D4v1D is fine on its own, especially with clone chip on the MWL. Its there to keep IT department and blue sun at bay. In my mind it was faust and then Museum that tipped their respective archetypes over the edge and should be targeted. Its not just about banning good cards (the MWL is there for overpowered), its the cards that create problems. Faust breaking all types frees up so much deck space, and open MU. Museum just makes it way too easy to hide agendas.
Its not about cards being overpowered, its about cards being able to do things that you probably shouldnât be able to do.
To answer the OP, I think the game would be way better if MoH and Adjusted Chronotype were banned (and maybe Faust).
Long term I think Astro should be banned or limited to 1 per deck. However I donât think NBN is really built to lose astro right now, so its a long term development goal. Additionally having a strong, fast FA deck in the meta keeps a lot of runner side nonsense decks in check.
MoH for completely game warping effects and enabling MCH based decks to work. MCH is a strong tutor that lets you get out the Temple combo quick, but if they can just trash everything without it going back for a click it becomes a lot worse.
Chronotype because the Pancakes / Wyldsides draw engine is so strong and also so heavy variance in terms of when you draw Wyldsides (draw it early and Whizz is pretty unbeatable, draw it really late and heâs not very good).
Faust needs to be MWLâd or banned because Faust does a couple things.
Fixed anarch gear check weakness in one card while freeing up a ton of slots.
Allows combo runner decks to easily interact with remotes for very few card slots (DLR Val, Noise)
Combined with wyldcakes is just massively efficient breaker suite that ignores ice types.
Anarch makes sense as a faction with a devastating late game where they can destroy the corps board state. The traditional weakness has been that they donât have easy means to tutor for their breakers, so you can often score behind a lotus or wrap around or whatever early and get such a huge edge you either win before the late game or are so ahead you win anyway.
Banning D4vid is a pretty terrible idea. D4vid provides necessary support for anarch to be able to interact with high strength ice with its fixed strength suite. Otherwise Anarch just dies to stuff like CVS + archer / assassin. D4vid + cutlery normally has weaknesses against big ice. For example, take it vs. assassin. You run, are forced to burn 2 counters. If you want to forked you gotta run again. So you end up trading 1-2 davids (or beating a trace of taking 3 net) and a forked to beat an assassin. This is the case where its unprotected. If you donât have a Faust its even harder to do this with an ice in front. In a vacuum its not busted strong (where as even without other busted support Faust still heavily warps the game).
This is close to how restricted lists have worked in other FFG LCGs (Thrones 1st Ed, for instance). They had a restricted list for Thrones tournament play, and you were only allowed to include one card off the entire restricted list in your deck, but any number of copies. So if Faust and D4v1d were on the restricted list, you could have 3 Faust, or 3 D4v1d, but not both cards in your deck at the same time. It was a way to separate cards that comboed too well, but werenât that dangerous on their own. Good candidates for a similar restricted list would be Wyldside and Chronotype, in my mind. Chronotype might get sleeved outside Anarch for some goofy combo decks, but Wyldside has pretty much never been used outside Anarch as far as I can tell, so restricting them both would only break up the Pancakes combo.
Only if you donât mulligan for Wyldside. You have a 33% chance of drawing one or more Wyldsides, but twice. Iâm too lazy to do the actual statistics, but your 40% number is way off.
Edit: I also have nothing to contribute to the discussion at hand, though I do agree with @SimonMoonâs excellent points.
I donât know about this. How do non-Anarchs deal with Curtain Wall/Assassin spam? (Answer: âwhat non anarchs lolâ) Corroder can get you through Curtain Wall. Itâs not fun, but itâs what Shapers and Criminals do: shovel credits into your Fracter. Assassin doesnât scare me because Iâve seen how Atman, Net-Ready Eyes, and Ice Carver can allow the Anarch Unholy Trinity to answer ice up to 5+ strength. Grimâs been around a while, and it wasnât unbeatably good back when it actually saw play.
I think in a vacuum it is busted strong (albeit maybe only just a little bit over the line), and is the reason why big ice that used to be included in winning decks isnât anymore. Nobody plays Susanoo-no-Mikoto out of RP/Jinteki Glaciers anymore, because paying 9 credits for something that gets skipped by D4v1d 3 times is awful. Even when it used to see play, you never wanted more than a copy because itâs so expensive to rez; weâve never been in danger of the âAll Big Ice Deckâ sweeping the meta because Corps canât afford to rez much of it. Once Anarchs became more and more common, it felt like Corps didnât even bother to include singleton copies anymore, because they were dead draws in more and more matchups, but I think the game needs there to be space for big ice and D4v1d is a strong â I would say too strong â pressure against including big ice in Corp decks. D4v1dâs not too strong within the context of a single game, but I think its impact to the meta overall is harmful.
