Would limited Astroscript kill Fast Advance?

I’m all for the banning of Future Perfect. That card is too good at defending itself without cost.
A stacked remote with Ash and Caprice takes some serious cash to setup, the answer should be running elsewhere but TFP just makes it so hard to grab points from centrals with pretty much no counterplay available.

It is going to suffer pretty badly from Wanton Destruction. Imp (or a targetted Noise mill) already work pretty well at allowing repeat psi games.

Let’s ban all the cards!

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It would be interesting to see how NBNFA played with five blank 3/2’s and one SanSan of Invulnerability as opposed to three of each. My gut says replacing 3/2s w 4/2s probably kills any non-ToL FA deck independently of eliminating the Astro tokens. Six blank 3/2’s makes for a fine FA deck, but don’t know that four is enough (again, excepting ToL decks and even they want to play as many 3/2s as possible).

Sure, a few non-serious players will want to play in tournaments, and again, I seriously doubt they’d be put off by the necessity of having to use a few updated cards to do so. +1 for the Big Lebowski gif; I think it applies to this case too :slight_smile: .

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LOL. It absolutely does. I’m just against complexity for complexities sake. I think anything banned or restricted should only be considered when there is a demonstrable problem in balance. I still beat NEH dudes a bunch (and for clarity, I lose all a bunch to them too) … They can’t auto-pilot a win if you playing right, IMO. And even if they can, they need turns on end to do it. I’m far more worried about power shutdown shenanigans, and even those decks I am able to beat when I have a good game.

Just to answer original question? I think it will absolutely kill players desire to use NBN. As the recent ChiLo tournament indicates. You know, the actual data it provided. Not the ‘moods’ and ‘feelings’ of posters.

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Then no one can win!

OnTopic:

Unique astrscript wouldn’t kill fast advance, it’d just slow NBN down. You still have Jinteki FA, HB FA (which I still think is stronger than NBN FA), and Psycho strategies out of NBN.

I don’t think there’s any way that HBFA is better than NBN FA.

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Money is just as good.
Agendas can do more once scored. (Still a full set of 3/2’s)
Ice is more potent and taxing, which leaves 6 influence (assuming 3x sansan) for whatever. (Shipment From SanSan + Efficiency committee) is very very strong.

Basically, I think if you take this shell:

3xABT
3xVIT
3xEFC
1xNAPD

3x Jacckson
3x SanSan
3x Biotic Labor
3x Shipment From SanSan

+Ice/Money/Ash

You have a very strong deck here. There are 9 FA pieces, which is comparable to NBN’s 9 in AstroBiotics (Biotic, SanSan, Astro). You may not move at the speed of AstroBiotics, but the security of a good, taxing ice suite will probably make up for that.

Probably by virtue of having better ICEs and a better econ engine. I don’t buy it but eh, everyone can have is opinion, right ?

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I think there is one thing to consider here: a lack of competitive balance among factions. Anarchs are the only faction left to not have a tier 1 build that is reliable- Noise can be pretty potent in the right hands, but he will fall short more often than Kate or Andy. The evidence and knowledge of this leads corps to tech towards speed and tax, the two ways you can lock out decks that need to set up or need to generate money through running; and this means Corps and runners are teching against the same decks: For runners, speed + money = win, for Corps, speed wins, or glacier wins.

Anarch will have tier 1 options soon, and their new-found presence in the meta will mean, like mentioned earlier, that Corps cannot all-in on Shaper or Criminal weaknesses exclusively. The fact that Valencia exists means NAPD could be a liability, because with it comes the threat of Blackmail. Clot exists, and now FA has to have enough ice to protect HQ from Kim and Wanton Destruction, AND still be able to protect a remote and its Sansan from Stimhack and Imp.

Corp is going to be made significantly weaker by the vulnerabilities they discover themselves having versus new Anarch.

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Can’t +1 this hard enough. I mean, the metagame is healthy right now, it’s just that the power creep is starting to become very apparent and it means whole buckets of really cool cards will never see constructed play again. That’s what upsets me most. Logos, code siphon, mutate, hemmorhage, sage, unregistered S&W, Iain, etc are all really cool concepts for unique card effects that will forever be too overcosted to be worth a deck slot.

Every so often, like with executive boot camp, they hit the nail on the head with a unique card that’s costed just right to be worth playing 1 or 2 copies without disrupting any power balances. But the frequency of glaring mistakes like NEH’s 17 influence or ITD’s/DBS’s 4 trash cost or Sage’s 2cr per break makes me feel like they’re just rolling dice back there.

