MNGA - Rolling Ban-List Discussion

Netrunner General
81

One thing I would point out about temujin is you need to make successful runs to make it fire.

If you’re playing against a deck that actually uses ice, emptying it isn’t 6 clicks: gain 16 net (or an average of 2.6 credits per click). It is 6 clicks: gain 16 credits net minus whatever the cost of breaking ice protecting the server is (an average of much less than 2.6 credits).

It’s significantly worse against glacier decks and has some counterplay available for horizontal decks, since the corp can install ice to prevent the last two clicks for 4 credits. HB also has advanced assembly lines to disrupt it. If it’s not targeting a central, the runner can trash an asset with Jackson Howard or executive boot camp or the like and get rid of the entire server. Defensive upgrades such as crisium grid and mumbad virtual tour really screw up its math too.

Emptying liberated account, on the other hand, is 5 clicks for a net gain of 10, or 2 credits per click. Lower upside, but there’s not usually much the corp can do it disrupt it.

I do think the influence number on temujin is too low, and would note you can make it more efficient with support pieces such as desperado and security testing. It also has a different kind of value against glacier if you just use it to target a server to make the next 5 runs 4 credits cheaper.

It is obviously a powerful card that helped bring criminals back into competitive viability. I’m by no means arguing it isn’t a very good and impactful card. But I’m not so sure it’s as big of a deal as people make it out to be, and without changes to tools horizontal decks have available, I think it’s probably necessary to keep up with the whack-a-mole nature of those games – especially with friends in high places in existence.

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82

I don’t think Temujin is anywhere as problematic as some have been saying. I’d like to see it on MWL, but I’d also like to see Desperado off. Putting both of them on is stupid and will just force Criminals to cut elsewhere or be content with mediocrity.

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83

Let’s make this simple, no influence at all. You play only your runner/corp faction and neutrals.Still more than enough for different strategies for all. In addition cards needing to be banned will be easier to single out. Just my opinion.

84

Ban Yellow.

I mean I cannot handle them, and I don’t want to change my play, so ban them.

If anybody can find this article about playing op cards instead of whining about them, it would be a very useful read.

85

Appreciate this added insight into the discussion.

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86

All cards you cite have counterplays. All. Of. Them.

What bothers you is you can’t make omnidecks anymore because the amount of silver bullets you would need is > 25% of a deck.

I’d 100% of the time prefer RPS mecanics than omnidecks.

I’m sorry but from my point of view, it’s just you that can’t bear loosing and/or always play the same side and/or unwilling to change your meta. When people throw you to water, swim or die : you won’t change the game and the sometimes very stupid cards in it, it’s there : just evolve with it.

Read that article. I was like you before, like “astrosansanban autowintrainzzz”, I changed my point of view on the problem after that. I still play shit decks but now I know why I’m loosing.

I won’t be whinning when I see a meta change toward trap decks. They never shined, let them be. They are as important to Netrunner as FA or Glacier.
All the “balance” change proposals here are “boost glacier, boost FA and let trap in the mud where they belong”. Sorry but trap can dispose of most if not all problems cited there. You can Blackmail or Faust to my IAAed Junebug anytime dude. You can Temujin a Snare! whenever you like. You can Rumor’s mill a Prisec if you find that fun.

87

A lot of this really looks like an attempt to play whackamole with the card pool until we end up with Draft - which is a fun experience because of the banter around the drafting but the actual gameplay sucks.

1 Like
88

Hey, hey, no need to ban yellow decks, FFG has printed Aaron Marron, so we don’t have to worry about tags ever again right?

Actually in microcosm Aaron Marron is a good example of why a banlist needs to be considered. An early Aaron can represent 6 draws and maybe 4 tags removed, at no clicks and for only 2 credits. Anyone who has played the man can attest that he’s completely worth his inclusion even when the only source of tags is Account Siphon, because he offers clickless draw at any time while also letting you remove tags for free.

But additionally, he invalidates Breaking News, stumps Personal Evolution and Jinteki Biotech kill, Sea Source and Hard-Hitting News, even hitting lower tier cards like Keegan Lane and Dedicated Response Team. That’s right, as a PE player I’ve been ruined by the printing of Aaron Marron - House of Knives isn’t so appealing when they just drawn 2 out of the 3 cards back. So much for bringing trap decks back. He’s a silver bullet for all of these cards and decks, much in the same way that On The Lam and and Decoy are for avoiding tags, but he’s good enough that even if you don’t fear those decks, you might as well run him.

