Everyone has been so hyped about the upcoming Mumbad cycle, however, alongside the heart warming news came a sadder story - it’s the last cycle of Android:Netrunner with Lukas Litzsinger as the head designer.
There have been rumors about who the next lead designers will be but the general consensus is that it’s going to be Damon Stone and Erik Dahlman. So what does this mean to us, the community, the players of the game? One of Lukas’ biggest strenghts is that he has tried to shy away from overpowered cards and the result of it is the fact that Netrunner still doesn’t have a restricted/banned card list. Damon Stone, on the other hand, has been very controversial and not regarded very nicely by the community.
What do these changes mean? Is Netrunner slowly going to die out, simply because of some cards that will be ridiculously overpowered and will end up being restricted? Or that the designers will get too excited and blown away and we will get too much strange card interactions that will make playing the game very messy? Or will the community just stop playing with the cards after cycle 4? Or are we painting everything in too bright colours and everything’s going to be just fine?
Tournament scene is one of the reasons I jumped into Netrunner, having only played Warhammer:Invasion before that, when it was already a DCG. I do not want to experience another dead game or a very messy tournament system with a ton of restricted cards. I might just be afraid of changes but the threat is something we should consider nevertheless. Maybe GenCon will sort things out a bit.
P.S. Can the forum Mods maybe redirect some posts from the Mumbad cycle in this thread? The discussion was a bit off-topic in there.