I’m hoping that Weyland gets at least a ‘limit 1 per deck’ 3/2 agenda to make things somewhat even. There’s a reason the most popular factions just happen to have the most number of easy to score agendas.
Short answer to this: 3/2’s are really important and the game is worse without them.
Netrunner is a really complicated game, both to play and particularly to design and balance. Because of that, removing certain aspects or cards will often have far reaching effects that are way beyond what you might expect.
Let’s look at 3/2’s as an example. I assume that the reason that people, possibly including Damon, would rather they don’t exist is because they’re too powerful and play in to fast advance strategies too much. They presumably think that if you remove them, you’re more likely to get ‘real’ Netrunner with agendas sitting advanced in remotes for a turn.
And that’s true, but doesn’t explore the next step, which is how runners would respond to such a world. If 3/2s didn’t exist and almost all agendas have to be advanced over multiple turns to be scored the ‘correct’ response for a runner deck is to set-up a remote lock, repeatedly take money and not make any aggressive action unless the Corp actually does something. This is not a healthy base state for the game, nor will it lead to enjoyable experiences. You might be able to mitigate some of this issue with traps, defensive upgrades or the like, but they are just plasters trying to staunch the bleeding caused by a poorly designed framework.
When you introduce 3/2s you automatically broaden the scope of your game. Now the Corp can fast advance, they can never advance, they can play a shell game. The runner is forced to be more proactive, because the Corp can score points in a variety of ways, some of which are hard to predict. It’s more interesting for both players.
Obviously there is a limit to how many 3/2s everyone should have access to; 3 to 4 per faction is probably about right. But removing them altogether would not be a good idea.
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I disagree about 3/2s. In short i think that they cause more design problems than they solve, they funnel deck design, and i think that the game probably has enough support cards that would create a healthier type of FA and NA in the absence of 3/2s.
That said, i think that other changes would probably need to be made to the game too, so within the bounds of those things that FFG would be willing to change i would suppose that a decent 3/2 for Weyland might help them out. Perhaps FFG could just introduce a ruling that no deck can have more than, say, three 3/2s.
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If there’s were no 3/2s fast advance and never advance is dead, full stop. Fast advancing a 4/2 requires a Jeeves model bioroid and a biotic labor every time.
If it’s that trivial to set up a remote lock, that’s the real problem. And as we’ve seen, giving people 3/2s doesn’t alleviate the issue, it just makes people really dependent on 3/2s. This is not good for the scope or health of the game.
edit: I think I’m disagreeing less than I seem to be. For the reasons you give, a wider range of advancement strategies is better under ideal conditions; I’m just saying that conditions are far from ideal.
And even under current conditions, Merger-quality 3/2s are fine; slightly better ones might be too. But if a blank 3/2 is still an obvious include for the average deck, that’s kind of suboptimal. It would be nice if we had more reason to consider 3/1s, or similarly difficult decisions to make.
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So, here’s the challenge. You can build whatever deck you want, but your win condition has to be scoring out (so not net damage, combo or kill) and you can’t use any 3/2’s. Nor, for the sake of argument, can you use other fast advance or never advance tricks. You’re going to score out the old fashioned way; by scoring 5/3s and 4/2s in a remote over multiple turns.
I’ll take a generic Shaper deck with some breakers and Beth and I’ll spend the first few turns setting up my board. Once I’ve done that I’ll mash my face in to Magnum Opus five times a turn, every single turn, unless you’ve got four points or more and have left an agenda advanced in a remote.
You can play this game a bunch of times, and you’ll find two predictable results.
- The Shaper deck will win the vast majority of games.
- Neither player will have any fun.
Setting up a remote lock is incredibly easy given all the tools available if there’s no pressure on runners to respond to other threats while deck building. All that you achieve by removing all 3/2s from the game is limiting the different win conditions that the corporation has available to them, which at the same time allows runners to focus on the ones that do remain.
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That’s a straw-man scenario. In order to make it such that removing 3/2s from the game means that the game doesn’t work well, you’re implicitly ignoring 3/1s, 2/1s ( which i don’t like much either ), and support cards that allow the Corporation to FA 4/2s and NA 3/1s, or even combo to FA 5/3s and NA 4/2s. You’re also explicitly removing the threat of damage from the game.
As i said though, i think other things in the game would need to change too in order for the removal of 3/2s to work well.
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It’s not a straw man, it’s an over-simplification of reality to illustrate that removing 3/2’s from your deck building pool will constrain both design and play space for the game.
