i agree somewhat with the premise, but definitely not the conclusion.
in tournaments in my meta, i see a lot of the same corps, NEH, RP, EtF, Blue Sun, maybe the odd Tennin, Argus, TWIY*, but most corps in my meta stick to one strong ID per faction.
runners don’t have this problem. plenty of Kit and Chaos Theory to balance out the Kates in shaper (not many people play Kate, actually). some Leela and Andy (but overall not a lot of criminal). loads of people have been trying out Geist lately (but who knows if we’ll see him at a tournament). and every Anarch runner sees play (except poor Quetzal)
so there isn’t a lot of variance with corp IDs, and this isn’t the same ‘problem’ with runners.
is it a problem? is it annoying? sure, i guess it’s a problem (ie: i see how some people see it as a problem, even if i don’t personally). yes, it’s probably kind of annoying.
but, is it the end of the world and any reason to quit the game? no. not by a long shot.
looking at the initial argument, using the term ‘waste’ to describe the fact that corp decks include the agendas seems a bit off to me. corps have control over how the agenda suite is realised. that’s one reason RP is so strong. Nisei, NAPD, Future Perfect… there’s definitely some variance with the odd Hades Fragment, Chronos Project, or Fetal AI, but the core of the deck design floats around these agendas that protect themselves.
the corp player gets to choose if the deck focuses on 2/3s or 3/5s, or maybe even a bunch of 1/3s in Argus/PE. the corp player gets to know how effective a current will be in the game (ie: in a deck full of 1/3s, your current probably isn’t going to last very long). the runner can’t know that when they put their deck together.
i agree with a lot of the previous discussion that part of this problem is the choice of agendas. some are clearly a lot stronger than others. in fact, i would almost argue that a blank 2/3 is strong than many 1/3s and 3/5s. the corp really needs stronger agendas that aren’t 2/3s, and we’re getting those in Global Food Initiative and Quantum Predictive Model. others, like Vanity Project and Improved Tracers are steps in the right direction as well.
'enough ICE to protect HQ and R&D early’
do you though? sure, if you’re playing glacier i suppose, but no matter your deck style, corp’s are supposed to be weak early game while they try to set up. some games, i install ICE first turn but don’t even rez it. yeah, just installing it deters the runner from running, but it also doesn’t slow them down by wasting time looking at my Hedge Fund on the top of R&D. and yes, they can just as easily score an agenda off the top of R&D first turn as they can once i have 5 pieces of ICE and a Caprice protecting it, but what’s really the problem here? that we didn’t make them work for it?
and about having to leverage psi/scorch/etc., corps actually have that luxury of leveraging an alternatve win condition. how often does the runner win by milling? the closest i got was seeing the last card of R&D being the last agenda i needed to score. even just a couple of Snare!s can create a great scoring window against the runner, just because the threat of a flatline is enough that they have to slow down and draw back up before putting pressure back on the corp. yes, ICE eventually becomes ‘just a tax,’ but corps need to leverage this to win. Back Channels is a great card that makes bluff/bait runs more plausible. wasting the time to run down a scoring remote just to see a Junebug can set the runner back so much, even if it doesn’t flatline.
and ICE is only ‘just a tax’ insomuch as it is the runner who decides when and where they run. things like Marcus Batty, Keegan Lane, and An Offer You Can’t Refuse are able to shake up what the runner can and can’t do in a run or lets the corp decide where the runner is going. things like Wendigo aren’t enough because the runner can just break it.
the thing is, corps can meaningfully specialise. in fact, i would strongly argue that it is the corps who are the ones specialising. it’s the runners who have to grab every troubleshooter they can to account for lots of different archetypes. the thing is, they have the abilities now to handle more problems more effectively. yes, there’s a lot of Eli, Wraparound, Tollbooth, but it’s the corp who decides what the game plan is. it’s the runner who has to match and beat it. and while we’re on this subject, at the most recent Auckland Regionals, most of the games at the top table were corp splits, again and again. with things like RP, Butcher Shop, and NEXT EtF, it was hard for many of the runners to match everything. they didn’t have all of the tools available for every game at just the right time to deal with the polarised variety of archetypes. i think that for a long time, the game was pushed faster with NEH fastrobiotics, but now that RP has begun to catch on, a lot of slower archetypes are seeing play as well, and the same tools for dealing with FA are not the same tools for dealing with glacier. yes, runners can get these tools more easily, but they’re also having to grab more troubleshooters that they wouldn’t normally need or want to grab.
things are definitely improving, so i don’t know if any of these concerns will be valid in a month or so. we’ll see. i personally don’t completely agree with them anyway, but i can see the merits of the concern.
one final point, the whole crux of this rant rests on an argument for tier 2 corp decks. so basically what we have is: tier 1 corp and tier 1 runner are about equivalent. at the very top of the competitive branch of netrunner, this argument agrees that corp and runner are about equivalent. and once you get into tier 2, runner is doing better than corp. what exactly is the problem here? the fun, eccentric, off-the-wall corp decks aren’t as good as the fun, eccentric, off-the-wall runner decks? why exactly is this a problem? the desire to remain competitive can’t be the main agent of this argument if the argument is just calling for a better tier 2 corp.
