tl;dr - phoning it in a bit this week folk. Not a ton of insight, just gloating. Skip if you have something better to do with your time, like grind Thule games on Jnet or clip your toenails.
EMEA Quick Takes
“+1 click” runner IDs (Lat, Sable, Hoshiko) were 50% of the meta but only ~35% of the cut.
QtM Esa (piloted to a win by Jan Tuno) is, as predicted by this here bloggerino, Good. Sometimes they don’t draw Spin Doctor and they just lose.
World Tree Arissana is a menace and still (probably) underplayed given its power and flexibility. It’s relatively difficult to pilot, and involves a lot of shuffling which may be keeping people off it. This deck is highly enriched in the cut at recent events.
Ob continues to murder people. While I have not had luck testing with Venti Latte/MAD Ob (losing with a smurf account to DoomRat and Dggmuffin among others) , better players such as ryanbantwins can clearly pilot it well enough to present a formidable challenge even against substantial hate (see him winning vs. AugustusCaesar’s double Stoneship Chartroom at 6:38:00 mark here - https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2185497699). One warning if you choose to play the deck on Jnet: after you MAD, you’re gonna see 6+ Ob Trigger buttons and you have to click the right one to fetch a relevant card. This can easily be the difference between winning and losing.
Metagame looks pretty healthy in terms of deck diversity: this was a 110 person event and there was very equitable faction and ID representation. More on this below.
Point and Laugh
With about $1000 you can own pretty much every Android: Netrunner card (FFG and Null Signal) ever in triplicate. If you want to proxy and print out your own, you can probably own a Standard-ready full collection for less than $300 USD. You can show up to a tournament and play whatever you want. As noted above, the meta in EMEA was reasonably balanced, and that’s taking into account that our game includes a card that starts in play every single game (your ID). So, we have a 110 person tournament with incentive to win, everyone who shows up has reasonable access to whatever deck they want and the top cut ends up being a reasonable mix of archetypes, with skill often being the deciding factor.
How’s that “other game” doing?
Well, they just had a Modern format ProTour where almost the entire top 8 cut was on the same stupid combo deck which was apparently miserable to play with, against, and watch. Despite (because of?) being a for profit corporation that has 30+ years’ experience balancing an extremely basic “creature beater”, they printed a card so obviously busted (Nadu1) that people were predicting it would need to be banned even before the ProTour. And that’s hardly the first time Hasbro/WotC2 has embarrassingly punted the card designs in the past 10 years. There are at least 3 non-mutually exclusive explanation for why this happens:
1. They don’t care. They sell for Commander casuals, everything else is whatever.
2. They do it on purpose to milk whales. People invest $1000 for a single modern deck with the expectation the format doesn’t rotate, but since they print a Modern Masters set every 2 years, it forces a “pseudo rotation” where previous cards matter a lot less. It also creates “reprint equity” – now everyone wants a fucking Shuko and Wizards can use the presence of a (now mythic-rare-shifted, obviously) Shuko in Innistrad 69: Get Your Red Wings to sell random booster packs.
3. They are really fucking bad at their jobs.
![The Simpsons Nelson Ha Ha - Sticker Mania The Simpsons Nelson Ha Ha - Sticker Mania](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe776ce48-8c4c-4f48-a530-3cd28117e9fa_512x512.png)
All this is to once again congratulate NSG design, development, testing, and ban committee for being the complete opposite of all of that.
“Rapa, pointing and laughing aren’t helpful. How do we rescue people from the grips of the evil Cardboard Corp?”
It’s not really up to us. Netrunner is a CCG, but it’s not really a 1-to-1 replacement for Magic for most people.
Only 2 players.
Relatively low variance.
Shallow (slow) learning curve.
No money incentive.
Ban Candidates
Shifting gears: Worlds is starting to loom on the horizon. What are, in my view, some valid ban candidates that NSG could consider prior to Worlds to shake things up?
1. World Tree
Case For: Repeatable tutoring is a very dangerous thing to allow in a CCG since it makes the game “go deterministic” more easily. Shaper decks that “solve all possible corp problems” tend to push the Meta towards subjectively unfun corporation win cons that rely on high variance cruxes: e.g. Mitosis[Cerebral/Fujii]. If the Corp can’t ever win by trying to push a “fair” fork because ice, upgrades and assets are irrelevant, then all that’s left is to double advance traps and agendas, and hope they guess wrong.
