Very true. I retract my statement!
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Dude, my Gagarin article finally got posted, and the next day theyāre like āHope you donāt like NAPD.ā Got an entire day to feel good about myself =( I know how ya feel.
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Somewhere in this thread I read someone comparing the MWL to Magicās Banned and Restricted List. I donāt really think we need to make this comparison, especially since Wizards has acknowledged that they have royally screwed up on this sort of stuff in the past (remember the Reserved List, anyone?).
Once you set a precedent for banning cards outright, the obligation to ban other cards that are perceived to be a problem starts to rear its ugly head. Iād rather stay away from that. This list is much closer to Magicās Restricted list for Vintage, though none of the cards in Netrunner are actually so powerful that they literally break the game the way Magicās card pool does.
As Iāve stated multiple times, I think the list is more focused on promoting card diversity rather than getting rid of cards outright that warp formats. Banning cards is not good for the business model (itās not like sets go out of print in Netrunner, especially the Core Set), and itās never fun to have a card and find out you actually canāt play with it.
If I have to choose between the MWL and a ban list for an LCG (not necessarily a CCG), Iāll choose the MWL every time. Not that the MWL is even necessary.
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Man, thatās not been my experience at all! Then again, Iāve been playing a Chronos deck that (from my experience) causes DLR all sorts of problems.
Yup - I agree, @BenConn is op.
Man, you work fast.
Eh - necessity is in the eye of the beholder. Iām fairly sure that the actual games of netrunner will be better with this approach.
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Netready femme as a primary sentry breaker.
THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH
Iām happy about this. They did it in an elegant way thatās easy to understand. I am sad to see us finally leave the era of being able to brag about having no errata, but in the end I think this is better for the game. The old strategies will still exist, but will now have more pronounced weaknesses and wonāt be the only competitive options on the block. Sure there will still be ābest decksā but this list is specifically targeted at cards that by their existence invalidated entire swaths of other cards. For example:
Parasite: itās not just a great card on its own in every situation, it also combos well with other great cards like datasucker and clone chip. On top of that, it harshly invalidates dozens of low-strength ICE that people wonāt even consider because āit dies to parasiteā. People will start using more low-strength ICE, which in turn makes parasite better - but if your opponent is using parasite, you know they have holes elsewhere in their deck that introduce vulnerabilities. Itās even more expensive than that to combo it with clone chip, which made the datasucker combo exponentially more powerful and turned off a lot of dangerous-to-facecheck ICE. On top of that, itās ubiquity and inexpensiveness also made positional ICE like Chum, already a precarious but potentially useful category of cards, into complete garbage.
NAPD: Not only did it effectively delete the existence of other 4/2s for almost all purposes, but it also did even more to kill 3/1s because youāre generally better off with 1 NAPD than 2 3/1s even if itās easier to score the 3/1s AND they have a great benefit when you score them. Until Food it even killed most 5/3s.
Yog and Lady: They had severe warping effects on corp deckbuilding. Competitive decks minimized their barriers (many top decks at worlds had Eli and maybe one copy of another barrier, because whatās the point when Kate gets Lady out?). And for the entire history of the game, low-strength code gates have been bad to various degrees. Enigma only recently made a modest comeback. But so many cards were just not options because if you used them and saw a Yog in even 20% of your games, youād get blown out by the single card in an otherwise winnable game, and it just wasnāt worth the risk.
Itās going to be so nice to be able to risk playing a slightly slower runner deck because you wonāt see blisteringly fast advance in half your games like it is today. Sunny can come off the shelf! You still risk a really bad matchup if someone wants to spend their inf on astro and sansan, but now they canāt also have all the architects, elis, NAPDs, and Biotics they wanted at the same time.
Itās going to be nice to actually consider low strength ICE, more code gates and barriers, program destruction, etc., and be able to explore strategies that previously would get too hosed by either prepaid kateās oppressive amount of money, parasites oppressive control, or the oppressive feeling of someone with Yog/sucker/desperado making infinite runs for no cost. Those cards will CERTAINLY still be around, but now they wonāt all be comboād together in the same deck as each other and a full suite of RD and HQ multiaccess. There is no way these changes reduce the number of decks, because the remaining cards donāt invalidate entire swaths of other cards.
Runners didnāt switch to the central-only breakers because Caprice turned off all remote play. Caprice is an amazing card, but she did not invalidate a chunk of the cardpool. Partly because her influence cost was appropriate.
Corps didnāt suddenly stop using non-ETR ICE because they needed to stop account siphons. We arenāt all stuck putting 3x Crisium in our decks to deal with Siphon.
There are tons of super powerful cards out there that arenāt on the list because they donāt warp deckbuilding and the cardpool and the meta the way the cards on this list do.
Iām sad that we have errata, but this was definitely the best way to do it and it can only improve the game overall. Literally 2 days ago I was thinking that maybe I should take a break from netrunner because I was tired of the limited number of dominant strategies, which all just coincidentally included the cards on this list, and have been dominant in an unbroken line since those cards were released, with Yog being the only one that saw any kind of hit, thanks to Lotus Field. Literally unbroken dominance since release. Even when explicit counter-cards are published. Even as the meta otherwise changes around them.
Thatās why this is good for the game.
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People thinking NBN FA is gonna disappears will have some Nasty surprise during the sc and regionals season. Iām pretty sure fast and rushy decks got more buffed than nerfed here .
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I donāt care, theyāre both cards that promote uninteractive play. To the trash it goes.
