I’m not convinced they’d just revise C&C, or revise it and “save” some rotating cards. That would leave them with five product categories in market at once: Core, revised Deluxe, “old” Deluxe, Datapack, Campaign Expansion, and new all-faction Deluxe. Not particularly coherent.
The only thing I thought of is what if the other H-B and Shaper IDs in R&R are NEXT and Kit? I think the only way to deprecate C&C would be for R&R to replace it in a way that signals the new direction for the deluxes, while providing a bridge to the past and partially answering for the “but you said deluxes would never rotate” question that would come up.
They didn’t say deluxes would never rotate. In the In-Flight when they announced, they say that a max of 7 cycles would be active plus “Core and Deluxes (Latest Versions).” So, they gave them selves leeway to rotate anything.
That said, rotating out C&C or any other product just to replace ‘overpowered cards’ is dumb. Every game needs a set of power cards; this game would be pretty milquetoast if they tried to bring the hammer down on all of them.
A good reason to rotate C&C, IMHO, would be to fix the HB side. Almost everything HB got in that box was underpowered and isn’t commonly played. With the big, big exception of CI.
I think rotating mistakes and then establishing staples that aren’t broken is a good idea. Parasite was absurd, hence the fix. There’s plenty of cards that are probably just too powerful in these sets, it’s about how they want the game to look going forward. By having things that will never ever rotate you get tied down to a specific power level, but if everything rotates, then you can have formats where everything is super powerful, and others where things are less powerful. People enjoy different things, and being able to cater to that is important.
Overpowered cards are great and all but not ones that don’t rotate. It means that certain strategies/cards are perpetually unplayable because of some evergreen power card that’s always in a substantial portion of decks. To return to Parasite, there are tons of low strength ICE seeing play now that are unfathomable if Parasite exists (EULA, Kakugo, on and on). Wildly powerful cards should be reserved for sets that rotate quicker, useful staples that don’t limit design space are perfect for a core set or deluxe IMO. Like, I love the design of a lot of core 1.0 (Parasite, Siphon, Medium) and big boxes (SMC, Clone Chip) but it’s pretty detrimental to have evergreen power cards.
Personally I would rather have all new deluxes with old ones rotating out. In my ideal world a cycle would consist of one deluxe and 6 data packs (180 cards in total) with occasional classic cards that have been rotated out being reprinted.
I suspect though that FFG may not have the resources to design that many new cards at a time. In which case a deluxe 2.0 which is a “greatest hits” of the rotating out cycles plus the 1.0 version may make commercial sense. Like core 2.0 they could set it 5 years after the 1.0 version and update art and lore accordingly.
I think that MTG cracked the perfect format for Standard, but had problems aligning that with limited and the TCG model. As above, if you do a big box Core set, then two cycles (I know you said one) then you’ll have a decent sized Standard. The format rotates with Pack 1 of the new cycle, giving you power standards with double core sets for like three months. Imagine if on the next Core they print Parasite, but no Datasucker or Ice Carver. For three months you get Anarch Kill decks ruining around, then when the first pack comes out they lose Sucker. Sure, Parasite is still good, but now having high strength Ice is actually relevant. How good is Tollbooth/Pop-Up Window on a format of Parasites, Vs how awful anything that costs 8 to rez is with Parasite/Datasucker. Throw in the big box in the middle of all of this for an extra 55 ish cards to up it to 420 ish cards, which is… Small but totally doable.
Nope, I don’t think they can do that. One major reason that Core2 didn’t upset people too much is because anyone with a complete collection didn’t have to buy it. But it’s now possible for a new player to have a complete collection of the legal cardpool without ever having bought Parasite. So they’d have to buy your proposed next core for one card. They might even need multiple copies.
If they’re going to do reprints on an ongoing basis, I’d much rather see small packs of just reprints of rotated cards, tied to specific cycles so that they rotate again at the same time as their associated cycle.
I think a slight variation of your suggestion could work, replacing the new cores with deluxes, and keeping the existing core legal always. Maybe a reprint pack could go between the cycles.
