NRDB in Review ┻━┻︵ \(°□°)/ ︵ ┻━┻ *9-9-16

Good shout, yeah apocalypse is quite good.

Its not so hard to pull off against spam decks because they tend to be ICE light on centrals and/or missing crisium grid. Of course, hostile infrastructure is the hard counter.

1 Like

Thanks for reading. As I said, I am not a game designer, I don’t presume to know how or why things seemed to develop this way.

Regarding randomness: I mean the way a game is preordained based on if you draw Wyldeside or not, or how the deck my swiss opponent is playing matters more than who my swiss opponent is.

Still love netrunner, still playing casually though.

18 Likes

I find myself liking playing casually more than competitive myself because I’m more free to try odd cards like Mumbad city grid or a runner that’s not anarch.

1 Like

I can tell you that this really boils down to two things.

  1. The playtesting system isn’t working. Either they need more testers, more time, or (the most likely) more ability to listen to the testers.
  2. The community gives too much of a perceived sense of the meta, causing people to not look twice at playing that NEH deck. Moderate level players like myself see that NEH and Dumblefork are the best decks, and then don’t try anything else, because they say that all other decks are worst. But in reality, moderate level players will have some decks that they play better. I mean, my highest win rate is with Titan Trnanational. I don’t think that that is the best deck, but it is the one that I am best at.f
2 Likes

I’ma play Apoc Kate until people stop going horizontal that much. Deus X against the hostiles should do work.

1 Like

deus X only stops 1 damage, so you’re still probably going to die.

4 Likes

Prevent any amount of damage it says? And Apoc hits all at once.

Edit: blah I see. Who decides these rulings? Fuck everything.

3 Likes

More specifically, it stops all damage once, and each asset trashed is a different instance of net damage.

3 Likes

Right, but Hostile triggers for each asset trashed, so it’s a simultaneous stack of “Trash a card -> do 1 net damage” for however many assets you trashed, not “X net damage for how many cards you trashed” .

4 Likes

Councilman should help you apocalyse those evil corps with Hostile Infrastructure though. Either it is rezzed when your turn begins so you don’t go for the big turn (trash HI instead), or it’s unrezzed and Councilman will stop them doing so before you bring on the doom.

4 Likes

Same; this is part of the reason I railed against these sorts of decks over in the old place we used to bitch about the meta’s direction, the Negative Play Experiences thread :). The two poles of perceived badness: Inevitability (perceived or not), and The Rigged Jackpot (upside variance that doesn’t vary much)–

It’s a really hard thing to do, keep a game balanced between those and feeling fresh while delivering a steady trickle of 20 cards a month. Means your playtesting really has to be on point, and also probably means you have to be willing to take breaks while you work on a particular issue. I think games like Netrunner need to get a little more quantitative with their playtest analysis and community feedback and a little less qualitative.

I don’t think the charge of “stale groupthink” really holds up in 2016 (I don’t think it did in 2013-2014 either, but that’s water under the bridge). There are tons of decks being tried all over my meta, and if all these 2016 Store Champs tags are correct, there are tons of decks being piloted to the top tables–but as @Chill84 says, that’s probably because (as we did here in MI) enough people got bored of only playing the try-hard decks. So there is lots of experimentation, and lots of “good enough” decks right now. But, as lots of good players have said: wait until regionals to see how many people stick with the “good enough”.

Anyhow, thanks for the article as usual. Less funny this week :slight_smile:

9 Likes

really hoping for this, myself. I think it will be at least partially true; a lot of decks just fall apart if you remove even one seemingly non-central card.

That said, the staleness I’m feeling runner side probably won’t be addressed any time soon; thanks to anarch’s powerful core set cards, followed by a long dearth of good card releases, followed by a blast of data packs and a big box full of just stupid good cards, means that almost none of the playable orange cards will rotate out for years, if ever.

