I keep seeing people use this phrase. What is “real” Netrunner? Anything you do with your cards is Netrunner. Killing your opponent with a Boom to the head is Netrunner. Asset spam is Netrunner. Tagging your opponent is Netrunner. Glacier builds are Netrunner. Fast advance is Netrunner. The mechanics that haven’t been created yet that change how you interact with the gamestate will be Netrunner.
The last person I read who used this phrase said that “real” Netrunner puts a clock on the Corp through decking when refering to MoH, and that was refuted by Damon in the cast. While Corps can lose from running out of cards, it was never meant to be an artificial clock on the game.
I wish people wouldn’t have such a myopic view of the game. If you only want a game that creates new breakers and ice and economy cards to cast those, it’s going to get stale real quick.
Agreed with everything except your clock comment. Damon did not refute that this is an integral mechanic of ANR; he asserted it. That is why MoH was MWL’d, because it subverts this defining and necessary mechanic of ANR. The clock isn’t ‘artificial,’ it was designed for a reason, and is crucial to the health of the game and the sanity of players.
Without the clock, ANR becomes another creature combat game, which many of us came to ANR to escape.
Real netrunner games end when a player has seven agenda points, a runner is flatlined, or the corp is decked, or a netrunner card states that the game has ended in a different way, due to the Golden Rule (like Harmony Medtech).
Mumbad cycle caused a very dramatic increase in the number games that failed to meet any of those ending conditions in tournament play. It is now much more difficult to play real netrunner in tournament play. It doesn’t matter whether “the corp is decked” remains a major ending condition, but rather that each matchup retains some kind of ending condition.
Then ask him why Caprice & Blackmail are still out of MWL, doing stuff in our remotes.
Nerf both or none, k but those one are going to be the new meta.
NAPD on MWL but Ash or Caprice out is illogic.
I play a Nisei deck that have no need of 3 inf. Help me
NAPD was so far above the power curve it was in every single corp deck, even ones that had no intention of ever scoring a 4/2 agenda. That is absurd. Blackmail and Caprice on the other hand, while certainly powerful cards, are nowhere near as ubiquitous.
There is a separate discussion to be had surrounding whether Blackmail and/or Caprice are good design, but there is no real reason to put them on the MWL when they are in no more than their fair share of winning decks.
That’s not the way I understood his comment. My understanding was that the clock he envisioned was the runner getting their rig assembled and enough money to make runs undeterred.
Almost every card game uses the deck as a “clock” in that case, and 99% of those games have a way to recycle the discard pile ad infinitum if needed.
So if you try to prevent those from happening you aren’t playing “real netrunner”? I guess we sould errata plascrete and the black file then as they also stop those things from happening.
Listening to Damon’s interview, it seems there is a really odd reasoning behind MWL inclusions. It seems that he aims to use the MWL to target overeffectively designed cards, but only if and after they have caused issues in “the metagame” for a period of time. That just seems like a deliberate policy of having a continual chain of “problematic” cards each having their time in the sun to be the resident design issue.
All of Damon’s points seemed logical to me. One of the criteria for being put on the list seems to be being overly effective to the point of being ‘beyond’ the usual considerations of when you build a deck.
Ideally you should be trying to build something that works towards a specific purpose, and you should have to consider each part carefully. When a card becomes an ‘auto-include’ that almost always suggests that it is powerful or effecient in a generic way that pushes other cards out of the picture. Sure you’ll win with it, but the creative potential of the game overall will suffer.
All of the cards on the list seem to have narrowed the creative possibilities of the game at one point or another, either alone or when combined.
Val’s ratio is #2, 1.5% behind Whizzard, and it’s all about Blackmail because she can afford Wyldside, just saying.
Caprice, I play her, is an unfair card, because she asks 1inf polops. This is 1inf that is a passive silver billet, inf should be from the active part of your deck (to me). So if you ask an effort for polop, then ask an effort for Caprice.
Ash is ok. But Caprice isn’t. If the corp have 1c, she can still defend with a rezzed Caprice. With Ash, it’s more difficult for the runner because trace 4+1 isn’t a wall.
Also : you see a server with a rezzed ash vs a server with a rezzed caprice. In one case the runner know he can make it, and can count exactly his money needs (2x run +3), in the other, run+3 and he’s still 66% unsure.
well, looking at Faust, Damon doesn’t seem to believe that the card is broken. he believes that full-on meat damage flatline decks keep it in check, but with a global meta of ‘weyland sucks,’ regardless of how true it intrinsically is vs how true we as the players made it to be based on our perceptions, it wasn’t common enough to keep Faust in check, and therefore it needed to be brought down a bit
i recall a tester on the Netrunner Geeks fb page going on a semi-rant the other day when someone called them out for letting them release a card like Faust in the first place, and he went on to say that there was no way they could predict the meta of Wyldside + Adjusted Chronotype + Faust + D4v1d. and it took months for those decks to really take shape too.
basically what i’m getting at is, a card can be overcost/undercosted/overpowered/unbalanced/etc. in a vacuum, but once it’s released into the wild, players will take those cards and find crazy shenanigans with them that the testers didn’t encounter in their own meta
Indeed, but isn’t this an intrinsic part of a “metagame”? Isn’t it almost the definition of it? Cards will always be better or worse than their “raw” power levels based on the number of counter cards or victim cards that you expect to face.
Trying to stop that happening, or to mitigate the results, seems to me to be a Cnut-ish attempt to hold back the very forces that cause the phenomenon of a metagame in the first place.
Yeah I really don’t get this - the problem with Weyland kill is landing the tags and the way Faust saves you money and deck slots lets you fight those tags more effectively, not less, than traditional rigs.
The Argus ID ability does fight Faust, but Weyland kill as whole really doesn’t to my eyes. Am I crazy?
Yeah, this was exactly what I was about to say. I’m sure a lot of people tried damage decks as a response to Faust - I know I did, and it’s daft to assume people wouldn’t - but it doesn’t work for this reason. The fact that Faust is in the same faction as I’ve Had Worse also mitigates this possible downside to Faust a lot, especially if you’re trying to fight it with net damage instead of meat.
The idea that people wouldn’t pair Faust with Wyldside + Chronotype is crazy (as is the idea that there’d be an Anarch deck without D4v1d in it). Surely it’s the first place most people would go?
On the other hand, I do have some sympathy for the testers here, as it wasn’t really until post-MWL that Faust + D4v1d + cutlery decks really got out of hand. I spent a lot of last December (post-D&D but pre-MWL) trying to make that set of cards work, and they were great against glacier but NEH was just too fast for them - even with Turntable. (I ended up with a weird MaxX variant because it was the only one that even had a chance of keeping up.)
That also means that in a sense that tester comment can be interpreted as supporting popeye’s point: they didn’t spot Dumblefork because it was enabled by the original MWL hitting NEH, and represents the set of new problematic cards that shook out of the first MWL. I don’t think, as popeye does, that it represents a deliberate policy to give certain sets of cards a period in the sun - it just seems kind of inevitable that there will always be a best set of cards and it doesn’t make too much sense to just keep hitting them as they’re revealed.
I think one of the things people are forgetting is the most successful Faust deck, Dumblefork, deliberately didn’t run through whole servers, they used parasite and cutlery to surgically disassemble servers at their leisure. Damon’s argument is that playing the shell game with Faust is dangerous, and that’s absolutely true, but if you just kill one ICE per turn, and draw up in between to avoid the kill, you’re draining the corp’s resources at no risk to yourself.
IF there was no ICE destruction, Faust would never have made sense as a main breaker, because the meta would have reacted as Damon suggested it should have.
