Fair point. Like I said, Dagger is an obvious example. Other cards simply aren’t as obvious because the puzzle is incomplete.
I would reply that “some cards are only bad until they are good”, but that’s probably too Buddhist for anyone to stomach 
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I feel that mediohxcore’s third point is really important – without more great cards, especially ones that aren’t that great together (as in, require different decks) we won’t be seeing a shift, and the design team is really hesitant to print anything that’s broken. Even though those cards already exist.
This is, I think, the problem with assuming that anything will dethrone Andy. That’s not possible, until 15 influence is not enough to make criminal decks particularly viable. They can make some Shaper/Anarch decks come close by increasing the number of powerful cards there than Andy can’t spend influence on, but that’s the only way that comes to mind without banning/restricting things.
I feel like this is the issue with Lotus Field – it’s hard on Anarchs (though not intolerably so, with Knight in faction and 3-of desirable anyway), but does a mixed amount to Andy. Andy decks just run Knight or trade Yog in for Gordian Blade, in my experience. The worst they can do just forces Andy to change, but it doesn’t make Andy much worse to do either of those things… and, again, others get caught in the crossfire.
Hell, the easiest thing to do would be to errata some of the more painfully broken cards (Desperado and Yog) and just move on. Or, even easier, try and actually print cards that are almost as good as those, rather than significantly weaker. It’s not like they’ll stop existing just because we’ve got Blackguard and Force of Nature.
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This is a load of crap, IMO. Mark Rosewater invented this nonsense to justify selling packs of magic cards filled largely with garbage. There is no good reason to print these cards in an LCG.
Cards like exile and pawn are not the cards I am talking about when I say overcosted garbage. Pawn is free, exile is an OK ID, (he does something unique, at least). I am talking about a card like Hard at Work. You could have made this cost $4 or maybe even $3, and it wouldn’t have been OP. There is not a good reason to cost cards like this more aggressively so they might see some play rather than none.
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Bravo, Dan! I thought after Gencon LAST year, that a restricted/ban list would be hitting before Worlds. However, Katman/JinPE won, so, all was right with the game, right?
Then, we’ve saw Worlds '13; Andy dominance, with some Katman and a few Anarch thrown into the mix. FA dominated.
No bans, no restricted cards, no errata.
EDIT: let’s face it; it is time for Core 2.0.
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I’ll give a few examples of cards from the last two packs I think were costed badly that could have been good if they weren’t, and why I think these cards were a failure of design:
Scrubbed seems fair at $2, but Datasucker is a thing. If you want to print cards like this and have them make a splash, you need to cost them with Datasucker in mind. It could have cost $0.
Three Steps Ahead is almost reasonable in some cases, but if you compare it to other econ options and realize that criminal can’t take extra clicks, you realize it could have cost $0. Queens Gambit costs $0 and does something pretty similar, and it still doesn’t see play.
Unscheduled Maintenance could have cost $0 and it still would have been unplayable. They should have made this card increase install costs rather than place a restriction on the Corp that will hardly ever make a difference.
LLDS Regulator is too narrow. It could have said “your hardware can’t be trashed by the corp” and it still would have been bad. Cards like this need an alternative “mode” that prevents them from being totally useless. Being able to Aesop it doesn’t count.
Mutate could have cost $0. We should be encouraging this sort of fun card/strategy by aggressively costing the pieces. This card will never be broken in a tier one deck as it is printed, so why not give other decks a leg up by making this card as good as possible.
Midway Station Grid could be useful in the future, but right now, NBN doesn’t have enough multi-sub ICE. I don’t think this would have been oppressive in other factions at less influence, but it’s still possible the card could eventually do something in NBN in the future. I would have made it 3 influence.
Taurus is an cool card, but the huge upfront cost of it trashing hardware and the fact that it’s in the same faction as Archer will make it hard to hit with. Could have cost $4 and/or had a base trace of 3.
Cyber Threat could have cost $0 and not been a priority and it would have been totally fair. As printed, it will see no play.
Paper Tripping is very narrow. This card would be much better as a 1-of in criminal decks if it weren’t useless against most decks. Lawyer up is a great example of how a card like this can be printed so that it’s okay even if your opponent isn’t tagging you.
Power Tap compares miserably to Compromised Employee. Cost it at $0.
