DLR needed WNP to work properly. DLR has been around since the first cycle. It wasn’t used successfully because 1. we needed a less combo oriented way to become tagged 2. it was either too slow or too easily countered without playing cards (inherent ability to trash resources).
RP was just boring, not because it was so good, but because the decks that worked were very similar and the game played out almost exactly the same every time. Basically you lived and died by Psy games, which isn’t exciting to me.
They aren’t banning the cards, they just make them harder to use, so you’ll find watered down versions of the current best decks, along with a lot of other decks that right now couldn’t compete within in the confines of the current meta (Aesops Econ Kate is one that leaps to mind) .
Most importantly though it gives the developers a lot more breathing room. Before, if you wanted to print a new Fracter that could compete with Lady, it would have to be too good to print, cause as it turns out, Lady was pretty much too good to print. If you want the game to grow you have to make it accessible to new players, and to do that you have to print new cards that are worth using over the old ones without breaking the game. I think this list is a reasonably elegant solution to the problem they had: some cards were just a little too far ahead of the curve power wise.
Personally, I’ve taken a bit a of a Netrunner break since Worlds cause nothing was changing until Mumbad started coming out. All of a sudden I’m pretty excited about figuring this new meta out, so it works for me.
I mean, does it really matter? If you’re just playing for fun at the pub, what does it matter if you’ve used the restrictions given with MWL? Or just tell people to start bringing MWL decks.
Jinteki got hurt the least by this list. They don’t have to spend any influence to use any of there in faction cards. If anything, RP just got way better.
You could always ignore the influence rules in a casual setting anyway! Play how you want.
But there will always be official rules for any game, what is the purpose of having different official rules for playing the game in a tournament? What does that add beyond confusion?
While I agree that each card on this list should have had a 1 influence cost increase (and a unique WNP), that shouldn’t affect cards in-faction, not when Jackson Howard is in NBN. Every corp deck is already penalized by 3 influence points because of a design flaw that Jackson fixes, now to build our decks with in-faction cards we’re going to be penalized too?
Architect shouldn’t cost HB influence, Eli shouldn’t cost HB influence these iconic cards should definitely be more expensive for everyone else. Same with SanSan or Clone Chip and Parasite.
If you’re going to penalize me for playing my in-faction cards, you damn well better give me Jackson for free.
I’m not totally sure about all the choices on the list, but I like the idea of this being a way to restrict cards without an errata and that the list could change in the future without having to take the effort of rewriting the rewrite of a card.
We could have used a bit more time warming up to the idea than they left us, but this was going to be a major change regardless of when it happened.
Eli 1.0 and Architect (which was sometimes a 1-of) are solid taxing ice that were seen in many RP lists. Admittedly, the parasite nerf might’ve helped Tsurugi make a reappearance.
But the faction that did get hurt the least was actually Weyland. Which leads me to believe that this list is going to be VERY reactionary, NAPDing (is it a verb now?) cards in the best decks, keeping everyone still play with different decks and not settle on one good deck.
I don’t understand why they went after cards instead of IDs.
Kate is still the best Shaper. NEH is still the best NBN, and ETF is still the best HB, RP is still the best Jinteki.
We might see more people playing Wayland and Jinteki, because of this list, but we aren’t going to see underused IDs in these factions coming out of the woodwork because Nasir, Exile, Making news or NEXT are all hurt equally as bad as Kate and NEH and ETF.
Instead of making this far reaching and rather confusing list, why not just cut influence for the top ids since we know that their ID powers are so much better than others?
Cutting those 4 ids all to 12 or even 10 influence would solve a lot of issues.
Not to mention how badly this hurts the already rarely played neutral runners, since they are entirely dependent on influence to fill out their deck.
I mean yeah you lose one point of influence for eli but that isn’t really that big of a loss. Also NAPD but that can be straight swapped for Fetal. What is really great for RP is the parasite Clone chip nerf making Tsurugi/Koimanu so much better.
Something worth discussing here is how this affects new players and the barrier to entry.
On one hand, it will be easier for new players to overlook the tournament rules and accidentally bring an illegal deck to a Store Champ, which won’t be a good experience. One could also argue that, with a new player’s likely smaller pool of available cards, this list could restrict them too much, especially since many of the affected cards are in the core set.
On the other hand, this could be a bit of a boon for casual events and GNKs. I think, for the sake of newer players, GNKs and casual events should choose to ignore the restricted list, since the restricted list is only for tournaments. But since competitive players will likely want to continue playing restricted decks for the practice, that could close the skill gap between competitive and casual players, since the competitive players will be nerfing themselves while others will play unrestricted. Unless a Day Job mat is on the line…
I would maintain that the size of the card pool is still more of a barrier to entry than these rules are. Interested to hear others’ opinions, though.
This is true. Datasucker is still out there, so it’s not completely gone, but it’s worse. Desperado Val just got hurt a LOT and that deck completely wrecked RP.
