I did but didn’t take it seriously until later down the line. I remember thinking that Astro and Scorched were OP on the corp side, and that Datasucker’s and Parasites would be part of pretty much every deck.
I also remember thinking that the corps were probably going to get more recursion support once Imp’s came out. And I think imp’s are what sent Noise into OP land. I also remember how heavily Jackson pimp-handed Noise into touch and he sucked until cache came out.
They were designed without rotation in mind, I think. And you had to buy the pack to counter sea scorched shenanigans. This is the slippery slope I’m venting about lol.
This is exactly what it is. As a game’s card pool grows, cards need to be stronger and stronger and stronger to see play, let alone make a big impact in formats. Eventually, the whole format is essentially composed of mistakes. It can be really fun - I’m a Legacy (non-rotating MTG format) player, and I love it (or would love it with slightly better management).
But the inevitable reality of an ever expanding card pool is bans upon bans, or Yu-Gi-Oh where they print ever more broken shit just so players will want to buy it. They have to. I don’t like the current design direction MTG is heading in, but one thing they’ve done well is keep Standard at a reasonable power level. They realized this quite early on - Standard is a pretty old thing, all things considered. It’s a splendid way to keep the game sane while being able to move product and introduce different experiences. It’s just devoting lower rarities to draft creates a completely rotten pricing structure.
But yeah, a rotating format inevitably has to be the main tournament format if the game is to live for any length of time in a sane state.
Reference MTG Standard format sizes:
Return to Ravinca/Theros Standard just after Theros rotated in and Innistrad Block+M13 rotated out: 1114 cards.
Full RTR/Theros Standard with M14 and M15 Core Sets: 1668 cards
Full Time Spiral/Lorwyn+Shadowmoor/Coldsnap Standard, aka Largest Standard Format Ever and Distillation Of Pure Awesome: 2150 cards.
No likey…
I hope they do some sort of “Vintage” format where you can still use what you like.
First of all, the plan is to start Rotation in Spring 2017. Since it’s almost Winter 2014, that’s barely more than two years, not the three or four you claim.
Second, having to buy six cycles’ worth of cards is not helpful to new players, as that’s still three years’ worth of cards to get caught up on. It would be more helpful to new players if the rotation is limited to three or four cycles. New players will still have to frantically buy up tons of datapacks to get caught up.
Third, as Badeesh stated above, they have now given my cards a shelf life that I DID NOT expect them to have when starting this game. I haven’t played a CCG in years because I got tired of the constant spending required to keep up-to-date. I only agreed with my friends to play Netrunner because I saw the LCG model as requiring less money, less “rare chasing”, and less “planned obsolescence” than the CCG model. I literally see no reason why, under the LCG model, I should be forced to purchase another copy of Plascrete Carapace or Jackson Howard when I still possess my original copies just because Fantasy Flight wants to hit me up for cash again.
By the way, there are those who say that this is a method of “fixing problems” that doesn’t require a banlist or restricted list, as a way of dealing with the dominance of certain factions such as Criminals and NBN. I am inclined somewhat to agree, as I can fully believe Lukas and Damon are lazy enough to just invalidate and ban giant chunks of the cardpool instead of working within the architecture of the game to address issues. While I somewhat agree, as many of the most powerful IDs will be forced out of play (such as Andromeda and Near Earth Hub), I encourage everyone to go look at the packs that are going to be rotated out in a couple of years, and then look at the Core Set and Deluxe Expansions. While certain powerful IDs will be gone, most of the worst excesses of Criminals (I’m looking at you, Account Siphon) and NBN will still be perfectly legal.
Unless they introduce an “Open” format and use this plan as their “Novice” format, I think I’ll be logging out of Netrunner soon, since I don’t see the point of buying any more cards that will simply be invalid in a couple of years.
It sounds like people are assuming that they have to use the new version of cards that get reprinted, when was this established?
I don’t know why people are assuming that. I can’t imagine FFG not allowing older versions of identical reprints.
Nothing to stop them renaming or tweaking the reprints (Jason Howard - shuffle two cards into R&D; Titanium Carapace with 5 counters…).
That would just be silly.
There’s two reasons for them to do it: one would be money grab, the other would be improving balance (imagine reprinting the Caissa pieces and Scheherazade allowing them to move off it).
