Well i think is a card don’t have many hate, but really i think is the real problem hidden in the actual anarch overpower. Yeah in the old netrunner was a fair card, but now synergyzes to much with the all the dirty tricks of anarch. Obelus, ice destruction, ddos, omar, etc… And also makes the game unfun in long range becasue the so hard lock of R/D make for most of the corps lost time becasue it don’t let a way out in the most of the cases.
With Interfaces rotating. I think is time to make more fair multiacess tools.
We know FFG don’t want to ban, and NAPD only can cause trouble to other factions, maybe limit one per deck was a nice option.
Jokes aside, OP does have a point. Medium is the primary wincon of most Anarch (and some Crim) decks. It does have many soft counters, though. CVS, Archangel and Crisium do help, as does a trappy R&D. I think packing some of these and some Friends helps, but they only really do a lot if there’s also rezzed ice (which Friends again helps with).
The problem does seem to mainly be “not dealing with ice with breakers”, though. If that wasn’t as easy, Medium would not be as hard to deal with!
Naked R&D vs Anarchs is more the problem of the OP than mine.
If the corp player can’t play with the runner needs showed on the table, then it’s a player problem, not a game problem.
Many cards or strategies in Netrunner that people complain about are accelerators or ‘win more’ cards.
Asset spam is like this. Either you can keep on top of every asset the corp plays out, and you win. Or one asset leads to more card draw and more money to rez more assets that draw more assets land more tags and…
Medium does the same thing, though not as bad. Either you can’t get into R&D much and Medium is useless. Or you can get into R&D a lot and the corp has to sacrifice tempo and board state just to shore up this problem somehow, and maybe even spend a turn purging on top of that.
I’m not sure if ‘win more’ is quite the way of putting it but accelerator is very apt.
Postive Feedbacks: Things that enable you to do the same thing again but better
Medium: Running on R&D makes running on R&D again better
Asset spam: each install of an asset spam ‘package’ makes the rest of that package better to install/more painful to deal with.
Siphon Spam: in the classical sense each siphon gives you the credits to pull off the next one
Astrotrain
Negative Feedbacks: Things that make doing the same thing again harder
Scoring Agendas: you’re using clicks and credits which will make later scores more difficult
Using Icebreakers: you’re spending whatever resource the icebreaker needs leaving you with less of it in the future.
Unique defensive upgrades: rezzing your UDU somewhere means you can’t have it anywhere else.
To much positive feedback makes systems unstable and/or degenerate, though medium is on the lower end as far as they go. Other card games throttle positive feedback with limits on the base per turn draw/resource increment, but one of the strongest aspects of netrunner (choices in drawing) is a weakness for implementing limiters.
Yes, ‘win more’ is how old articles used to describe these cards. But I prefer ‘accelerator’ or ‘snowball’. Notice that in many of the best decks of the day, the negative feedbacks are eliminated (scoring agendas becomes an accelerator in NEH Astrobiotics as it can reinstall assets or provide Astro tokens that allow for more agendas to be scored later; using icebreakers (or making runs for accesses) in Andysucker often rewarded the runner with more cards, credits and Datasucker tokens than they started with).
Personally I think the tempo exchange involved in scoring/stealing agendas is one of the most interesting and important parts of Netrunner, as it helps self-balance any game between runner and corp, and is what allows for consistently exciting and close finishes (you should consider the impact of Leela in this context, too!). When those are eliminated, games are much more explosive and one-sided.
I don’t think Medium is the problem, I think it’s Ice destruction and the new hyper-efficient ways to deal with Ice that runners have gotten. If there are two reasonably taxing ice on R&D, then Medium is a threat but not an overwhleming one. The reason Medium seems oppresive now (rather than since the very beginning of the game) is that Anarchs just tear down any Ice they don’t want to deal with more than once.
Ice destruction has caused corps to shy away from including tough ice in their decks, which makes Medium stronger by proxy. If I can rez an Assassin and expect it to live for more than 2 turns, Medium is much less of an issue.
But médium is one card, and ice destrucción cards are many. Is more easy to fix one card than many. But Well this post was before i see Sifr, maybe the game in competive is not more for me, and i m really tired of anarch overpower.
The thing I always liked about Medium is how it allowed the runner to close out games quickly, snowballing an advantage into victory. In contrast, there are runner games where the corp is doing terribly but the poor Criminal can only check the top card of R&D each turn, so the corp’s granted several turns to stabilize simply because they happened not to draw agendas. Those games can feel slow and annoying, as if the runner’s being punished for persistent success.
As others have pointed out, the means that runners use to repeatedly hammer R&D feel less fair than a card that scales with successful runs. Dyper is a fine example; it feels like an uninteractive, unfair deck because of the way DDoS/False Echo neutralize all your ICE, not the Keyhole/Medium/Turning Wheel win conditions. Runners should be rewarded for successful runs beyond just single accesses, no doubt, the runs just should be harder to make.
Instead of asking “Access?” when you’re getting bodied by Medium, try asking “Are you a bad person?” Subliminal Medium-shaming is the first step to a healthier local meta. Also, cards seen by Medium are not ‘cards’ but ‘victims’.
