Personally I don’t think Netrunner needs much in the way of immediate balancing, and that the natural evolution the card pool will likely be enough to keep the game from becoming stagnant or overly dominated by any particular deck archetype. I’m adverse to the idea of errata for power balancing, and banned/restricted lists seem equally inelegant.
It might be interesting, however, to think about game balancing through editing the rules.
What if the timing structure of a run was changed? What is certain effects that currently stack, were made not to stack? What if paid ability windows were added or taken away? What if the conditions under which the corp could rez ice were expanded? Those kind of things.
There’s a lot of complexity in the rules of Netrunner - are there any surgical edits or wholesale changes to the rules of how the game is played that could lead to a more interesting or more balanced game?
Allowing the Corp to rez ICE outside of the normal encounter sequence would be game-changing - it would bolster NEXT ICE and give the Corp a way to spend cash to defend against Account Siphon. It wouldn’t surprise me to see that as a paid ability card effect at some point.
Removing the paid ability window at the end of the turn would be interesting as well. It would mean players would have to commit to their final paid ability before the final click is taken which might have some neat interactions in the future.
But as an example to encourage discussion I will suggest something specific off the top of my head.
Change the “Rez Cost” of Ice to a “Rez/De-Rez” cost. Any time the Corp would be able to Rez a piece of ice, they could pay the same amount to De-Rez it. This would allow the Corp a money sink in event of Siphon, as well as an option to “turtle” a piece of Ice from a surprise Parasite/Datasucker until such time as the corp could execute a virus purge and save the Ice, or just never re-rez the ice and keep the parasite around in a less recurrable state, eating MU in exchange for keeping the Ice de-rezzed.
Alternatively, make “De-Rezzing” a piece of Ice a free action on encounter, again as a counter to Parasite Datasucker. The runner still gets an advantage in that they effectively bypass the Ice, but the Corp prevents the Parasite from going to Heap where it would become recurred.
What if advancing cards didn’t cost money, and agendas required an action to score?
This removes fast advance as a Tier 1 strategy, buffs ambush assets, and puts us back to the glory days of Core Set Netrunner where you had to stuff that Private Security Force in the remote for a turn and pray they didn’t have Stimhack.
By making Runners stronger it also makes the game more interesting (in my opinion).
How would having a Magic-style stack affect the game? Instead of a series of windows you could trigger abilities in response to actions that happened prior to the trigger resolving.
Not quite, functionally the result is the same as that but the absolute value of the trace makes a difference to cards like Taurus and any future possibilities such as “if the trace strength is at least twice the runner’s link” etc.
I don’t like the idea of that, makes perfect sense for there to be a paid window at end of turn and I don’t think it currently creates any problems. Leave my PAD Campaign outta this!
I was thinking about the wording “remove X from the game”. Thematically that should include copies of said card, so maybe that would be an interesting rule change.
Only thing I’d like to see is to allow corps to rez ice outside of a runner encountering that ice. Everything else makes a lot of sense to me and I couldn’t mess with it.
