Where is the MWL? - As of August 20th, 2018 - MWL 2.2 is here (effective 2018.09.06)

I think those are good options but I think despi-val or despi-smoke can probably keep up if they find their tools early enough.

With 3 I don’t think it will. With 2 it will survive for sure.

Personally, I think MWL 3 for Friends and MWL 1 for Moon might be better than just MWL Friends for 3.

I don’t think it will actually affect the Corp side much. Dummy Box is a much bigger limitation than not having friends.

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Good thing that thanks to this great game we all have so many friends!

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All this tells me is that you aren’t playing enough Museum of History decks :wink:

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Playing as in using them or against them? :wink:

Moons survives Friends T3 by cutting DBS or Turtlebacks and putting FIHP at 2x. Probably ratcheting up CSM. If Moon also goes T1, deck might die.

I think if FIHP goes t3 you go down to 1 FIHP, one or two restore, and yeah, play extra csm. Don’t think you cut dbs and turtles, those cards do so much work? EDIT: At least DBS does a ton of work, esp post rotation. I can see turtles going down to two but openings with turtle are pretty sick

Restore is a good call. A little harder to use, but not bad.

I still think Friends at 2x makes sense because of how powerful putting two assets out is – Like Moons+AAL, or AAL+ALL w/Moons on table. You can stack her to 3-6 counters before the Runner can even respond.

IMHO, DBS does do work, but Turtles is going to let you start scoring quicker. I think judicious use of Moons and aggressive scoring mitigates any trouble that you have with flooding. Not entirely, but a decent amount.

Looks like FFG has decided to hit the nuke button on the MWL. spoiler-ken just leaked a brand new, radical ban/restricted list, similar to Game of Thrones.

https://imgur.com/a/6Zu0Y

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Geez, I didn’t paly for 4 months, my TermDir and most of my Mars datapack are still unblistered and it’s like I’ve missed a whole year of meta.

Praise Boggs! :heart_eyes:

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Not sure how you go from ‘Yeah I’d rather not go above 20 cards on the list’ to this.

Almost feels like someone’s probing for leaks again.

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If that is truly true I’m… I’m not sure I’m 100% on board with that approach… I don’t mind introducing a straight Ban list, that’s for sure, but I feel like the structure of such a restricted list is inferior to the MWL. I mean, Pawnshop and Clone Chip being mutually rerstricted make sense, I guess, because they combo well. But Pawnshop and Film Critic? That’s not a problem combination and just further neuters Panwshop decks for no good reason.

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At the minimum, I think it requires a LOT less math than the MWL to build and verify decks.

If you’ve got this, then you don’t have any of these. If you do, JUDGE!

Maths allows for creative flexibility though. This not so much.

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Card choices aside, I think a ban+restricted list is needed for any card game. I would still like to see the MWL because it’s another knob developers can use to balance the game and probably solves different problems.

Film Critic is a hilariously blunt instrument used to smash a wide range of cool and interactive strategies/cards (currently Hunter Seeker, Obokata Protocol, the new HB 5/3, and even stuff like Ben Musashi and Red Herrings), most of which you’ll notice fit in quite nicely to glacier. The same is true of Employee Strike, just with interesting IDs instead of normal cards. I’m all for the runner having to choose between some other generically strong and disruptive card (like Inversificator or Magnum Opus, both great examples of cards that HEAVILY mess with certain corp strategies) and those sorts of hate cards. I just don’t see Film Critic and EStrike as particularly fun cards, and I value changes to the game that makes the runner actually have to play around corp cards instead of just invalidating them with tech cards.

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After reviewing discussions and thinking on it more, I would think that a 3-tier system probably makes the most sense, but is also probably more complicated than the powers-that-be at FFG would want to go.

There are basically 3 kinds of problematic interactions:

Power Cards. These are cards that are above the curve. These are cards that are pretty powerful on their own, but don’t break the game. They just need to be brought down a notch. The MWL can address these cards by altering the power level of decks that include them.

Power Combos. These are cards that are fine, or maybe power cards themselves, on their own, but create an over-the-top interaction when combined with another card. A restricted list addresses these cards by breaking up combos, but otherwise leaving the pieces available to play with.

Broken Cards. Cards that are broken in some way on their own. Too efficient economically, unlimited effects that happen to be easier to reach absurd levels than initially thought, cards that create a power combo with a large part of the card pool, cards that have a kind of effect that breaks certain design space for other cards that can’t be mitigated without a redesign. There’s no redeeming these, they need to be banned. A ban list addresses these cards.

What we have now is the MWL trying to cover all 3 problems. The MWL is great for addressing the Power Cards, but it doesn’t break up combos when the opportunity cost of the MWL is worth including the combo. It also can’t fix fundamental design flaws within certain cards. It does an OK job, but it obviously needs to be better.

This leaked Banned/Restricted List combo has the Banned List addressing the broken cards, so we’re good there. But, it also has the Restricted List addressing both Power Cards and Power Combos. This works wonderfully to break up those Power Combos, but it’s clunky when addressing those Power Cards. Now you can’t use Power Cards with other cards that are part of Power Combos, even if they don’t make their own Power Combo together. It also doesn’t restrict using that Power Card in any way if it’s the only one of the list you have. As the list grows there are more and more collateral interactions between the two that begin to exponentially restrict deck building space.

If we have all 3 working together then we can address each kind of problem individually and keep the deck building space as open as possible. I’d even prefer if Power Combos were individually restricted, as a homogeneous list can lead to two Power Combos unnecessarily restricting each other’s cards. Maybe a “only cards from Column A or only cards from Column B” type setup would work. This begins to get complicated, though, which is rough for accessibility outside of the competitive crowd.

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Yes, this exactly :slight_smile:

Interesting, if it were me, I’d probably ban Strike and Critic, and restrict Temujin and Moose. I’d also probably unrestrict Aesops and be tempted to unrestrict Mopus (although I understand the logic). But beyond that, the list seems good if true. Some choices will probably make more sense as we see the new cycle.

My first thoughts are that it is interesting how shaper have had nothing banned and everything restricted, and that Sunny might now be a big winner vs glacier.

One further thought: Where are DDoS and D4vid?