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I agree with this, FA is better now that the best anti-FA deck (that also had good overall MUs) is effectively gone. And @aerosaucer wasnāt so that NAPD together with jackson really helped even out the corp-runner balance. I think itās just inherent in how the game works that corp needs selfprotecting agendas to smooth out variance. This is more important for a competitive game than slightly more varied agenda suites.
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Self protecting or agendas that give you something for the steal, really. Exploda might replace NAPD in some decks.
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I donāt necessarily disagree; but in that case all 4/2s should be self-protecting in some way, or NAPD needs a bigger downside - or they could just not print any other 4/2s? I think much like with Food, having NAPD cost an influence is probably the way to go.
As Orbital_Tangent said, 4/2s that give you a benefit if the runner steals it are one way to go. In its previous state, NAPD just crowded out all other 4/2s and effectively lowered the card pool.
EDIT: Also, Jackson is kind of necessary for the game - the game was created with one big glaring flaw, and that was agenda flood. Iād like to see each faction just get a different, thematic way of dealing with agenda flood instead of just requiring all decks to pack 3x Jackson. You are totally right something like Jackson was needed to balance corp v runner.
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Blackmail doesnāt interact with ice - that doesnāt mean itās not interactive in general. There are plenty of interactions involved in a run in which ice is not involved.
The game is netrunner, not icebreaker. Ice is only one small part of the interaction going on between corp and runner. There have been very few really good decks that tried to win purely through the interaction of ice and programs, on either side of the board.
Saying the corp canāt interact in a Blackmail run sounds to me kind of like saying they canāt interact when you play Sure Gamble.
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Blackmail is a problem because it takes the part of the game that is usually the centerpiece of interactivity and makes it uninteractive.
Sure Gamble isnāt a problem because economy isnāt based on interactivity in this game - but if you put Sure Gamble into a game like Conquest where the economy is interactive it could well be a problem.
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This most wanted list is definitely not most wanted. I can see the issue that they were trying to address, and they did it in a very inelegant manner with a lot of collateral damage. The real problem that everyone has known about for years is the power of Astroscript. But instead of dealing with this they nerf a whole bunch of cards. A simple card change such as the first Astroscript scored is a 3-2 and each subsequent Astroscript is a 4-2 would have solved the problem. Did they need to smash NAPD, San San or even Architect, no! These were just tools that the runner had to play around. Ironically, adding it up, you can still make a strong NEH fast advance deck, itās now just a hell of a lot harder to stop it because clone chips are more expensive. I donāt see a reduction of Astro biotics in the meta, if anything it might become more prominent.
Whenever you start getting into a debate about which cards ought to be banned/nerfed it comes down to personal opinion. Personally if I could remove 3 cards from the game they would be Housekeeping, Power Shutdown and Blue Sun. I hate cards that punish the runner for not doing anything. And why the hell didnāt they put Caprice Nisei on this list - A card that basically turns netrunner into a game of rock, paper, scissors.
And donāt get me started on the runner cards. In my view there are NO Runner cards that need to be modified in the game. I have played the game now for about a year and a half, and in that time the runner has never been the dominant force in the game. In recent times we have only just started seeing runner become strong. Kate is boned! Was it really necessary to destroy an elegant archetype like prepaid Kate with one fell swoop? Interestingly, this thread is the first time that I have ever heard anyone complaining about clone chip. In my view clone chip for the runner is similar (but weaker) than Jackson Howard for the Corp, itās going to save your a$$ at some time or other. Not anymore! If Iām the Corp now Iām playing all sorts of evil crap knowing that CCs are minimised or at least more expensive. And I hear lots of people whining about parasite recursion, that is just a part of the game. Prior to Christmas I built a deck list with tournaments in mind that was based around ice destruction which is a completely legitimate part of the game. Or at least it used to be! In fact all of my lists written over Christmas time can be binned now, will FFG give me back the time I spent on those?
In chess people talk about the concept of the space left behind, meaning that when you move a chess piece it opens up new opportunities/problems because of the space left behind. What many seem to be forgetting about with these changes are how powerful it is going to make other cards, particularly Corp cards. There are some pretty evil pieces of ice out there, particularly in regards to trashing programs and doing heaps of damage, without the ability to parasite away some of this crap the running game is doomed. I donāt know about you but I have rarely made a comeback from losing my RIG once it is set up.
The most worrisome thing about this new direction is that it is very reactionary and means that we are not walking on stable ground into the future of this game. What changes will they make down the road, lots of people have talked about Faust, are they going to take that tool away from us as well? Will we have to write a new deck list for every tournament? How often are they going to make these changes? And how arbitrary are they going to be. If they can nerf Prepaid VoicePad and Yog they can nerf anything. This is a sad day for Netrunner, and my view of FFG has plummeted following this decision.
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I disagree vehemently. Blackmail is fine, and interactive. The corporate can bluff assets as agendas, Caprice or Ash their stuff, or build remotes that demand Blackmail use. Just because it circumvents the normal rules of the game doesnāt mean it is problematic; Nasir does and he is antisynergistic with winning Netrunner games. Blackmail just demands skilled counterplay.
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NBN FA goes unchanged except it loses some influence that was almost inevitably spent protecting against Clot [Ash] and Parasite [Architect].
Say, werenāt those the Runner cards just got Nerfed?
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Obviously Blackmail is dealable. That doesnāt mean itās good for the game. It makes WAY more players angry and frustrated than it makes excited.
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Reg Ass Val just took a huge hit with these changes, the only reason to nerf Blackmail on top of them is because of Val DLR, which can be successful without it. Iāve sat across from many people tilting to Blackmail so I know of the hate for it but it seems silly to add to this list.
Iām not saying anything should be done now that it exists. I just wish it had never been printed.
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