Since the release of Lady, astrobiotics feels eminently beatable, and only on top of the corp pile by a slim margin. Two or three packs ago, the deck was so busted that you practically had to cripple your deck to tech against it, such as with 3 bank jobs. Lady is a broken card, just no one complains because it evens out the playing field so much. I find this a really frightening amount of power creep.

I know it’s trite for everyone to be dumping their personal opinions about how to fix power levels, but… just imagine a world where: desperado costs 5, siphon doesn’t double stolen credits, datasucker is 2 inf, legwork costs 3, lady has 2 strength, sec testing costs 2, Andy gets 8 cards and 0 link, personal touch (or net-ready eyes) is 1 inf, djinn’s tutor costs 0cr, NEH has 15 influence, fast track costs 1, architect is 3 inf, TFP is a 6/3, DBS trashes for 3, IT dept trashes for 1, sansan trashes for 4, and eli costs 4.

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I imagine in that world you’d be complaining about something else.

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Because constructed will always be dominated by the cards at the high end of the power-level bell curve, you want that bell curve to be as narrow as possible. I’m not necessarily saying that any particular card is broken, I am saying that I wish they had done a better job of narrowing that bell curve.

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This is me publicly shaming you. @benjaminwald05 also referenced Hindsight Bias, but it’s silly to say you could do better than they could. That’s like seeing a professional football player make a mistake and say “OMG, that guy sucks. I could totally do that!”

Anyway, my original question was just if limited Astro to one-per-deck would kill the archetype completely. Some of you addressed that, so thank you!

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@bblum : I’m just gonna put this …

…here.

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On the subject of banning, some of you apparently need to get your fundamentals straight - reading this might help.

To call a game out on power creep when the most common complaint is that new packs are full of unusable crap, the metagame is stale and decks are full of core set cards even after two years seems to require a staggering amount of doublethink. Hell, your second sentence seems to go directly against your first.

I’ve bee playing card games with blatant power creep as it was happening (hello, Decipher) and trust me, this ain’t it.

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This seems to be a pervading sentiment on this thread and on Netrunner forums in general. I am always amused when I see comments such as:

Let’s talk about testing for a minute, shall we? I had the honor of playtesting Wisdom and Warfare, the second expansion to FFG’s Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game. The complexity we faced was much lower than what I imagine Netrunner’s testers deal with - a self-contained board game rather than a living card game.

Let me tell you, testing is hard. We had to spend a lot of time figuring out what could break stuff. Then, we had to actually go there and break it. The next step will be to report back to the testing forum and then hope that at least one other group manages to repeat our experience. At least once we thought we found something utterly broken, but another group pointed out how to counter our strategy.

And that’s only dealing with the broken stuff! Our top priority was to make sure nothing over-powered leaks to the main release. As a result, weak cards were given lower priority. When W&W was released people were unhappy with one of the new Civilizations (the Zulu) cause they deemed them too weak compared to the others. Entirely legitimate concern; however, since the playtest group was too busy weeding stuff that makes the game unplayable, we couldn’t dedicate much attention to buffing the weak stuff.

We did get rid of a bunch of over-powered stuff in W&W. Thanks to the game format (a board game) we also managed to squeeze in some errata to older cards, a prerogative that does not exist in Netrunner. It took us many hours of testing to get the game to its published state, and again - it’s a much simpler game. Plus, we didn’t even have to consider the future! I can’t even imagine how planning for unknown future expansions influences Netrunner development. Working on the big boxes must be a huge headache.

The only change I agree with in @bblum’s rant above is that Fast Track should have been more expensive. In fact, Lukas Litzinger admitted that Fast Track was “fast track’ed” into printing. Unfortunate, yes, but not disastrous - we’re not seeing FT in any decks other than AstroBiotics, and as this thread pointed out, the problem there is Astroscript, not FT (or Biotic Labor).

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Moving on with my previous rant: this article is from October 2014. Eli 1.0 was released in Future Proof, that’s more than a year and a half beforehand! I think it took about a year before the community figured out how powerful Eli 1.0 is (which is even more evident now when it’s compared to Markus 1.0; it’s not that Markus 1.0 is weak, it’s just that Eli 1.0 is too strong). Going back to the previous point - testing this must be a nightmare. Personally, I think that the game is at a great spot.

Now I just hope Clot really exists :open_mouth: And that it wasn’t part of the snow-jax sting :wink:

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Thats a naked assertion. Why do you want the power curve to be limited?