standard at any given time, and their answer was “probably 400-500”; draft and limited make a big chunk of the remainder of those cards more “playable”, but ANR doesn’t really have those formats.
I wonder both what the current ratio is and what we think it “should” be?
How competitive are your friends? Kitchen table players are more likely to use “worse” cards because they are interested in exploring them more. At 500 cards, I would assume they are pretty competitive. I would say there are a comparable percentage of ANR cards that are chaff and aren’t used.
I think because of all of the hidden information and interwoven mechanics understanding all of the cards in the card pool is much more important in Netrunner than in MTG. Netrunner may have less cards by number, but it has a much larger burden of knowledge. A new player has to understand a huge portion of the cards in Netrunner, and they interact in ways that are often quite complicated. To be even somewhat competitive this must be done since so much of the information on a game of Netrunner is hidden.
Additionally, to buy into competitive Netrunner you have to buy ALL the packs - not just the cards you need. In magic there are cheap decks which you can use to get a start. Sure, they may not be as competitive, but you can find them online, they’re easy to get started with, and will even win sometimes. In Netrunner decks take advantage of as many cards as possible - minimizing the number of packs used (and thus cost for a new player) is not typically a consideration at all. And regardless of how many packs you need to buy, you still need to know the entire card base - because the players you are playing against are using those cards and most of the information is hidden until it is too late.
Totally agree - the total buy-in to get into high level competitive netrunner is way lower than high level competitive MTG. But what concerns me is the initial buy-in for someone who is interested in playing the game competitively. Both in burden of knowledge and in cost.
About the need to know the entire card base : I don’t think so, for my part I enjoy playing at a savvy level if not competitive without knowing the loads of crappy cards and 46th cards and Criminal breakers and so.
(I enjoy competitive too, I’m just not good at it). Sure, I won’t be the guy that’ll remember the new False Echo when we’ll see the new DDoS, but if it pops up in the meta, I’ll just have to learn.