D4 is fine. It perhaps should have been a trash: break any number of routines consistent with faerie/sharpshooter/deusX but it isnât.
A potent silver bullet is coming out in the form of Navi City Grid in the final pack of the cycle which could well be the answer â certainly for Blue Sun / HB decks.
The idea of a double Turing remote with Navi inside it (or a CW/wormhole remote) gives you are a massive window to score as the only thing that can stop it (without a real breaker) is slow parasite as it also neuters sucker tokens as well. If it becomes a thing you may well see Dumble forced to slot Polop to counter.
If you are forced to play Atman, Net-Ready Eyes and Ice Carver, why bother playing Anarch at all?
Because even if you could âdealâ with Assassin like that, you cannot deal with Crick in-faction without D4v1d. You canât deal with Turing, either, which is already a pain in the ass even with D4v1d. And thereâs absolutely no reasonable way in-faction to get past Little Engine or IT Department.
Really, if Anarchs have to import Zu.13, Atman and Net-Ready Eyes just to deal with big ICE, they will die because you would be better off playing Shaper which not only already has those cards, but has a much more powerful economy and
tutors to boot.
Susanoo was never a common card. For a very long time it was seen as being a massive Femme Fatale target and a liability against the then common Criminal decks packing Faerie and Crescentus. Then it began to be seen as a liability against Eater and negatively compared to the more resilent Ashigaru.
I really donât think thereâs less âbig ICEâ than it used to be. Practically all decks that arenât rushing have Assassin, Ashigaru or Tollbooth in them and in similar quantities than it used to be. The supposedly taxing Red Coats never packed more than a couple of Tollbooths and perhaps a Heimdall here and there. You can check the lists, thereâs not a big difference.
I think the only piece of ICE that was killed by D4v1d was Viktor 2.0.
Thanks! Though it should be notedthat the vast majority of versions have far less big pieces of ICE. Most people never bothered with Heimdall 2.0 or Ichi 2.0, for example and as time went on most people took them out for fear of Femme Fatale and Inside Job.
For example, Nordrunner later settled on a list that has only 2x Tollbooth, 1x Ichi 2.0.
More contemporary, I wrote against including big ICE back then and ran a list to nationals that only had 1x Wotan, 2x Ichi 2.0 in them.
The contemporary Jinteki RP builds ran a couple Tollbooths and little else. You can see an old Stimhack article here:
Really, neither D4v1d, nor the surge in Anarchs have made big ICE a rarity. The only change is that some people are choosing not to run Assassin if they were only going to run 1 or 2 copies.
I donât know! Ask anybody who played L4J Whizzard. (Though I think only Steven Wooleyâs list had all 3 of those in it. And all the L4J lists still ran D4v1d because D4v1d is a stupendously good card.)
When RP was the deck to beat, Susanoo was a common one-of inclusion. It was quite good against shaper, who had to Atman-7 or Atman-6 + Data sucker to deal with it.
Banning: hmm. Itâs a pretty brutal approach but to be fair itâs the cleanest. I think the best solution for the actual gameplay itself is errata/changes, and creative errata at that, but this has practical problems that make it really clunky and is not something that holds up to adjustment later on, unlike a ban-list etc.
People talk about banning Astro, which I get, but I think the best fix would just be to make it so the token canât be used on other copies of itself. Like that I think it would be a cool, strong card that is an enabler for only one other agenda - youâd need to score another one to get the boost a second time.
Faust - this seems like one of those cards that is clever, but unfortunately messes with the central balance & mechanics of the game too badly. Rebirth is a more extreme of this in that it fundamentally screws with game mechanics, too boldly for my taste. Iâm no expert at all, but I wouldnât be surprised if it proves impossible to balance Faust properly other than banning or restricting it as I suspect it will veer between underpowered and overpowered without being able to find the sweet spot.
DAvid - hmm, yeah. Even in my limited experience this seems to act like too much of a âget out of jail freeâ card. I donât like cards where the threat of it alone restricts your options - the threat of Janus is one thing, but it doesnât change your deck composition, but the threat of D4vid just making most people ditch big ICE is just too much. Does it leave Anarch without any answers? Maybe. But then canât they do what Criminal did for ages - import some breakers? Not ideal, butâŚI dunno.
