I personally tech most of my decks against Eli. I have a cool Supplier big rig Whizzard who runs Ice Carver and BlackKat. It’ll get even better with Net-ready Eyes. Lots of draw, Cyberfeeder fed runs, Datasucker+Parasite support,
Now Anarchs can tech even harder against Eli with Knifed. And for Crim I usually slot 2x E3.
Just reading this thread, it’s not as if there’s one card that’s powerful. It’s even more than a handfull, there’s a whole bunch of them. Do we really need to complain over and over because there are strong cards and weak ones? Hell, the only card that’s so strong you have to have it in your deck even if it costs you influence has no direct power itself, Jackson just has a lot of utility. The rest of the cards doesn’t even come close.
It all doesn’t seem so terribly problematic to me.
This thread looks like those we got last year when everyone and their mom complained about siphon spamming, parasite recursion and how strong late game RDI+Kati Jones were.
I really can’t give enough thanks to the person who linked to David Sirlin’s “Playing to Win” in another thread. I’ve read the book before, but completely forgot about it in the meantime, and re-reading it has been such a huge eye-opener… these sorts of complaints just really make me want to say “scrub”, shake my head and move on.
Sure, I’m interested in playing with weird cards as much as the next guy (maybe more, even)… but I think the way to do it is to look at the weird card and try to explore which specific decks they might actually be a better fit for than the overall stronger choice. Is every other crim console horribly overcosted when compared to Desperado? Sure. Do they still have specific builds where they’re actually better? The empirical evidence seems to be there.
The game is what it is. If it bugs you too much, then by all means go find a different game. Some people (like Alex) did, and I’m reasonably certain everyone involved is happier that way.
I realize playtesting is hard - I’m not saying LLDS were stupid or anything; it’s just a pity there are so many problems, and I think it’s not immoral to use the strength of hindsight to create a more balanced meta than the one that already exists.
Exactly. In Eve Online we just say:
can i haz ur stuff
(lower case important)
Because the more playable cards there are, the more interesting the game is. If Desperado, Logos, and Doppelganger are close together in power level then picking a console for a criminal deck is interesting. Instead you just almost always pick Desperado, which is not interesting.
That makes sense. If you want to win a tournament sure, I get that Desperado is better in most builds.
The tournament scene in any game like this is always going to be about playing the BEST stuff. Sometimes it’s great to just sit at home running Stirling Connections with Logos on the patio, drinking wine with your wife. Games MUST have an element of the latter. Where you can do fun stuff as well as effective stuff.
Can you create interesting stuff that isn’t as good and still not everyone rage quit? I would suggest that’s EXACTLY what the designers are doing…
Let me put it this way. Against friends, I might do crazy gambit chess moves. Like a King’s Gambit or something. Its really not the greatest opening. But it leads to fun interesting play.
Insiders have indicated to me that clot is real
I am not saying “don’t print Logos because it’s not good enough”. I am saying make Logos better (or Desperado worse).
How can you control meta in the tournament scene without making certain things interesting and certain things effective? May I suggest, the strongest card would always be ‘found’ and then people would play that much much more?
I’m talking about two different things here. When I say the metagame is healthy, I mean that in the timeframe of the current 1-2 pack releases, each faction has a relatively competitive deck (say, tier 1.5) and the corp/runner imbalance at the top level is at most 55/45. Lady is entirely to credit for this. During Worlds, the metagame was not healthy.
The second thing is what @crunchums is talking about just above me. On a longer time scale, looking perhaps 1 cycle of packs ahead, how are the top decks going to change? Sure, runners might climb back to 55/45 over corps, NEH may fall to tier 2 because of clot, etc. But the decks will not fundamentally change – vast horizontal expansion of the metagame is simply not possible anymore because of the power creep. I guarantee that after SanSan, crims will still be playing desperado and RP will still be competitive (even if only on the back of TFP).
The empirical evidence being what, 1 in 20 crim decks that show up on tournament-winning decklists feature logos or doppelganger? All that means is that tier 2 decks can win a modestly-size tournament in the hands of an expert player. It does not mean that there exists a tier 1 logos/doppelganger build and we just aren’t “creative” enough to find it. Desperado is a problem.
How about “Internet arguments are what they are. If they bug you and you’d rather tacitly accept the game’s problems, just ignore them.”?