That has to be too small a card pool to work with. When MTG has a year of cards their sets are larger and release more often than full datapack cycles. Not only that, but Netrunner is a much more complex and diverse game with design space to support a bigger competitive card pool.
This is ignoring that when you spend money on cards, you’d prefer if they were usable for a longer period of time. There’s a point at which things get too big and a cardpool starts to hold back on progress but there’s also a threshold where having something to build on adds to the game, with enough tools to viably support lots of playstyles.
I’m sorry but I cannot take you seriously here.
Kakugo was widely played when Parasite was legal. Freaking Vanilla was widely played with Parasite being legal. (You can argue similarly that it makes no sense to play Vanilla when Paperclip is everywhere; It isn’t supported by actual play.)
I don’t really want to talk too much about Parasite and its rotation’s effect on the meta… But whether a low-strength ice is good is independent of Parasite’s existence. Pop-Up Window was widely played with Parasite around, Quandary, Enigma, and Vanilla all saw plenty of play. Conversely, Errand Boy, Burke Bugs, and Salvage were never played, and are never played. (Just to name Weyland ice because I had a list of them up…)
I believe Core Rotation was a net positive for the game, but a few things were… well, they were filling holes in the game that exist because of the basic rules of the game, and those holes are only now, at the end of Kitara, starting to be filled. Which was part of the point of Kitara, and was the point of Genesis, so again, I’m not worried.
i actually don’t see what’s so questionable about that post. i agree with you on Kakugo, but whereas the barrier suite used to be 3 Vanilla 2 Kakugo, it’s now often 3 Kakugo and 1-2 something else.
and i also don’t see how Vanilla being played goes against the post either. Vanilla was 0 to rez, so the opportunity cost of losing it (same as Pop-Up) vs installing/rezzing is just so low that the corp was often happy if the runner wasted a parasite on it and let them keep something else at a much higher strength (and cost)
i think more to the point, EULA is already contending with Laamb (and to a lesser extent, Sherman). i really don’t think EULA would be in any way considered if Parasite were also in the card pool.
Eula would be unplayable with parasite in the cardpool (as it has no facecheck, unlike komainu).
that said, EULA is pretty much the only low str ice designed in a “no parasite” world. the rest all saw play and many are now problematic now that parasite is gone.
What are you basing the usage of Kakugo on? Just your memory of those metas? If you check Know the Meta, Kakugo was around 10% until it show up to twice that around Crimson Dust. I believe that was when the Core 2.0 list was announced. Even so, a lot of the decks that played Kakugo in the Parasite era also played Hostile Infrastructure which punished Parasite trashes or PU that wanted ice that can consistently mill even if they sometimes were trashed.
And if you check below where it shows the percentage of decks in that faction that use the card… All Jinteki decks use the card. Palana’s the only one that has posted decks without the card.
I do believe that’s a current chart, though. I would be very surprised if that number dipped below 75% before Core2.
Remember, Know the Meta doesn’t have every deck.
Yet Parasite was still around during Crimson Dust. I wonder if there was a card in Crimson Dust that made Jinteki decks more playable and thus would show up as a larger percentage of the meta and because every Jinteki deck plays Kakugo, would correspond to a jump in Kakugo being played in fully a fifth of all Corp decks? Oh, yeah.
Why is this contentious? Did someone actually play in a meta where Jinteki decks didn’t play this card immediately upon release?
i think i would reword the initial statement, from just saying low-str ice to saying high-cost, low-str ice. and i don’t care to argue it anymore past that from what’s already been said.
My point is that the Revised Core was announced for a while and not released until after Worlds so the “Crimson Dust” era was artificially long, partially with Parasite legal partially without. There could very well be a lot of Core 2.0 events in that time where Kakugo seems more appealing. But, I’m not sure how KtM tracks each pack release.
Overall, I don’t think a lot of people played Kakugo unless it was in a prison deck that punished trashing cards, or PU, or if they thought Inversificator Andy was more common. Kakugo (and non-prison Jinteki) became a lot more appealing once rotation happened because Parasite was gone. Most people at a competitive event don’t want to pay 4 for non-facecheck punishing ice that will trash in one turn.