Oh? When was the last time you played Corporate Scandal, Investigative Journalism, Frame Job, Activist Support, Tallie Perrault, or The Archivist?
The corp cards that give bad pub don’t see play for the same reason those six don’t: They aren’t good cards with good effects. Hostile Takeover, Geothermal Fracking, Grim, Bulwark, and Profiteering are the ones that have seen play. The bad ones are Checkpoint, Fenris, Muckraker, Reality Threedee, Shinobi, and Swarm.
I’d argue that Bad Publicity is still not a fully-explored mechanic. Most of the BP cards are in Spin Cycle, with one or two sprinkled in the other cycles. (Bulwark’s the most recent Corp card, and The Archivist just came out for Runner.)
If Blackmail were so powerful that it were a problem, it would be worth running the Runner BP-generation cards to do it. Valencia runs it because it’s the only/best option available to use with Bad Publicity on the Corp. (The other two are Itinerant Protesters and, technically, Tallie Perrault.)
I think that’s a false assumption, because it assumes that at least one of the BP-generation cards (other than Val) is reliable and effective enough in cost, cards, and actions to be worth the deck slots to include it along with Blackmail. Investigative Journalism costs too many clicks and requires the corp to have bad pub. Frame Job costs an agenda. Corporate Scandal is a current, so it’s only good until the Corp scores or plays another current. Tallie Perrault depends on what the corp plays and more-or-less requires you to include instant-speed tag management. Activist Support is binary and also requires instant-speed tag management.
Itinerant Protestors and Tallie Perrault’s trash ability, unlike Blackmail, require more than 1 bad pub to be worthwhile. But as long as Blackmail is in the card pool, anything that gives bad pub has to be inefficient or it will become ubiquitous. Blackmail’s strength is the reason that all the other bad pub cards have to be so bad. It restricts the design space by making it difficult to allow bad pub generation to be efficient enough to make Protestors and Tallie worthwhile. The Archivist might be a step toward making it more prevalent, but it still requires you to let the Corp score, be lucky enough that the Corp scored the right kind of agenda, and have enough money to reasonably beat the trace.
Bad pub don’t really need runner cards to exploit it to be economically insane (or at least a serious concern). 1 credit per bad pub per run is enough.
Also, if Blackmail doesn’t see much play is because there are no runner card that give bad pub being easy to play. They either are situational, have cost or additional effect the runners want to avoid. Except Valencia, obviously.
I haven’t thought about activist support since Aaron. Maybe that’s worth a look. You probably still want to be able to kill it at some point, it’s a many moving parts combo that probably doesn’t work.
I think Blackmail was probably alright until Val because (a) it was a faff to land bad pub, and (b) only Weyland were voluntarily taking bad pub, they were/are bad anyway.
Tallie and the Archivist both rely on your opponent having certain cards in their decks. You can’t play many cards that are dead in even 30% of games. They may see play in a netrunner with a side board. Those cards are dead much more than that.
In the absence of Blackmail, really good illicit cards may become playable again. As has already been pointed out a slightly better PAD isn’t really good.
Bad pub has always been one of the most mis-developed parts of the game. Printing Blackmail as a 0-cost neutral event made it just so, I don’t know, binary.
In the magic land of what-if, it could have had a less-severe benefit for runners, been a second win condition for runners, and been a lot easier to apply and remove. In that fantasy, I’d be fine with Blackmail as a high-influence Criminal card that made you remove a bad pub to play it.
I don’t think Val without Blackmail is that bad. Just before the first MWL hit, my favorite runner was Desperado Val where you spent all your influence on despies and clone chips. You’ll be able to make that deck with -1 clone chip. Its whole strength was efficient runs with bp/desp/sucker and Blackmail was rarely useful, I dropped down to 2 just to screw with people.
I don’t disagree that bp is an underdeveloped part of the card pool. It rivals advanceable ICE for the sheer number of unplayable cards sharing a mechanic. But the fundamental effect is decent.
Actually probably -all clone chips lol. Like every card in the deck is on the MWL. But point is you can make a pretty decent version of it and a few slots have been upgraded since then.
Bad Pub’s concept is interesting but its effect should have been some other thing than recurring credits per run. It’s the single most forgotten trigger (even though it’s not quite a trigger) in the game. It’s hard to indicate consistently on the table, easy to miss, and leads to so many situations of “I forgot my bad pub, do you mind if I take a credit?” that literally give me an OCD (Of course in these cases often neither player has any idea if the bad pub was actually used or not.)
Get rid of Blackmail and let this herald the slow death of this muddled mechanic!
For how simple it is in practice its always something that’s semi-irritating to teach new players about, mostly because it just doesn’t come up very often but also new players have a poor grasp on the worth of a credit which leads to them forgetting to use the BP credit all the time.
I really do wish there was some other interesting thing that BP did but hey, what can you do?
Assuming the list is true (with Rumor Mill all but banned, the big hit that Anarchs have taken to their strong cards, Eli coming off and Friends not going on), it seems that Foodcoats (as well as Palana and RP) will be back to tier 1. Am I just being hopeful about the return of glacier or do others see it that way too?
To be fair, I have had some success with a nearly breakerless Andy (Rebirth) -> Leela deck that used the Corporate Scandal/Blackmail combo to get into servers. Was using the Au Revoir/Snitch econ engine for it. But I’ll admit it’s edge case, and still didn’t use any of the other bad publicity cards.
Agreed. I also think the big hits to anarch will push people towards Crim, which is also good for glacier.
I’m guessing this creates a situation where Crim beats NBN, NBN beats anarch, anarch beats HB/Jinteki glacier, and glacier beats Crim. As long as the favorite in those matchups has a 60-70% matchup, and not 90% (the way Rumor Mill vs glacier was), then I’d be quite happy with it!
Funnily enough, I started playing the deck to train myself to better remember triggers. Datasucker, Desperado, and bp were things I kept forgetting, so I grinded that deck for months until they were ingrained. Everyone should play Val for a while so they never forget to use bp.
Also it wrecked old glacier RP pretty well. It was hard to tax that deck out.
Also I think Jinteki.net exacerbates how hard it is to remember to use bp since it does it automatically. If that’s where you practice primarily, it’s fairly hard to remember IRL.
(Of course in these cases often neither player has any idea if the bad pub was actually used or not.)
