NAPD Most Wanted List - *Update July 2016*

To make it a little nicer they did errata WNP to being unique.

3 Likes

Because why issue errata adjusting cards when you can invent whole new rules via FAQ :slight_smile:

lel at all Anarchs getting steamrollered in an effort to nerf Noise and Kate.

WNP getting the unique tag is the only good thing about this change, IMO

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Once all of the dust settles and we build our new decks to adhere to these restricrions, I feel like this is positive for the game. It just hurts now because we have all spent a lot of time building and honing decks and can have a personal connection with them. The influence restrictions are elegant and for that I applaud the design team. I am looking forward to seeing the new meta that emerges from this change.

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Wow. Justā€¦wow. I actually like the idea here, but man this puts some pressure on everyone with SCs looming.

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Anyone else struck by the irony of NAPD Contract being on the NAPD Most Wanted List?

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ā€œWho signed this contract? THEYā€™RE ON THE LISTā€ :slight_smile:

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Oofa doofa! This surely does change things up a lot.

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2015/12/31/napd-security-upgrades/

FFG explains their reasoning.

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Blue Sun iterations are helped a lot by this. It barely touches bootcamp and Weyland in general. The hammering of cerb / CC is a major win, as is less yog (datapike/enigma).

Never mind the bat taken to HB. Eli/arc nerf is going to hurt.

7 Likes

This is quite shocking but itā€™ll increase the diversity of the card pool out of sheer necessity. Who else is excited to start playing Pipeline in Shaper :smiley:

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well Iā€™m supposing this list is fluid, and cards can come back off the list. Anarchy spending inf on parasite and shapers spending inf on clone chip irks me.

And sansan. Astro was a problem, but sansan always seemed pretty balanced to me.

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With Astro being on the list, NBN is effectively forced to pay the influence that every other faction pays for Jackson.

Haarp probably gets hurt the most by this, although I reckon they can play more 1 pointers or Beale instead of Astro, it was never central to their gameplan.

7 Likes

Imagine explaining this to a new player who wants to attend a tournament.

Sure, people crying out at balance issues will be happy at first glance but then you realise that these cards are what were needed to make suboptimal decks perform better. What FFG will actually achieve is a less healthy meta. Imagine every deck runs Faust because they donā€™t have inluence for anything else anymore. And then they maybe will add Faust to this list.

HB Glacier will take a hit but theyā€™re strong enough, RP is completely dead (councilman, political operative destroyed their scoring plan). Is this their way of forcing a Weyland meta onto us? Now that the gameā€™s in a healthy place? Think of all the NBN popping up after Data and Destiny, while before the expansion, all we had was Astrobiotics and Butcher. NBN glacier finally became a thing.

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I like how the NAPD Most Wanted list is basically just decks @spags made last year.

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ā€œHereā€™s a list - everything on it is essentially one more influence.ā€ If youā€™re going to do it, I think itā€™s a pretty straightforward way of doing it.

Having said that, once you get on the banning/restricting/errating bandwagon you canā€™t get off. Already the ā€œwhy not this cardā€ calls have started.

I havenā€™t played for yonks, but I donā€™t really get the sense from keeping up with Stimhack that this was needed (other than perhaps the errata to WNP). I think it will shake things up a lot and the short term thatā€™ll be cool, but longer term Iā€™m not convinced itā€™s a positive development for the game.

6 Likes

Thematically, arenā€™t we way outside NAPD jurisdiction right now?

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Ugh, this is the worst way to nerf cards/decks/archetypes. Functional errata is an awful way to design a game. This will not serve to make the metagame more diverse, it will just change it (in the short term, there will be a shakeup to a different metagame) to one with less playable cards in: the metagame after these changes will be less diverse and there are other adverse effects for the longterm.

Thatā€™s not to mention how much baggage this has on deckbuilding and less competitive players. I can very much imagine new players turning up to tournaments and being turned away because they didnā€™t know about this list, or something a bit more malicious like a new player being told a card is errataā€™d to not work the way they wanted (cards donā€™t work as printed any more) or even that a card hasnā€™t been errataā€™d at all. You canā€™t just look at cards to know what they do any more.

Lastly, I want to point out how uneccesary this all is. We have seen in the past with factions/decks like Criminal that you can make factions/decks worse without printing ban lists. You just need to print reasons to play or not to play them (i.e. NBN being strong and Criminal having Testing/Bank Job). You do not need a ban/restricted list for a healthy metagame. You canā€™t just keep banning/errataing the decks that are good.

I already want Lukas back. This feels like a sick joke.

34 Likes

Love it.

Nice meta shake-up without banning or restrictions. Whereā€™s Datasucker though?!

Also,looks like a nightmare to implement on online deckbuilders? maybe?

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I think an even more straightforward way would be to just modify the cards like your paraphrase suggests (either influence, cost, or uniqueness) :). But Iā€™m very much pro-actively-rebalancing cards (and issuing tournament update packs).

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Iā€™ll be pouring one out for Kate tonight.

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