Case Against: World Tree is initially slow and the metagame numbers don’t support it having an unreasonable win rate. World Tree decks tend to be large, so they have starts where they have to spend time digging for their namesake card or a suitable tutor (which further taxes early game tempo).
2. Physarum Entangler
Case For: Physarum out of Arissana allows absolutely reckless facechecking with little risk in most board states. It is easily and cheaply tutorable via Muse or SMC. In the mid-to-late game, Physarum+Silmulchip allows flexible mitigation of very expensive ice making it basically impossible to secure a remote.
Case Against: Whatever. Botulus and Boomerang have been a thing for ages, and purging actually kills Physarum. Mavirus blowouts are possible and hilarious. The deck it’s best in (Arissana) generally only has the influence to afford one, and blowing Simulchips to recur this is fine but not busted. It does nothing against Barriers, or defensive upgrade stacks.
3. Bankhar
Case For: The Corp has to double stack every server it wants to protect against Bankhar, which can be extremely difficult with Hippo and Crew both in the card pool. The ‘cost’ is actually just Faust in disguise, highly mitigated by Strike Fund and Steelskin.
Case Against: There have to be cards that allow runners to do some early game aggression and create difficulties for the Corp. Banning Bankhar would further push things towards a Shaper Only Meta. It’s hilarious when they facecheck Envelopment. Bankhar cannot affect a board unexpectedly unless you sneak it down at the end of the Corp’s turn with a Sebastião trigger or something.
4. Mutually Assured Destruction
Case For: There is only one use case for this card: to force a kill on the following turn. If the runner deck is incapable of keeping assets in check, it’s basically auto-loss.
Case Against: You’re complaining about assets when everyone is packing Miss Bones and Paricia? There’s also a ton of other forms of mitigation that give you time against this deck: you can run Stoneship Chartroom, you can Maw them to death, you can play No One Home… these are not specific solutions that apply only to this matchup either. Corps need wincons too bruh.
5. Spark of Inspiration
Case For: In Kit, this hitting Lobisomem early makes it impossible to secure any servers. It contributes towards the Shaper Only Meta in a way that’s pretty orthogonal to World Tree Arissana. Spark decks have been consistently putting up results with the start of the RWR meta.
Case Against: they have awkward draws, sometimes they faceplant a 2nd layer Sentry without Orca, and, come on, it’s super awesome that Kit is clearly Tier 1. These decks have some vulnerability to program trashing, which creates incentives for alternative Weyland shells besides Ob shenanigans.
6. Riot Suppression
Case For: do we really want to enable that deck?
Case Against: from tournament results it seems like only Santa has been able to pilot “barf Thule” to consistent results. Banning a single card won’t completely ruin the deck either, they’ll just play Kuwinda, Nightmare Archives or some alternative NPE BS instead. The deck has basically no ice, which create incentives for people to play Jeitinho and Deep Dive.
7. Nothing
Case For: Meta’s healthy yo. We’ve had a bunch of real (40+ player) events with great deck diversity, why would you mess with this? If Worlds were tomorrow, do you think you could predict what would win?
Case Against: Uhhhhhh…
Unlike some people, this bird knows how to properly swoop a pond and not break 10 bones.
Who, if it is not yet clear from this post, I pretty much group with Nestle, Phillip Morris/Altria and Potential Unleashed as far as shitty corporations go.
Thanks for the contrast between EMEA Continentals and Pro Tour MH3, which both happened on the same weekend. Watching Bant Nadu was atrocious and constructed Magic is just an exercise in frustration. For two-players, I'd rather play Netrunner. For 4-players, I rather play a board game. That being said, I enjoy mtg draft; power outliers there are interesting and I think a creature beater is a great game for Limited gameplay and the Timmy player type.
And that is why cube is Magic's best format. It highlights Limited gameplay, fosters community building, allows the majority of people to show up empty-handed, can be played with proxies, and is as far removed from the company while still interacting with their product.
Thanks for these write ups! It is good to hear what's on your mind