As a Legacy player, this is life. How’d you like the local store selling Umezawa’s Jitte for €35? I mean sure, you can buy it from a player for 15€, but…
LCGs will still be less money, and no rare chasing. The price will be for owning a whole goddamn format, not one or two decks. The planned obsolesence is necessary unless you want to play an insane game where everything is nuts. That’s a fact of life. It is completely, utterly impossible to keep a stable power level while adding cards and taking none away. Completely. Some of the most broken cards in MTG history started out as complete, unplayable pieces of crap. But someday they inevitably print a card that synergizes with that piece of crap and it turns broken. The only alternative is to not print interesting cards, which is unacceptable.
Why would you have to? There’s no indication that that would be the case. If Wizards reprints Llanowar Elves or Lightning Bolt into Standard, I can easily play Beta versions of those cards if I want to. I don’t see why FFG would work differently, and they sure haven’t said anything to the contrary.
It’s done in MTG, for what it’s worth. Sometimes thematically appropriate, sometimes a little silly.
Because they’ll tweak the reprints to make the older ones unusable: Reprint Andy will only give you 7 cards, NEH with 15 Influence, that sort of thing.
I’m also cynical like this. TBH, I kinda feel like trading in my cycle cards and only buying big boxes now. I think a huge bulk of non world’s and nationals players will do the same, and that this attempt to allow easier access is going to spectacularly backfire.
In those cases, I’d be all about it. (Although if NEH is getting reprinted with 15, GRNDL deserves 12 
)
I only meant to identical reprints. I don’t see that stuff like Plascrete or Jackson would need fixing, they are balanced and playable as they are.
The problem is that the cards would then be worth money because of rarity, which is what I thought the LCG model was trying to avoid.
They why rotate them out at all? Most everything is this game is reasonably balanced… why can’t they just let me use the cards I’ve already bought?
QFT. I can foresee people only buying Cores and Expansions, simply to avoid the eventual obsolescence issues. I’m already rethinking my purchase habits for this game…
Even if they do introduce and “Open” and “Limited” style format, this game isn’t old enough and doesn’t have a big enough playerbase to allow for a subdivision like that.
You guys don’t understand. This isn’t Rotation… this is Planned Obsolescence.
I think this is a bit unfair. When there are problem cards or unexpected interactions people complain; when they address it by publishing hard counters people complain; when there’s talk of restrictions and bans people complain; when there’s talk of errata people complain. I guess some people will just moan regardless.
Rotation isn’t about creating a lazy solution to cards that are a problem now; if it was then they’d be rotating much sooner. It’s a solution to limit the size of the card pool for the future to try and minimise those problem cards and weird interactions so that they’re picked up in design/testing and don’t make it into the environment.
Just to give you an idea of the timescales we’re talking about the cards you are buying right now will rotate out in spring 2018. You get slightly less life out of packs in even numbered cycles (since they rotate out at the same time as the odd numbered pack that came before), but broadly speaking any card you buy will be legal for at least three years - even in the worst case scenario of the cards in the last pack of an even numbered cycle.
That’s still a fair innings for a card. Nobody complains about the 60% of their cards that don’t get played at all because they’re crap. And all the whiners that are talking about quitting - why? This rule doesn’t in any way alter your play experience until 2017 and quitting now reduces the value you get out of the cards you’ve already bought - which is the very thing you’re complaining about.
Overall, LCGs still represent excellent value compared to CCGs. You can pick up a whole cycle of an LCG for less than the cost of a booster box for a CCG. You make that investment knowing that you have a full play set of 120 cards with a minimum of a 3 year shelf-life. That CCG booster box gets you maybe one or two of the rare cards you need for your deck and a whole bunch of waste paper commons.
Things will probably rotate later than expected since they’re having a hard time keeping cycles to 6 months as advertised. IMO
I’d add a year onto each pack’s life cycle just because of the delays between the intervening 5 expansions.
It is quite hard to take offence about something that was always going to have to happen at some point and which everyone has been given over two years notice of. I guess assuming the worst possible case scenario on the basis of no evidence at all is one way to do it. Honestly, I can’t think of another reason why people are assuming that this is going to be the case.
In L5R they tweeked reprints all the time and you could still use the old versions, even when the text was almost unrecognisable and even if they changed the character names. And that was (is) a CCG.
I don’t understand this. At all.
FFG prints one cycle a year, right? With one deluxe expansion? So one cycle is 15 bucks times 6 packs, and a deluxe is 30 bucks…that’s $120 a year, or $10 a month.
$10 a month. That is so cheap. I have to pay more than that to get a teenager to mow my lawn.
Personally, I’m more than happy to pay $10 a month to participate in a well-designed and constantly evolving card game. That’s a bargain.
Its more like 1.5 cycles and two deluxe expansions year.