On the corp side I do think that players can adapt to some of the more non-interactive decks and force them to interact again. I installed archives interface against our local IG fanatic the other day and from the look on his face I could tell he wanted to scoop right then and there. he probably should have, because from that point on it was an embarrassing blowout.

1 Like

The problem is that silver bullets are inherently non-interactive (because they need to work, and work really well, in order to justify their deck slot) – case in point, your archives interface story. Archives Interface is a card you put in your deck in order to defeat one archetype, and if you draw it in time, you will probably defeat that archetype. It doesn’t help you against any non-Museum deck (except in extreme edge cases), and there’s little to nothing the Museum decks can do once you’ve played it short of resorting to a hard-counter of their own. Which is just another layer of the same.

So, right: players can (and will) adapt–that’s not really the question or the concern, though. It’s what the adaptation is, and if it isn’t about finding a way to open more lines of play instead of drawing a tool that constricts gameplay down to an inevitable (or nearly so) path, then things probably aren’t going in the proverbial Right Direction.

10 Likes

lol, I actually came back here to say just that; I meant it as a flip example that there are answers to these decks, but you’re totally right, the escalating silver bullets thing is a big part on the non-interactivity issue.

I think the designers would like silver bullets to work like this: “Oh, my deck just cannot win against any opponent with this specific tech. If I want to win a wide swath of games, such as in a swiss pairing, I’ll need to switch to a more flexible, interactive strategy!”

when in reality it works like this: “Oh, my deck just cannot win against any opponent with this specific tech. But it completely crushes if they don’t have it, and no one like playing that card. I’ll roll the dice that I just won’t face that tech on the day and bring my NPE deck anyways.”

makes me really wish sideboards were a thing. Forcing deck to actually have a plan to beat their silver bullets (since it would become a virtual certainty that a majority of players would have the thing that kills your deck) might allow us to break out of this type of cycle? Is there a strong reason not to have sideboards in this game? what’s the abuse case I’m not seeing?

4 Likes

Archives interface has always been good in Noise as a method to get rid of CVS, not to mention removing a milled or trashed Jackson from the game permanently. The fact that it hates on IG/museum decks just makes it more playable

6 Likes

Which is such an important part of LCG’s anyway. I’d like this post twice if I could.

1 Like

A chronos project style event for the runner would be great with all this recursion going on. Maybe something like, the first time you make a successful run on all 3 centrals, the runner access all cards in archives and may remove any number from the game.

3 Likes

The part I bolded has become a big part of it, for me. Maybe I’m wrong, but it used to (say, ~18 months ago) feel like no matter the deck I was playing, I still had a shot in my unfavorable matchups, I just had to play without making any mistakes and get lucky. Now, it feels like “oh, you’re Val + PolOp/Councilman? I guess I just lose, then.” More and more it seems like certain matchups are all but unwinnable – and that’s not something I’ve ever thought to be true before. (Maybe it always was, but I personally didn’t see it. Who knows.)

It’s super discouraging, that’s for sure. I’ll see what things look like in the fall, maybe they’ll be better.

11 Likes

To my mind the reason why certain match-ups are unwinnable is that the corp right now is incentivised not to play ‘real’ netrunner. Runner engines are too robust and efficient to tax out effectively, and too quick to setup so gear-check rush is questionable. So many corps are hiding behind FA , defensive upgrades, or asset spam. If your deck is relying on a gimmick as its main plan of course if they get the right silver bullet it will be near impossible to win. This is compounded in larger tournaments where the temptation of trying to ‘dodge’ decks is higher (high risk-high reward strategy).

That said I’m sure there is a deck out there that can play the game and do good enough to win without all but completely relying on tricks. The problem then is giving up the win percentage against decks that would not have the answer to a gimmick.

TLDR: The farther from ice-and-money the corp gets the higher likelihood that a deck will just hose you. This is a trade-off for higher win percentage against decks that don’t counter you.

5 Likes

Yeah, but that is a part of having so many viable strategies now. You can’t defend against all of them.

1 Like