In some ways I prefer banning to the MWL - itâs more of a admission of a mistake, but also itâs just cleaner - âwe did a boo-boo, scratch that card, weâll fix it in the future with some more solutionsâ. Regardless, making a game like this is super super hard, that much is clear.
In some ways though, Astro is NBN. It doesnât make any one NBN deck more viable, it just boosts NBN. Tagstorm and FA both love some Astro. Iâm not sure I want it banned.
David and Faust (and Chronotype) yes.
Banning has been done in other games such as Warhammer Invasion with cards that are obviously broken, such as Faust. Chronotype needs to somehow be made 5 inf Green, as if anyone should have Wyldcakes, it should be Shaper. David should have been trash and not power counter, as unlike Faerie and Sharpshooter, it doesnât need any pumping.
The people who are saying âyellow immediately cease to exist if Astro is banned.â seem like they have a poor understanding of card games. Yellow has been a huge part of the meta since forever, so every card choice in ever runner deck is based on the idea of yellow being a huge part of the matchup spread - how many Clots and Legworks to run, whether to rely heavily on a remote camp strategy, how many answers your deck needs to large code gates. If yellow is heavily nerfed, then apart from an adjustment period, all these card choices that are specifically geared towards making sure youâll be able to handle NBN will start to fall off and NBN will get its own healthy share of the meta again.
Donât worry, Iâm very confident in my understanding of card games!
But what are those deck choices? The closest we have in Dumblefork that is âgeared towards making sure youâll be able to handle NBNâ are Medium and Faust, neither of which will be less played because Astroscript is gone. Kaplanâs whole NBN hate is a single Clot, which is only played for Astro, its removal in exchange of Astro wouldnât help NBN at all!
Really, without Astro, how is NBN going to beat Dumblefork? Or Kaplan? Itâs Psychographics/Scorched or nothing and both are much harder without the pressure Astro gives you.
The entire idea that the deck with the best matchup spread is the one that can usually destroy all the pieces of relevant ICE it encounters each game is predicated on the expectation that at least 35% of the meta is yellow: the faction that was meeting the Mumba Temple restriction before Mumba Temple was ever spoiled. Dumblefork itself likely loses popularity as a result of the change in meta, even if that particular deck, the way itâs structured canât change as much as other decks. The 3 Datasuckers that appeared in the Mead Hall list and fell out of favor have a pretty great shot at coming back, though, itâs much more appealing to try to use those to destroy ICE if the piece of ICE youâre going to be destroying isnât a Tollbooth that you have to on-encounter no matter how much you charge up the suckers. So then when you do play Tollbooth (or Data Raven, what with Sync being a great choice right now) you can get much better results.
A lot of the econ in the deck needs to be fast because NBN is fast and itâs out there, and thatâs part of the gearing. Cutting a Career Fair for a Film Critic seems very reasonable if people arenât playing yellow in the more perfect future, so when you do play NBN, every time the Film Critic is drawn you get a little bit ahead.
If Hayleyâs not on triple Paricia, she does indeed have a hard time if you throw out 10 trash cost worth of credits of SanSan, even if theyâre naked. (An Astro ban would go best with a limit six per deck errata on Beale)
I think there are 2 different topics here really. There are power-level bans and NPE bans. I agree wholeheartedly with @popsofctown on this.
MoH is so annoying that it ought to be banned on that basis alone. IT Dept would be in the same category if it saw actual play. I know that some of you donât feel that itâs annoying, and thatâs fine, but I have talked to multiple people who have quit the game basically because of this card. Shuffling every single turn needlessly extends game length quite a bit. Other cards with this kind of effect tend to run out of targets pretty quickly or just end the game. Playing against newer players, I give them the choice to play against a MoH deck or a non-MoH deck. They choose non-MoH every single time. Because itâs more fun.
The power-level stuff is a separate conversation and I think itâs important not to conflate them.
romance tip: flirt with the runner by letting them into your server of low-cost, porous ICE like Pop-up Window and Pup, then really surprise them with a rezzed Caprice Nisei and Ash 2X3ZB9CY at the very end
(Though I think only Steven Wooleyâs list had all 3 of those in it. And all the L4J lists still ran D4v1d because D4v1d is a stupendously good card.)