I think the card would be fine in any other faction, but its in a faction that has so much remote running hate (RP, Nisei, Nisei Mark II) that when you pull in the rest of the remote hate (ELP, Ash) the card becomes simply untouchable in some games. That might be ok if there weren’t another neutral hard to score card in the meta (NAPD), but there is.
I find IMP to be a reasonable card against TFP, but not good enough with interns around.
I wonder what RP would play like without The Future Perfect? Especially now that they’re upping the ante with Incubator/Medium. I just remember when “regular” 5/3s were nigh uplayable, and I still think they’re rarely played outside of Blue Sun. Haas Glacier is second tier, and Blue Sun glacier only works because it can gain boatloads of money and rez big Ice faster than any other corp. We needed The Future Perfect.
The real frustration with RP is the invincible remote. I like Caprice’s concept, and I think psi games are fine and occasionally interesting. Nevertheless, in the current card pool she may be too cheap to rez at 2 credits. That’s only because right now we have an underpowered blunder of a counter to invincible remotes in Unregistered S&W (it could be a run event, maybe a double, that just requires a successful run on HQ. Cost 0).
The upcoming Drive By may put a minor hurtin’ on RP, and who knows how the runners will develop. Spooned, Forked and other ice destruction may make those remotes more fragile. I think Lotus Field’s invincibility and the “Elephant in the Room” that is Eli 1.0 are just as much to blame as Caprice and Nisei counters for RP’s dominance.
I used to play Jinteki glacier before Future Perfect was released.
You would occasionally rez a free Tollbooth off of Priority Req and be happy, and frequently lose the game to someone plucking that same Priority Req off R&D and be sad.
It’s a huge shame that S&W is not playable. Alexfrog might still be playing the game if it were possible to actually shoot all Caprices with a gun.
If fast advance went away, Quest Complete could actually be a card. Right now it’s a massive blowout 5% of the time and blank 95% of the time.
I would actually consider that an advantage to S&W not being playable 
I think QC could get some traction if Anarch becomes more accessible. We’ll see whether O&C helps.
What if Astro token just couldn’t be used on another copy of Astro? It stops the train but doesn’t necessarily kill the FA. It just brings it down in speed to a more manageable level, I would think.
That’s how I would errata Astro if I were doing Core Set 2.0.
LOL. The bastards do that in Eve too. Ask my 50 Dramiels how lonely they are feeling in Jita 4-4 Hangar. XD
I would just reword Astro to say only the first scored astro gains the token.
Anyways, nice discussions here. Looking forward to a tournament where not half the people netdeck some NEH and its flip a coin a lot of matches.
Net deckers are going to net deck (note that I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing - if you’re playing to win with limited time why wouldn’t you leverage the work of other people?), I think the key is to ensure that there are enough viable options that they don’t all pick the same damn thing.
Except when the lucky top deck is TFP, then the runner needs to get lucky again. That’s what I mean by it’s a 5/1 for the runner, because on most accesses it’s going to give the runner 0 points.
If TFP were any other 5/3 it would clearly impact the win rate of RP. I remember running Priority Req in RP over a year ago, and it was a totally different feeling when you had one of those in HQ.
Right. That’s because 5/3 agendas are, strictly speaking, crap. TFP is the first and currently only non-crap 5/3 agenda. Its existence enables the two competitive Jin archetypes: RP Glacier and PE Cambridge. Without TFP, there would have been NO Jinteki in the metagame - similarly to how Weyland has been struggling before the arrival of BS (and some would argue that they’re still in trouble since their Shaper matchup is abysmal, but that’s another thread).
3/2 agendas are the strongest agendas: they can be never-advanced, they can be fast-advanced, and they’re the most efficient from a resource-to-points perspective.
Government Takeover is also just as efficient. (troll)
Cmon now. Alex wrote incredibly high quality, and his card evaluations were top notch. The fact that lots of people feel personally offended by someone saying a card is bad was not a problem of Alex.
I for one really miss playing against @AlexFrog here in local tournaments. His online extremely polarizing figure aside, he is an amazing gamer.
At least he will play board games probably long after I am dead :).
Apologies - that was done in bad taste. I agree that @Alexfrog contributed to the community and personally I would love to see him back, I was a bit surprised when he quit the game.
Since the problem cards are mostly in the core set, one solution might be to restrict certain cards to their single core set quantity. Two copies of Astroscript and one of Desperado for example. The pips on the card make it easy to remember and new or casual players that only own one core would be unaffected. The big downside is of course that you’d need a new system when you wanted to take action on a card outside the core.
edit: The restriction would just be on targeted cards, not the whole core.
I feel like that works with some and not with others. Grimoire didn’t do anything, it shouldn’t have to suffer.
Yeah, Zaibatsu Loyalty and Security Subcontract are so strong and so imbalanced that they should be restricted to 1.
=/
That’s not a good solution. Conquest has op cards that are limited to 1 per deck. If they show up early you very often win. It isn’t good design space in my opinion.
This just adds a ton of variance to the game. Those cards are still imbalanced, and you just have a massive lead if you’re lucky enough to draw them and you flail about helplessly when you don’t.
Matches become who can topdeck their singleton SanSan City Grid first and then keep it on the board by spamming Interns?
I guess I haven’t provided my solution in this thread yet. For my two cents, restricted lists of the form “cannot play X and Y in the same deck” are the best compromise. They have precedent for FFG and don’t prevent anybody from playing with a card that they own.
They can be specific enough to target only the biggest of problems, and can easily be revoked later if they aren’t necessary anymore.
An example would be:
After this I don’t think Fast Track or TFP would be a problem anymore.