When you say the number of silver bullets you need is >25% of the deck, that’s because those silver bullets are good enough in ordinary play that you don’t feel the pressure of running that card out of it’s best scenario. It’s not a silver bullet, it’s a gold bullet. And ultimately, that’s what happens: everyone runs Aaron Marron, and the decks that Aaron Marron hard-counters disappear. It’s not a Rock-Paper-Scissors mechanic, it’s a Rock-Paper-Other Paper mechanic - no reason to play Rock because every deck is Paper. And then the decks don’t stop playing paper like Aaron Marron because it’s good enough even without the deck it counters, so its not like we see a resurgence.

But I don’t really want to engage in this discussion. The premise here is, basically, yes, we’re not happy with how FFG is running things and we’d like to go back to how the game was rather than “adapt”. Elusive states in the OP that “he’s not trying to fix Netrunner, just play the game that he wants to play.” If he wants to live in a world without Sifr, and I want to live in a world without Temujin, why be a dick about it? This is for discussion on what that world looks like and how the most players could agree upon.

Which actually gives me an idea. Anyone want to try a “pick-ban” system for deckbuilding?

  1. Player 1 states Runner faction
  2. Player 2 states Corp faction
  3. Player 2 bans a runner card (which can include identities (although that sounds like it could be broken))
  4. Player 1 bans a corp card
  5. Player 2 bans another runner card
  6. Player 1 bans another corp card
    This continues until:
    X. Player X declines to ban another card
    X+1: Player Y’s last ban is lifted
    Then deckbuilding commences. The idea is that you ban just enough cards that you can make the deck you want to make (and you needed a plan in mind because you chose the faction), but decline before the cards you need get banned by the other player.

I think ultimately it’s a kind of a gentleman’s agreement not to do silly things with it and completely impractical for tournaments or any other play, but I think it’d be a fun exercise. I’m fairly certain it’s pretty abusable, but what do you guys think?

2 Likes
89

So you removed Rumor’s mill and Sifr but kept Sandburg, and claim the game is unbroken again ?
Yay, I can make people ragequit for 3 inf like I did before Rumor’s mill :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

I think the power creep is only at its begining.
I though power creeping before the rotation was very unlogic where in fact there’s an industrial logic doing so (new players would have a low entry ticket).

I’d like to play a game with you in six monthes when you will be banning 2-3 card per datapack because you banned this or this card thinking FFG have no editorial idea of what they print at time T, T+1 and T+2.

90

I mean that’s fine right? We can have a discussion on whether Sandburg should go on the MWL, or whether existing counterplay is strong enough (Political Operative, Councilman, early R&D lock, or having enough money to go in there and trash it are all options), or whether it’s just so good that it needs to be banned. Personally, I think that you can’t have both Sandburg and Friends in High Places without the tempo swing being too huge to be fair, but that’s just mere hypothesising. The point is that a discussion can take place at all, and that discussion is iterative. Elusive wants to have rounds of testing, where cards are added and removed depending on the state of the banlist meta. The Flashpoint cycle went by so quickly that when decks like Sandburg came and died within a month or so it was very difficult to examine how fair they were.

I’d maybe agree with you on the low entry ticket point if these powerful cards came out in a big box set or weren’t spread thinly across two cycles. Even then, this is a dangerous game: you’re admitting there that these power creeping cards are powerful enough that it makes having older cards worthless in a competitive environment, which doesn’t feel fair.

There is one thing you said is definitely right: FFG seems to be planning on an aggressive power creep with every datapack. The upcoming Mad Dash is definitely above the power curve and beats Freedom Through Equality in every way. God help us all.

1 Like
91

On Sandburg, no need of those 1 inf Friends. I made this lock working in NEH / 3x Jackson / 3x Interns. Friend instead of Interns means Sandburg could come back up to 21 times instead of 12 but no runner have 48c+run cost or even half the money to put in Sandburg trashing vs NEH to begin with. I had online insults about that deck.

The point was not Sandburg.

It is what those banned cards prevent or destroyed, like @rojazu said, this is plain whack-a-mole.

And that building a confort bubble set in the Ash spamming past days won’t help you to find new decks. I don’t know if something will destroy Aaron in a datapack or two, but what I know is Criminal needed draw since the begining of the game and that they welcome this.

92

Really you are just trolling. I try to engage people in discussion, but this is not worth bothering with. Play the game you like.

