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Author Topic: Balance Sink Cards in Netrunner  (Read 3842 times)

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XerxesPraelor

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Balance Sink Cards in Netrunner
« on: April 23, 2014, 02:08:34 pm »
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I've been noticing a technique that the designers of Android: Netrunner seem to use quite often: namely, that of creating fallback cards that act as a silver bullet to certain strategies. Feedback Filter is a good example of this: if decks revolving around a killshot with net damage made possible by brain damage lowering the runner's hand become popular, feedback filter would be a perfect counter to them. This doesn't mean those archetypes can't become good; just that they can't get too good.

Plascrete Carapace is an example of a balance sink card that ends up being used. For a while, while Tag and Bag was one of the absolute best archetypes, Plascrete Carapace was needed three times in every runner deck. It is still common to have even in a non-tag me deck, but is nowhere near as necessary as before. And yet the relative power of T&B is still around the same; it's lost prominence due to the rise of NBN FA, but the fact that Plascrete Carapace does not always go up first turn against Weyland makes it better again.

Balance sink cards like Plascrete Carapace act like a chemical buffer: inside a certain range, the power of an archetype increases by much less than it would if its silver bullet did not exist. One possible reason for the designers to include this sort of card is to make the meta much more stable: if NBN fast advance became the only viable corp deck, The Source would make it still within range of the other corps. This sort of cards also acts as a way of forcefully introducing variety into the metagame, because the chosen archetype of a meta without variance quickly stabilizes back as soon as the runner decks begin to include the silver bullets.

What this looks like from the standpoint of a player is that many times, a card introduced in a datapack seems useless, and is in fact useless. Like reaction cards in dominion that hurt the attacker1, they will probably never be used, but, and this is on purpose in Netrunner, will decrease the effectiveness of their chosen target or at least give it a boundary over which it cannot pass but slowly. So don't be disappointed when you crack open the new data-pack and find a Restoring Face: it's doing its job in the backround, unseen yet efficient.

1 See http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=699.0 for why there aren't reactions that hurt the attacker in Dominion.
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Drab Emordnilap

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Re: Balance Sink Cards in Netrunner
« Reply #1 on: April 24, 2014, 08:15:45 am »
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This happens in other games too -- Magic the Gathering does this a lot. See something like Deicide for a recent example.
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popsofctown

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Re: Balance Sink Cards in Netrunner
« Reply #2 on: February 03, 2016, 09:24:53 am »
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Necro. 

The way MtG does this is far more palatable than the way Netrunner does it.  Cards like Deicide (which didn't actually see play as far as I know, but Roast and Back to Nature and such do) end up in your sideboard so that you don't have to use them against decks where they do nothing.  It makes actually playing your games out more pleasant, you don't draw a useless card all the time, and when you do actually come up against the thing you need the hate card for, games 2 and 3 out of a set you can jam so many into your deck you'll get to see at least one.  In either game I think it's a necessary evil that adds more rock-paper-scissorsy feel to what you play in a tournament versus what you'll happen to be paired up against.

Cards that aren't useless in irrelevant matchups like I've Had Worse are nice.  Sports Hopper is coming out soon, and is the first neutral form of Plascrete Carapace that has backup use cases for other matchups.  (Although it probably won't be useable except for Geist because the numbers aren't good enough).

Turing and Swordsman are really important balance sink cards for the dominance of Faust.  The parent corp of Turing got hit hard by the new restriction list so Faust pretty much does nothing but run rampant and get in wherever the heck it wants now.
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Grujah

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Re: Balance Sink Cards in Netrunner
« Reply #3 on: February 03, 2016, 09:31:19 am »
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Yeah, but drawing is easier in ANR (comparing diesel / anon tip to any (non Ancestrall Recall) card draw in MTG), so it kinda "evens out", doesn't it?
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popsofctown

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Re: Balance Sink Cards in Netrunner
« Reply #4 on: February 03, 2016, 10:55:05 am »
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Yeah, but drawing is easier in ANR (comparing diesel / anon tip to any (non Ancestrall Recall) card draw in MTG), so it kinda "evens out", doesn't it?

It's definitely easier to win a game with a blank runner card shuffle into your deck than a blank card in Magic.  It's really unfortunate when the Corp silver bullets are worse than blank cards, though, like Blacklist or Chronos Project
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