The fellas at Team Covenant waxed a bit nostalgic about Netrunner during this cast and definitely made me smile and nod my head in agreement, but I think it also made some great points about the challenges of “on-boarding” the LCG model (and how Marvel Champions has a pretty great way to solve that problem).
Anyway, while I know my two cents are just that, I think there are a few good take-aways that Niesi could contemplate from the conversation with Zach and Steven:
Products come ready to play, but can be broken apart and added to the card pool. If someone were to jump into Netrunner now, it’s both easy and hard (proxy what you like! Get the cards if you want!..however, the notion of having a deck ready to go seems even easier).
Even though most of us on here are already “all-in,” I still want to see our game grow and it would be pretty easy to say to someone, “if you like this game, you can get up and running by ordering the Anarch/Weyland Deck-Pack Product from MakePlayingCards.com” and we’ll see you at the next meet up."
Player Friendly Core Set Design–again, as we are in our “new era” of Netrunner, the core set barrier is significantly lower anyway, having a core set designed as 3x of everything simply, well, simplifies what it is.
Of course, that’s a VERY simplistic statement, especially if Niesi eventually releases it’s own official core set because 3x of everything would be pretty expensive. But if you couple that with the aforementioned Runner-Corp Pack Deck Products, you could have a couple choices for On-Boarding into the game.
It’s some time ago, but it keeps staying in my head. And I don’t have a solution for that, but the casts they are doing about theoretical aspects, I like them very much.
I have no idea about the hero game to be honest.
The good thing is, sales are not so important to ANR as in the past. Not saying they don’t count, but it’s more important that the game is alive.
I agree that Arkham has the advantage (same as LotR) that you need all data packs to play the story! This might only be true people having to buy the scenarios as everyone else can proxy, but it means the sales number for cycles must be very balanced.
On top of that and this is the biggest advantage, there is no meta! I can play the game with friends in 3 years and if I have only 2 sets of whatever, it’s fine and I can play it in my own speed!
This brings me to the name LCG this is from my point of view the biggest confusion factor. I can see that from a purchasing point of view they are the same, but between competitive LCGs like ANR, L5R and GoT there is a huge difference to AH & LotR.
How to overcome the issue with the ever growing card pool I have no idea! I understand that people have the feeling their money is going in to the bin when cards rotate but the amount of cards in ANR is creating a huge barrier of entry not only from a monetary point of view.
What we need from my perspective is something like Cache Refresh. A small card pool that is regularly supported and that maybe also has a World Champion? So it’s not only side events. CoreXP ok, I like it especially with changing Core Sets. But what comes after it? Standard? Currently Core + 5 big boxes + 6.5 cycles that makes it > 750 cards? Maybe the number is wrong, but let’s say it’s a lot of cards! So something inbetween is something I’m missing!
Last year there was modded, which was Core Set + Kitara and I really liked it! Maybe it’s something we should focus on? So like Core + last big box (R&R) + last cycle? No choice of boxes that just leads to you need to know all the cards?
I think on top of that we need to be more casual! As that is the source we are getting our new competitive players from.
We had some success with the Project Crow decks as they move towards standard without the sheer amount of cards for new players so they can learn step by step and the decks are fixed.
