I agree that following history seems a little silly. We already have seen the meta evolve along in that card pool. I think something different would be more interesting.
My coworkers played a tournament once where they’d meet up for a round robin every week, and then afterwards they’d look at decklists and ban the most popular X cards of different types (say the top 3 agendas, top 3 programs, top 1 upgrade, etc). This repeated for 4 or 5 weeks, with a slowly narrowing card pool. Something like that would be more interesting and would actually get people to make different choices.
I also think you shouldn’t restrict the ID choice of players. I actually think this would make fringe decks weaker. For example, at Worlds if they knew that 1/4 of players would be playing Weyland we would have seen more Plascretes in decks. Netrunner is partially balanced around the fact that there are strong counter cards – the more popular something is, the weaker it becomes since you can adapt your deck to be stronger against it. If you artificially control the distribution of decks it will affect these choices, and I don’t think that’s good if the point of this is seeing interesting meta changes. I don’t think you need to worry about seeing all factions represented – the type of people that want to play in a format like this are the type of people who will come up with crazy decks.
If I did this thing, I can tell you the first thing I’d do with just Core is BABW. Old School Tag’N’Bag was the reason they printed Plascrete.
Only HB even comes close to Core Weyland. NBN was dogshit, and Jinteki was worse.
Old school tag n bag is great, but even in core only (I played in a core + 1 deluxe tournament a couple of weeks ago) it’s much better to import the bag into NBN than import the tag into Weyland. Breaking News is much better than Posted Bounty. Data Raven is brilliant in a kill deck. AstroScript and SanSan City Grid give you a workable plan B.
In the oldest meta Jinteki was even worse than Weyland, sure. But Weyland was never good.
definitely doing a lot of thinking and trying to weigh up everyone’s different suggestions and opinions on it.
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At the moment I suspect whichever format it takes, it won’t suit everyone, and it might be a case of doing a small experiment to start and seeing if my writing and the playing gets off the ground at all, and then expanding to trying out other things. I love the ideas of:
non-historic release order
MWL playing some part
voting / randomly choosing to remove cards.
All could be great so lots to think about.
I assure you that Weyland was a force to be reckoned with in the core set days; for me it felt almost unloseable. Any NBN deck that tried to play 3 Scorches would certainly lack the economy to land a SEA Source or protect a Breaking News. Runners would even go so far as to splash Decoy in order to protect themselves against Weyland.
What’s amazing about this is it just proves that different people’s perception of the evolution of the meta is completely different. Within my small core-set-only group, Weyland can be utterly brutal. Other people never had that experience or started playing the game with datapacks and never experienced that. It just goes to show how important it is for this project to work to realise that people have preconceived notions about a faction’s strength at a given time in the meta, and that those notions do affect deck-building and playing decisions. Hurrah!
You’re just wrong. BABW was a top ID through Genesis. Weyland and HB were just about tied for best faction until C&C. Tournaments fell like threshed wheat to the green cards over, and over, and over again. I implore you to look back at the Tournament Winning Lists here on Stimhack from that era. I’m not making this shit up. Weyland was good once, despite what the group-think tells you.
Shameless bump for this off the back of Terminal7 mentioning it - thank you @Nelsormensch and Jesse!
I’ve not gone much further beyond stewing about this, and swapping some private messages. Thank you to everyone who’s expressed interest. I’ll pull my finger out and start to get something going soon-ish.
Hi all! Literally just signed up to Stimhack today and I’ve only just started playing Netrunner. Being in Japan I have very few people to play with (and the packs can be a little hard to find) so this project sounds fantastic. If it’s not too late to jump onboard I’d love to have a few Core Set games on Jinteki.net . I’ve been hammered so far in very educational ways and I’d appreciate any chances for a game or two to keep learning.
As for the conversation going on, and speaking as someone who only has experience with the Core Set, Weyland and Anarch come across as particularly brutal. I have a couple of friends I can play with ocassionally and we’re all on the same newbie level. Also economy seems very fragile in these core decks (If you’re just playing in-faction) and a good run on a Melange or Pad feels like a real kick in the nuts.
