Granted it does synergise with that, but even under those conditions it’s probably only approximately equivalent to an in-faction Easy Mark (in terms of expected value per card and click). For me the reliability is simply too poor to play it purely as an economy card, even in a PPVP deck. I would need to be experiencing a current-heavy Corp meta to be considering it.
Remember, Lukas’ interview tells us that the design team have been designing conservatively up until now and the Runner currents are intentionally weaker than the Corp’s. Those two factors combined should tell you that Runner currents are pretty weak sauce in the grand scheme of things.
The Runner currents are weaker than the Corp ones because Runner decks are intrinsically advantaged when it comes to using currents, as Runners tend to have more free deck slots. If Runner and Corp currents were equally strong, Corps would be greatly disadvantaged overall.
Overall Corp winrate at 55% is completely fine-- Chess is 55-45 White. Besides, initial analysis indicates Runners do better at the top level anyway, and this lines up with standard theory. Obviously a full OCTGN dump will be required to verify this in greater detail, but right now I’m quite happy with the state of game balance.
I like the feel, thematically speaking, that the Corp should be the favourite but from a game balance perspective it’s not really acceptable - especially given that in the double-elimination bracket you don’t play both match ups. In fact I think I’m correct in thinking that you can theoretically win a double elimination bracket without ever playing one of your decks so a large asymmetry in the relative power levels doesn’t seem right to me.
I’m not intimately familiar with chess, but I was always given to understand that white’s advantage is very significant and at the highest level black is playing for a draw. There are a few chess experts on the forums here so perhaps they will correct me if I have that wrong? It would not at all surprise me though if and when computers eventually solve chess that black, in fact, cannot win. How does chess deal with who plays which colour in tournament or league play?
Returning to Netrunner though, NEH being at 69% but the average only being 55% is not a good thing. The average tells us the “real” story about the game state, based on what people are actually playing, but that NEH statistic gives us insight into the “theoretical” game state. What I mean by that is that it’s clear that there are a lot of players doing horrendously and dragging down the “real” average simply by not playing NEH and if they switched they would be much better off.and the game would become really stale.
To give you some numbers, if you assume that a third of all decks currently are NEH (for the sake of argument, but a conservative estimate if numbers from Gen Con and CA Nationals are reliable) then the mean win rate of all other Corps combined is only 48% - and that statistic gets worse the greater the proportion of NEH decks becomes.
Theoretically this shouldn’t happen in deck building games because the environment is dynamic and runners would respond by creating counter-decks if everyone was playing NEH with 100% certainty. But it turns out (allegedly) that there isn’t a great option against NEH at the moment. In the thread responding to Damon Stone’s interview it was noted that El-Ad (Canadian National Champ) and his team tested extensively in trying to find a deck that was primed specifically to beat NEH but couldn’t do any better than Andromeda. Most of the reports from the business end of those tournaments are that NEH goes close to undefeated, even at elite level.