Neither fast advance or never advance can exist as archetypes if the game doesn’t have a supply of 3/2’s; at the very most they would be a minor strategy in a different archetype (and note that combo is it’s own archetype, not an extension of fast advance). In addition, the above shows that you’ve also removed a pure glacier scoring strategy from the game; it’s not possible to score out in this situation unless you’re playing a damage hybrid.
The game is at it’s healthiest when there’s a wide variety of viable victory conditions for both sides, but especially the Corp side.
It is possible that you could remove the need for 3/2’s, but you would need to completely redesign the game and the card pool from the ground up.
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In short, in the main, i think i much prefer decks to need more than one strategy, and this is especially true of using FA and NA as a strategy. I don’t like decks being able to be built entirely around either of those two, at least not without having some serious drawbacks, if at all.
But yes, i think we are getting into redesigning the game at this point.
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To take this discussion further, what should 3/2’s look like if they are reprinted?
Should a 3/2 with an ability unrelated to over-advancing always be a 1 per deck? Should FFG extend this restriction to Accelerated Beta Test, or is the risk of an incompetent beta test enough to balance this card post rotation?
Do future non neutral 3/2’s need any abilities at all? Do they need drawbacks?
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They’ve already included different ways to NA or FA 4/2’s and larger that isn’t just Jeeves and Biotic. I already posted some examples five posts before your post:
No, they are not as good as SSCG, Biotic, and to a lesser extent Jeeves at scoring 3/2’s. But, that’s kind of the problem, there’s no reason to explore other scoring mechanisms, when you have a much easier way to do it with Core set and early cycle tools.
And, there is no reason to think they won’t design other complex ways to FA and NA large agendas. The main problem with 3/2’s is that they are too easy to use, and competitive Corp players will have pretty much the same agenda packages. While, I don’t like the threat of losing an archetype, making one too powerful has the similar effect: homogeneity at the top tables.
If the lack of 3/2’s does come to pass, the designer do have to consider the Corp/Runner imbalance that is likely to occur. But, they don’t necessarily need to neglect the 3/2 problem to avoid such an imbalance.
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I can’t wait to rely on early premier to score a 4/2.
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Corps splashing more Draw will become a thing. I’m honestly excited. I keep trying to utilize draw cards for a more rushy strategy, but end up cutting them because Jackson gets the job done.
I would go one further than Chris here, not only do you need a wide array of 3/2 but you need 3/2s with impactful scoring abilities. ABT is about right here, as is Project Atlas if you’re in Titan. Astroscript has proven itself to be above the curve here but a more limited version of this design could be cool, such as a clot-like stipulation built into the agenda counter.
What you describing is exactly what the meme “Gordian NPE” is referring to, for those who do not get it yet 
It’s important note that historically glacier has been able to beat mopus decks through two means:
- The inability to contest early assets like sundew or Adonis have meant glacier decks can set up very fast and get a taxing-ish remote.
- Caprice (not ash, not any other upgrade) has had such a high multiplier on taxingness of a server that glacier can still score in the late game.
You basically need something that increases the path length of servers by a factor of larger than 2x in order for glacier late game to be able to beat mopus.
You also need strong remote asset econ that can punish lack of remote pressure.
I think what Chris is talking about is one of the two major design challenges of rotation.
- Make sure asset spam isn’t insane
- If you succeed in that, make sure corps can score out of remotes against mopus.
It’s also important to note that you cannot have ice alone beat this strategy, because in doing so you’ve power creeped the taxingness of ice tosuch an insane degree that running becomes terrible as you are paying 6+ to break every piece of ice that’s all cheapish to Rez.
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The correct way to do Merger:
Fixed Merger.
3 Advance, 3 Agenda Points.
Fixed Merger is worth one less Agenda Point in the Corporation’s score area.
1 Influence.
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Why is that good?
Maintains the balancing factor of the original Merger while allowing the corp to reduce agenda density. I still don’t think the 1 inf is necessary though.
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Because then you at least aren’t getting shafted on having to include more agenda points as well as giving the Runner more points when they steal them.
3 Merger, 3 GFI, and an ABT is worlds better than 3 Merger, 3 GFI, 2 ABT and a 3/1. Two less agendas in the deck, 3 less points in the deck for the Runner. It would make it at least interesting to include and try and lower your Agenda count at the risk of giving the Runner more points.
(Also it would make Punitive stronger I think?)
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