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93

Mad Dash has a mild downside if it whiffs (1 meat damage), has to hit on exactly one run, and does not clear a corp current. I think that is a fair trade off compared to FTE.

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94

Wait, there are Corps that run Assets that the Runner doesn’t want to trash?

(EDIT: Heck, it’s actually subjective whether you want to trash their assets or not. One Noise deck I saw willingly let Sensie’s fire over and over because he didn’t care that the Corp was drawing into their agendas to score; he was trying to mill them, and turns out getting two free mills every turn helped that plan. It… Didn’t quite work, because he got antsy and ran, and immediately got HHN’d and lost all his money and resources, but it was a plan, at least.)

95

What I consider a 'must trash’asset is something that left alone 1-2 turns turns into a win-condition.

This means it is so strong you have little option but to trash it or lose one way or another. This could be economy, card-advantage or damage. The political assets are the typical example.

The problem with this is that it creates a ‘fork’ for the Runner, essentialy two bad options. If it is very easy for the Corp to create multiple forks the game will tilt in their favor regardless of Runner actions. This might seem like interaction, but is really not. The line is thin though, and judgement is difficult to call.

In your Noise example the noise player had an alternate strategy, but many archetypes do not. This limits greatly the viable runners. This is an effect we’ve seen the last 6 months.

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96

Turns out that the list of ‘Must Trash’ Assets is longer than the list of cards named “Hard-Hitting News” :wink:

Instead of trying to ban Must Trash Assets, I’d rather just ban the card that actually makes trashing those Assets legitimately a bad idea. (This is further reinforced by wanting to ban Hostile Infrastructure over Bio-Ethics.)

This doesn’t mean I think Sensie’s is perfectly fine, it is a really powerful card that should probably see either MWL or Ban… (0 rez cost? Really? Maybe if it didn’t put a card on bottom, sure… Because then you’d have Anonymous Tip every turn, and that isn’t widely considered to be powerful…)

((Oh, and of course this is if we have to ban anything anyway. I’m still on that soapbox labelled ‘Ban Nothing!!!11’ but that’s not particularly relevant in this topic.))

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97

Right, and that’s fair.
I’m of the mind that HHN does more good for the game (in other types of use) than keeping the political assets, so the only point we differ is estimated judgement of the cards.
But really, sensie is above the rest in power. Bankers is not as powerful to leave a few turns, that’s why it is not on there.

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98

You’re welcoming sceptical comments you said but not this much, I guess.

This is Ash spam days, but worse, since today HB have access to more recursion in-faction tools than before.

99

That’s fair. I’m of the opinion that if the Political assets didn’t exist, we’d see CtM+HHN with stuff like Melange Mining, DBS, and other things. Heck, there’s already a version that runs Aryabhata Tech’s, pretty sure you’d see that version come to the front if you ban out Sensie. (Also I’m intrigued in the thought of trying a Dedicated Response Team CtM variant…)

I think that Sensie is the one with the highest Ceiling, but also the lowest Floor. At its worst case, it ends up stuffing extra cards into Archives. At its best case, it wins you the game.

Bio-Ethics: Worst case, you still did a damage. Best case, it wins you the game.
Bankers: Worst case, you got money. Best case, you got money. (This one has the highest floor and lowest ceiling.)
Clone Suffrage Movement: Worst case, there’s no Operations to recycle. Best case, it wins you the game off the back of repeated Friends in High Places and Restructures. (I feel this one has the lowest floor and doesn’t have the highest ceiling.)

The one thing they did right with the Political assets is that all of them are useful. None of them is a stone-cold brick, binder fodder card. All of them are subjective in their uses, though. Sometimes what you need is money, and Bankers (or sometimes CSM) gives you that. Sometimes what you need is cards, and Sensies (or, again, sometimes CSM) does that. And sometimes you just want to make the Runner bleed, and Bio-Ethics is there for you. (or… Huh. Sometimes CSM. Again. Hmm.) Most Often, I feel that Corps can use extra cards, and that’s why Sensie is standing out.

100

HHN is the core of the new NBN that Damon wanted to create: a tag punishment, punishing corp that doesn’t necessarily rely on FA or meat damage. Most people I know love this new take on NBN and think it’s one of the highlights of Damon’s run. If you ban HHN, you have to go back to 3x Astro and NBN being the FA faction, or there’s just no identify for the corp anymore. I wouldn’t support that,

2 Likes