Social Engineering is very bad as is. You have to work hard to ensure this card will give you enough money to make it worth playing, and the corp is given options, making it even worse. Cost this sort of thing at $0.
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I think that Katman was and still is a really good deck, (the modern prepaid Kate decks are just Katman decks with a new, stronger, more consistent, less tag vulnerable econ engine) and was an example of something going right with the meta, (though the designers apparently missed it entirely, so hard to give props to anyone but the deckbuilder). There is a bigger issue with drawing conclusions from one tournament like this though, which is that Netrunner gives you a lot of value for surprising your opponents. If one person wins with a deck, everyone else tries and tests against it after the list is published, unless it’s actually high-powered, (read: full of mathy-good cards), most of the time it will be relegated to tier 2 forever afterwards. I really like that you can win a tournament with a surprise deck, but it doesn’t usually affect the meta in the long term when someone manages to do it.
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Agreed. I had games this past weekend where I both wiped a single Datasucker counter, and Siphoned a single credit, for the game state dictated that I needed to do this (yes, I won both games).
Honestly, I feel like if FFG wants to help diversify the meta the best thing they could do is go with blocks as in MTG. This would not affect casual play, as that’s something like 80-85% of the base or something from what I remember reading somewhere. It WOULD help with tournaments. I know it’s been brought up before.
This might not be viable until another core-type box is released, but I imagine something like a “tournament” box akin to a Cube is released with cards everyone wants (Hedge Fund, Sure Gamble, Armitage, Inside Job, etc.) and restricts cards we don’t want spammed (AS, Astroscript, Datasucker/Parasite) and/or changes the influence, but hopefully just the former so lots of casual players aren’t suddenly playing with tons of errata’d cards as that’s annoying. Then we play with maybe the 2 most recent cycles. Suddenly things like Currents make more sense as they make up a sizeable portion of the deck construction pool, for example.
I don’t expect they’ll ever do that as it runs counter to the mission behind the LCG idea. There’s also the idea that these cycles were not designed to be run independent of the entire Core set.
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FWIW, I am by no means saying the designers and testers have not made mistakes with various cards. I was trying to imply this in my first paragraph. I am not sure we will ever see Damon admit this, as he wants everything he designed to “work” exactly how he envisioned it. I think he has an unrealistic perception of how he expects things to work, and how the real world ANR works.
None the less, I think we have seen new playstyles and decks emerge from the overarching philosophies of “question everything” and looking at things from different perspectives.
On a microlevel of looking at the game, this interview more or less irritates me, because he seems so blind to the truth. On a macro level, if you aren’t thinking about the game the way he suggests, I think you will always be one or two steps behind.
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The most relevant quote from the interview occurs around 26:30 - where he openly admits that there are things that he wouldn’t say in front of the camera. Both this interview and the one with Lukas should be looked at with the PR lens in mind.
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So many insightful posts in this thread. Glad to see many others validating my own opinions and frustrations.
I feel the opposite. In an ideal meta, wouldn’t such a deck get piloted by others, and thus change the meta? I hate the idea of innovative decks being relegated to one-hit wonders.
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One would think. For example, I expected JinPE to be all over Gencon, equally splitting those playing Jinteki (this based on the surprise of it at the Boston Regional win, and how it was all over OCTGN lately). However, I didn’t see or even hear of one in play. RP, of course. Medtech, sure. Even a Tennin or two. But, no one I knew of saw that PE deck.
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I think the interview with Lucas Litzsinger has one of the most telling quotes. Lucas says that he wanted very much to avoid a banned or restricted list, especially in the early stages of the game, and so he was conservative with the cards released after the core set.
This relates to Medioxcore’s point that, to really create diversity, you need to print new strong cards. The danger with this is, if you aim to make a strong card and you miscalculate, it can easily become broken, and require a ban or restriction. If you want to avoid this, you have to avoid printing cards that you think will end up as powerful as astroscript or desperado- since if they end up even better, the game is in trouble.
I think the conservatism is a mistake, at least long term. It worry that too much of this will lead to a stale meta-game. I hope that Lucas decides to take more risks, accepting that this might lead to a banned or restricted list eventually.
