Spring 2025 Preview Season!

Wanna get elevated?

Preamble

• AI-Generated Content: none.

• This article contains Elevation spoilers!

Welcome Back

It’s that time of year again - the sun lingers longer, there are leaves on the trees, the birds are singing, and my thalamocortical loop recovers from the seasonal depression that has become an unavoidable curse in middle age.¹

But it’s also that time of the year where NSG releases new cards. This gets me thinking about that fun activity where I sit in a chair and torture my brain with negotiating extremely large decision trees with minimal information given by an extremely hostile adversary who probably has more repetitions than I do.

That’s right, ELEVATION SCOOPS are here, and boy do we have a lot of stuff to talk about.

First and foremost: NSG has graced me with a preview card! That’s right dear reader: you too can be one of the first to glimpse a hitherto unseen card from the Elevation card pool by checking this blog again on Wednesday² April 16th. I can’t give anything away about this non-artificially-scarce³ piece of cardboard yet, but believe me that as soon as the embargo is lifted I will drop it like a healthcare insurance CEO in midtown Manhattan. Hahaha! Just a little political humor to get us all back in the mood.

The Metagame

I have no idea, I haven’t played an Operation or Event in months. Check out The Surveyor, they’re still reporting on tournament results. As soon as Elevation hits, you can pretty much press delete on all your hard-won metagame specific heuristics though, because what’s coming is probably the single sharpest shift in the Meta since NSG took over the game. Not only is the last huge chunk of the FFG card pool gone, we have a new banlist which hits 5 NSG-printed cards.

Straight from the source:

Summary of Standard Banlist 25.04 Changes

Cleaver banned

Creative Commission banned

Daily Casts banned

K2CP Turbine banned

Moshing banned

This update is effective with the release of Elevation on 24 April 2025 for casual tier events, and on 10 May 2025 for competitive tier events.

A few things to note:

• Everything banned was from the runner side, as Corps will be losing a significant number of powerful tools after rotation.

• Runner economy has been broadly tuned down.

Without the full Elevation card pool or experience playing with it, any opinion on this banlist’s effect on balance would be beneath worthless. From a gameplay perspective, Creative Commission and Daily Casts are somewhat uninteresting cards: [click+card→ money]. Creative Commission does have a teensy bit of tension in that there are times where you really wanna make a run and need just a bit more money, so sacrificing the click is actually the correct play, but in my experience I have used the card like that maybe 5% of the time. Daily Casts is a resource, so it is painful if it gets cut down by an Above the Law right after installation, but those are pretty much the only times these cards don’t play somewhat akin to a Basic Land from Magic: the Gathering. I don’t think that’s a huge flaw (Sure Gamble and Hedge Fund presumably aren’t going anywhere) but too many ‘easy econ’ cards does detract from gameplay variety.

The game is more interesting when the money comes with a risk or an angle through which it can be attacked. The best example of this is Fermenter: this card is effectively dripping 2 credits every turn, but it eats a memory, is vulnerable to purging, becomes a juicy target if you get too greedy, and pays out once in a burst. Great design, great art, great game play: S-tier card.

Some of the New Cards

No trace math. Easy to understand. Has a trash cost to add a counterplay angle. Can ends games on the spot (or cause a big econ flip to give the Corporation a scoring window). Uses threat, the best new mechanic in the game. Excellent art.

Prediction: I will die to it many times.

As the Corp, if you are playing 3 copies of this, one early strategic decision to make (read: during deckbuilding) is whether you’re actually going to try to score anything at all, or if every Agenda you install is meant to be stolen.

For anyone with so much as a smidge of a competitive streak, this will be a card internalize immediately. This card has five numbers on it (cost, threat, meat, tax, trash). You need to etch these numbers into your neural pathways with a molecular laser: 5,4,4,8,3.

For those newer players who see this and are (correctly) impressed by the implications of this card: there was a time where the runner could steal a Global Food Initiative, then would make run, get tagged, trigger a QPM and then you would Exchange of Information their 2 points for your (free) 1 point, and the 2 pointer you swapped would become 3 points because card text. So the game score would go from 2-0 to 1-3 merely from a tag and an operation and the tag would remain.

If this sounds horribly unfair⁴, don’t worry, this happened when runners still had cards like Temujin Contract, so the unbearable dunking was happening on both sides of the table with roughly equal frequency.

Compared to EoI, it may seem quaint. But if you think for one second this card won’t enable completely disgusting play sequences from NBN players, you are deluding yourself.

That’s all for today. Other cards have been spoiled, but those are the only ones I’ve had time to really parse. If you are also coming out from Netrunner Hibernation, check out the latest episode of Neon Static, great discussion and they cover more of the spoiled cards.

See you all next week!

1. I lived for 10 years in Rochester, NY. My blood was antifreeze and six feet of snow blocking my front door was a mild inconvenience. I got soft after spending 4 years in San Antonio, and even the relatively mild winters of the Mid-Atlantic are taxing now. But I hold that there’s also an aging component to this wintertime slump.

2. Yeah, let’s go with Wednesday since this hasn’t been a reliable Tuesday blog since Methuselah walked the Earth.

3. Except in Europe. Zing!

4. This is indeed one of those “fun is zero sum” situations.