I think that the answer might be abilities that are neither all good nor all negatives, such as abilities with both a benefit and a drawback, as seen on Hostile Infrastructure or ABT. More so Hostile Infrastructure, since ABT’s drawback is mitigated by the ability being optional.
Or abilities that require forfeiting the agenda, like on Posted Bounty or False Lead, which basically make the agenda blank if you want the points. But that would mostly only work for Weyland color-pie-wise, and a self-forfeiting 3/2 might be too good with Jemison.
And of course, there’s lots of precedent for 3/2s that don’t do anything unless they’re overadvanced, which means that you can use either the 3/2-ness or the ability, but not both at once.
Basically, I think that maybe 3/2s shouldn’t have a beneficial ability unless there’s some kind of drawback or additional cost to the ability. But I also think that an ability + drawback/cost agenda is more likely to see play and enable interesting decks than a blank agenda, or one that’s all drawback like Merger.
It’s clear by the amount of brain trusts in top tier play that a blank 3/2 is generally not actually good enough.
The answer of how do you get non 3/2s if 3/2s are available can heavily follow the example of jinteki in general. You print 4/2s with strong synergistic abilities as well as 3/1s. 5/3s are so hard to score and so valuable on their own that putting score abilities on nthem is kinda missing the point.
Foodcoats also definitely preferred to play napd over vitrivius, and in the right meta cst is also better than vitrivius, and you’d probably play Nisei mk2 if you had it. More strong 4/2s on the power level of Nisei is the way to go in my opinion (strong synergistic agendas that give you some sort of resource to help score out of a remote).
Also you basically need to have strong defensive upgrades for 4/2s to be better than 3/2s though. Which a lot of people don’t want. (I think defensive upgrades clearly good)
Agreed; I feel that ABT is probably the best agenda they’ve printed. I think it sits at the right point; you can have it as a blank 3/2 if you’d like, or you can have a 3/2 with a both detrimental and positive ability.
The only thing I honestly don’t like about it is how much it inflicts Variance upon the game. You can either hit the jackpot with three Ichi’s or Heimdalls, or Zonk with hitting 3 Agendas. Both are unlikely, but I’ve gone an entire tournament, firing every ABT, and hitting no ICE in the 18 ICE deck. Them’s the breaks.
Sorry to bump this, but I think if 3/2 are coming back, we should have more per faction and they should be made unique.
Jinteki Philotic is a great agenda, but his uniqueness forbid to construct a synergy around it. Uniqueness of Astro almost totally solved the problem.
3/2 are great agendas, and very fun to play. If they were quite specialized in each main direction a faction have, you could have a unique 3/2 to synergise in lots of decks, the other ones would be braintrust like and add more random effects to a working deck than stabilizing your game.
I think Weyland have too less 3/2, HB too much, so the “good number” should be either 4 like Jinteki & NBN today, or maybe 5 (the question is points in 3/2 + 6 points with 5/3 needs a full 4/2 - merger slot or not : I think yes).
I think FA need a little de-clocking, but not much. This would be very satisfying imo.
For exemple (did not pushed a lot of though in these designs):
Jinteki need slot compression cards to play traps. One agenda there could serve as an agenda or ice for exemple, so it free 1x trap. One agenda could say “if this is stolen, choose a server and the runner immediately runs it”. Last one could boost psifumi in case of either steal or score.
NBN may want a unique Beal, another with more card draw / free mulligan, one having effects with tagstorm (like “each 3 tag worth 1pt”, or something).
Weyland may still want a reprint of Atlas non unique but no 4th 3/2, maybe giving one counter if scored (Atlas is really an ideal card for this corp, and I don’t think the variance should be increased for Weyland).
HB may need a unique on its 3/2, and two new stuff, one synergizing with brains, the other synergizing with Bioroids. ABT was ok in ANR when there was not much recursion and Vitrivius may need to be a little rarer for the corp to take risks.
This way, at least one 3/2 shouldn’t be blank in lots of non-conventional decks, and FA gets a little more random synergies.