That being said, its easy to overestimate the homogeneity of the metagame. Canadian nationals had a lot of very competitive players, and we had a fair amount of diversity. A Ken Tenma deck came in second, a PE deck made the top 8 along with a few HB decks, and I made the top 16 losing only a single game with my Tennin institute deck. It’s possible that there is only one optimal choice, but there are at least several non-crazy choices, even at the top levels.
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The PE deck is interesting because it is both very hard to play well and can fall short against very strong players. Hikes is one of the few who is both good enough to play a deck like that to a lot of wins and willing to take his chances against anyone in the tournament, including in the top 8 or top 16 or whatever. Furthermore, I don’t know that everyone realizes exactly how much better his deck is than the previous generations of PE decks and are still somewhat dismissive just because of the rep PE kill decks got before the release of HnP. The fact of the matter is that all of his top16 wins with PE that were on camera were due to runner mistakes. He should have lost them. Great players see this sort of thing happen against other great players when piloting this deck and decide it isn’t worth it to play rather than something that doesn’t rely on opponents screw-ups, especially when they’re gunning to win the whole thing. The deck is also public information now, which means people are probably better at playing against it, which leads me to my next point.
These decks do get piloted by others, just not usually at a big tournament. After someone wins with a novel deck, a lot of people try it out in their play group. Usually, I find that what ends up happening is that the deck doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Once people know the deck exists, it becomes a lot worse very quickly and nearly disappears entirely. For example, Scorched CI decks put up a few good performances a few months ago. Immediately afterwards, most people I played against who were using CI had scorches in their deck. Now, everyone plays Plascrete or stockpiles money against CI and it’s a lot harder for those decks to win. So basically, they have a short-term impact on the meta that quickly disappears.
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With specific regard to that deck, my local meta repped that deck hard as soon as the list came out of Boston, and while it had tremendous success early we figured out how to attack it, which brought its winrate back down to earth. Since we had figured out how to do so, we figured other groups of folks had done so too, and it got cut from consideration late in the testing cycle. Basically your second paragraph.
It’s a great deck, by far the best Jinteki net damage kill deck out there in that it can actually get ahead of even a great runner, but it isn’t as consistent as it looked at first.
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The problem with PE is that it lives and dies off variance. It’s best threat is multiple advanced remotes that could possibly be Overwriters or Ronins. If it puts the runner in a position where they have to run it can win, but it can also lose.
Why give the runner a shot at guessing the correct remote to run when you can just play decks that remove the need to interact with the runner at all? That’s the main disconnect between Damon’s dream and the reality of competitive play.
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It feels to me a little bit as if these “hard counters” we’re seeing stem from Lukas and Damon’s unwillingness to accept that they made some crazy good cards early on and refuse to ban or restrict. However, the strong cards we’re all talking about from the Core set are all on the Runner side, yet somehow the Corp is favoured at the moment so it must be the ubiquity of them we’re debating as opposed to the power level.
With the exception of Parasite, those problem cards all share a common attribute: they are Runner economy that key off a successful run - passively in most cases. They reward you for doing things that you want to be doing anyway. The way to downpower these cards would be to find ways to improve IDs like NEXT Design in order to prematurely progress the game into phase 2 and make passive run economy more difficult to get off the ground.
I think @mediohxcore is right that the game needs more cards of a power level that competes with the ones we’re discussing - but clearly they must put players to a deckbuilding choice: a highly competitive console to compete with Desperado; strong events/programs that cost influence (probably neutral) to compete with Siphon, DS and Parasite such that Runners couldn’t possibly carry all of them.
Finally, FFG could start utilising the keywords on the Runner identities. A Corp card that somehow punished “natural” IDs would nerf Andy and Kate; or better still a suite of Runner cards that could only be played by certain subsets of IDs would add an extra dimension to deckbuilding - if the naturals’ card(s) was bad but the other subtypes all had viable strong options then this would become a serious deckbuilding constraint.
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I agree. I think they are conservative with some cards because they are unsure of how powerful they may become, and in the process they make the cards unplayable. I agree it’s definitely a mistake. If we have more powerful cards we have factions with multiple powerful archetypes, which brings deception back into the game in the form of “guess my builld”. Right now NBN can do this, and it’s part of the reason for their success.
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It is good that the core cards are the most powerful cards in the game by a significant margin. This allows new players to have a fighting chance against older players in casual play without buying a ton of extra cards.
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I like this idea a lot.
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