I love netrunner. Don’t mistake my complaints for an opinion that FFG is doing a bad job with the game overall. But the game is not perfect, and I enjoy discussing how it could be better. I won’t leave the game because of power creep or anything – it doesn’t stop me from practicing top-notch play with the existing spike decks and it doesn’t stop me from creative deckbuilding of new tier-1.5 stuff. But IMO, these arguments are also part of the game.
Well … To be fair, Kranz (not sure on the nickname) won the Chicago Regional on the back of a Fast-Ad Tennin (way more faster than the Polish one) and a Doppelganger Silhouette against a field of RP, TWIY* and if I think it was probably the biggest regional the US got.
Can you explain more what you mean by this? Interesting point of view.
There is something to be said for the surprise factor, though. I lost a game to that Silhouette deck one time because I was blindsided by a quest completed. If I put my Caprice on R&D rather than the remote, I wouldn’t have lost. I have played a lot of games against that deck since and have never once lost to it again. Hard to call something tier one just because it CAN win a big tournament, or even just because it was actually a good choice for that tournament. If the results can’t be replicated, it’s just a novelty.
Basically, if you have to be a tricky surprisey guy to win a big tournament with a non Desperado criminal deck, it’s a problem. I don’t think anyone denies that Desperado is undercosted. I would have liked to see Doppleganger costed at $2 and Logos costed at $2 or $3, even if they compare super favorably to non criminal consoles at that price, just because that’s what they would need to do to make them remotely close to as good as Desperado. Hell, if Logos costed $1 I would still probably play Desperado over it.
Consider all the cards they’ve recently released where it’s clear they’re trying to push a type of deck that does something entirely new. Connection-heavy Iain, Harmony shi-kyu, some sort of blackguard denial, and now they’re pushing this Eater+Keyhole, BWBI+space ice, and Cybernetics 5-brain-damage-flatline stuff. In almost all of the cases, they’ve been bad, kitchen-table material.
What I’m saying is that the currently-top strategies are already supported by such powerful cards (desperado/sec test, astro/sansan, caprice/nisei) that FFG is starting to back themselves into a corner where, if they wanted to make a card for a “horizontally new” deck that was powerful enough to make that deck tier 1, why wouldn’t you just play that card in the existing tier 1 strategy, thereby pushing the bar for tier 1 even higher? It’s certanly possible, but without as much power creep, it’s much rarer to see.
Well a novelty deck also ended 2nd at worlds.
I don’t think PE is a novelty deck at all. It has been putting up meaningful results ever since Hinkes won regionals with it. The problem with PE isn’t that it’s not good if people know what’s going on, (people have won with it over and over again without changing up lists much at all), but that there’s such an effective counter available in FBF.
I don’t think this is entirely true. Once clot comes out, DRT NEH could become an actual thing. Blue Sun created synergies, making OAI and Curtain Tier 1.5 cards when they were pretty much trash before. Cache was a huge boost to Noise without seeing much play in any other tier 1 decks outside of the odd Kate Pawnshop. There are a lot of ways to create new decks without making the currently-best decks any better.
The reason Harmony Shi Kyu, Connections Iain, Eater Keyhole, etc decks aren’t tier one is because the synergy cards the support them are just not good enough to make you want to play them over the raw-powerful cards. If Jinteki got another awesome 5/3, Harmony would get a lot better, but it wouldn’t necessarily see play over TFP in anything else. If Eater costed $1 or something, those decks would look a lot more appealing. If there were better connections, especially ones that synergized with other connections, the connections deck would be better but Stealth Andy probably wouldn’t be.
Clarification post for the people who are reading my posts as just another idiot on the internet who thinks he knows everything:
I love Netrunner. It’s the best card game I’ve ever played. Please don’t interpret my opinion that things could be better as saying that the sky is falling and everything sucks.
I am aware that it is silly to say that I would have done a better job playtesting than they did (hence my “I can’t help but feel like…” as opposed to something more declarative). I know that playtesting is hard and that I would have missed things. Even Magic, with its vastly greater testing resources, still makes occasional huge mistakes.
But none of that makes the end result immune to criticism. There is a persistent pattern of cards with marginal effects costing something when they should cost 0 (e.g. Mutate, Cyber Threat, Power Tap, Social Engineering, Unscheduled Mainenance). You cannot tell me with a straight face that Power Tap is excusable because “playtesting is hard”.