Museum of Contempt

Just a side-note: I always think it’s weird that people suggest turning a card into a “one a deck”. That seems incredibly unlikely considering that their current method of post release balancing is not even a year old yet. For Netrunner they seem pretty uncomfortable even with errata. For discussions like this I think it’s probably good to focus on whether MWL is a good idea or not. Endlessly dreaming up “how the card should be fixed” is just a recipe for disappointment.

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Yeah agreed it’s not going to happen, but imo would be good :smiley: The reason it makes sense is that it’s not really a power card, it’s more of an annoying set-up card that can recur other copies of itself. You make it 1 per deck and it makes the card super fair while still being appealing to some decks (the 50 card restriction starts mattering!). Just seems like it cleans up a ton of issues with the card and limits NPE while being flavorful since there’s already cards with the “limit 1 per deck” clause. So yeah unlikely to happen but it seems like a cleaner fix than MWL in this case (just like unique fixed WNP better than MWL).

As for disappointment, as I said I’ll be happily playing no matter what so I don’t mind having some dreams :slight_smile:

The only problem I have with “Limit 1 per deck” cards is that the more of them that are powerful, the worse this game becomes.

Imagine a card exists which, when drawn, guarantees you the win. Imagine that this card exists both for Runner and Corp, and if both draw their “I Win Button” then the game continues normally, but otherwise whichever side drew their Win Button, well, wins. (It can be argued that this already exists, but put those cards/arguments aside. Literally this card reads ‘Win the game in 1 turn if opponent doesn’t play the same card.’)

This sounds like a pretty awful experience, I mean you have 3/45 chance to draw your card and immediately win if your opponent didn’t also get their card. Why even bother playing the game, right? (45 because if it means you win, Corp will go to 45 to try and draw the card. Don’t get hung up on details.) All it boils down to is the random chance that you’ll see your card before the opponent sees theirs.

Well now, maybe we can make that better by just limiting the card to 1 per deck. Now instead of ~3/45 games ending stupidly, only ~1/45 games will! However, you’ve just made the game even more luck-dependent than it was before. The ‘lucky’ player who draws his 1/45 card will win more often now because his opponent has less chance to draw the accordingly powerful answer card.

This is why you must absolutely be very careful with Limit 1 Per Deck. If it’s powerful enough to limit it like this, and everyone will have it, then games become decided even further by who drew the lucky card, and matters less about the play of the game. Right now, Netrunner is being careful in that the Limit 1 Per Deck cards aren’t actually gamebreakingly powerful effects, in isolation. We can take Philotic Entanglement as an example. Just because you draw the card, and score it, won’t win you the game on the spot, 100% of the time. It still requires player skill to know when to score it for the flatline. Government Takeover is Limit 1 Per Deck more because it would break a fundamental balancing rule in deck construction. (There’s ridiculous decks that can be made if GT isn’t Limit 1 Per Deck.) While it can theoretically win you the game on the spot, more often it loses you the game on the spot.

(For More Information, See: MtG Vintage Format; Black Lotus.)

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Oh man, Black Lotus? I was behind you 100 percent until you said the BL word. I don’t think a single 1 per deck card can really change the game that much, but cards like deja vu and same old thing and archived memories can already get you 6 copies of a single powerful 3 of. I’ve seen people play hacktivist meeting to try and beat MoH, but the only thing that does it is Whizz. They desperately need to give runners other than Dumbledork the ability to fight against museum decks. Maybe stop giving Anarch cards like Salsette Slums

Oh I totally agree @CrushU . But at the same time I think a card like Museum is more interesting as a 1 of, since it limits its power directly (can’t recur other copies) and makes protecting it more important and having one running more “special”. It also leads to way fewer deck shuffles.

Basically Museum isn’t really a power-card so I don’t think of the limit as a power-level restriction, but instead as a true errata that makes the card more fun and interesting–it also actually drops the power level of the card simply by only having one of it.

Since there’s tutors people could still build “fun” museum decks, and it could still have a place in some special decks (maybe RP?) but it would limit the craziness and the constant shuffles.

I definitely agree with the philosophy that having lots of cards like Account Siphon, Clone Chip, etc as a 1 of would likely lead to a terrible game.

The problem with protecting museum, is that it’s likely to be impossible, you just can’t spare the ice early game. If the runner has a trivial time accessing museum, then you just wasted a single click of the runners. That is an annoyance, not a genuine path to victory. People need to learn to shuffle faster, or maybe just agree to cut the deck in casual games or something.

Heh. Talking about Vintage would detract too much, but BL’s an example of a card that is actually correct to have as a 1-of, because while it’s undeniably a powerful card, it would be much worse to have 4of in Vintage. I remember reading an article about how they decided which cards should ultimately be on the Restricted List for Vintage, and they talked about looking at a world with 4of BL and with only 1of BL, and the problem was not so much Drawing BL, but Drawing Multiple BL. So in that instance, they took the ‘Increased Variance’ hit involved there to avoid absolutely bonkers from happening.

(I’m trying to generalize here so it can apply to Netrunner. Museum may actually be an appropriate Limit 1 Per Deck, but its drawback might actually outweigh its benefits in that case. MCH is certainly not a candidate for Limit 1 Per Deck, in my opinion, due to the reasons listed in the previous post. That and MCH is already sometimes played as a 1of with Tech Startups to search for it.)

Museum might work as unique. To me the biggest drag playing against a Museum deck is how Sisyphean it feels, where any mistake means they snowball out 3 museums and a bunch of HI again. Making it unique would limit your ability to recur your entire engine in a single turn, put a limit on spamming alliance operations like Salem’s and Heritage, and make it so the Corp is still on a timer, albeit a much longer one.

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They can have all of them installed if they were unique, they just couldn’t have them all rezzed at once.

I am not sure if it has been proposed before but MoH would be a really useful card if it could return anything EXCEPT a MoH. Simple and elegant imho.

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I want an ocelot

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It might feel bad, but it doesn’t actually do anything!

Alright, so you’ve spent the time and the nine card slots to get your Mumba Temples, Museums of History, and Hostile Infrastructures set up. So all that must do something cool right? Something to advance your win or kill the Runner? Nope, it does the square root of sod all in terms of winning the game.

All that laborious setup does is provide a platform to enable you to start to build a base of non-ambush assets that do provide effects to win the game in some way, with some confidence that those assets won’t get immediately and trivially trashed.

It’s better to think of those cards as an alternative to ICE in protecting your real assets that do stuff, rather than useful cards in their own right.

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I’ve been screwed playing IG by plain old multi access on R&D a number of times, maybe runner decks could increase the number of multi access cards? Each shuffle of R&D does randomize it for new accesses. Simple draw and mimic always bests Jinteki, most of the time.

spy cam, hq multi-access, film critic. sports hopper (and other draw), you got a stew goin’

100% effective, 80% of the time?

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50% of the time, it works every time.

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