I don’t think the advantage that a fully fleshed out card pool (and hence fully fleshed out strategies) will give someone over just the basic core set was ever meant to be addressed by the LCG model, though. What it addresses extremely well is the never-ending costs of something like MtG. The entire Netrunner card pool still costs less than a tournament tier MtG deck, and you don’t have the crazy side-markets attached, or the teens coming in and gambling on what they’ll find in their sixth/seventh/nineteenth booster pack of the night.
It’s an extremely solvable problem on the player end - play the game with your friends, and agree to stick to a certain pool of cards. Yes, you might not be able to compete with J. Random at the game store or win tournaments but I personally have no interest in doing that in the first place. (And tournaments, especially, are expensive propositions anyway.)
Well there is several different issues meshed together.
So I’ll talk about X-wing, as I’ve a lot of experience with that but none with Netrunner. Both are by FFG, and both have similar business models.
So as far as power creep they have tended to be very careful with pricing of cards and pilots. If anything they err on the side of caution, most of the time when something comes out that is not properly balanced it is due to _over_costing. Examples are the Star Viper, M-3A Scyk, the TIE Advanced, A-wing, TIE Defender, and X-wing. Each cost more points than they were ‘worth’, at least at competitive levels. Now we are typically talking 1-3 points for ships that cost between 17 and 25, so it is maybe 10% off.
There have been relatively few cards that are _under_costed. And that’s a good thing. Most of those ships I listed, except the Scyk and Star Viper, have had ‘fixes’ released in later packs. Basically FFG responded to these ships lack of competitive play by creating upgrades, abilities, or combos that could bring them back into competitiveness. And even when there is a dominant build they usually are able to respond in a manner that allows the meta to respond. Be it by a tweak to the FAQ, such as with a particularly powerful combo using the R4 agromech and deadeye, or by creating tools to deal with that issue, like autothrusters dealt with the fact 2 ship turret lists were the only game in town at one point. Often times these changes will benefit people who don’t have access to those cards even, as it breaks up previously dominant strategies allowing other, perhaps older, strategies to become competitive again.
Recently I had the opportunity to play a friendly against the North American champion from Gencon, he happens to frequent the stores I regular at as he is local, and we played a match using quirky lists. He happened to be flying Wave 9 ships, which were not officially available to the public, but they had limited quantities on sale at Gencon. I flew what was mostly an older list using ships from the original core, the Force Awakens core, and a wave 2 A-wing. So nothing released in the last year and a half. Yet it was a very competitive game that came down to a few turns of positioning, plus a little dice luck at the right time. So even though I only have one ship released since December I could have flown many lists that would have been fun and competitive against the new hotness.
And really that’s kind of where it is at. Even though there are a few list types that have won the majority of tournaments this year, you still see a wave 1 style TIE swarm pull off one of the regional championships. They have done a good job of keeping older ships viable, and often times doing things that make older cards that are out of favor come back into favor. Cards like Sensor Jammer, which I’ve always liked, were not ‘championship’ caliber, so the thinking went. But the new meta has made it a much more attractive card, despite being 3 years old at this point.
Obviously these things can change, and it requires careful management of game balance from the designers. At any time things could go off the rails, it only takes a bade few waves to upset this balance. But so far FFG has largely proved themselves capable of keeping the game balanced, for the most part, while introducing new ships and abilities.
Also the Wave 9 that just came out, and recently announced wave 10, both rely on unusual abilities, strong positioning emphasis to maximize, and support role type cards. This instead of brute force solutions. The recent release of a ship with an asymetrical dial, movable secondary arcs, and a multi sided cards that you can flip to alternate abilities prove there is lots of design space left for them to work with that doesn’t change the power level of the game.
But at the end of the day you could still fly a pretty vanilla list and have a competitive game.
One itsy, bitsy correction:
“followed [by] the $45 Millennium Falcon add-on”
So, this is now one of my favorite games of all time. That said, I was 0-4. On both sides. Never had a strategy come together for me.
That changed last week.
I won on the Imps on turn 5 or 6. Early on I had captured a rebel leader and my opponent didn’t seem to eager to rescue him. I drew the Homing Beacon mission card which forced him to at least show me the region he was in. I already had drawn 2/4 of that region’s probe droids. I had the Death Star close to that region. The next turn I invade the first of the two planets. He wasn’t there. The next turn the rebel played the card the forces me to move all the ground troops from a planet. No worries, next turn I moved the Death Star in and blew up the planet. He though moving my troops gave him an extra turn so he didn’t have Move the Rebel Base card queued up.
I really think this is one of those games where a lot has to go right or wrong for a decisive win. It’s well balanced, but the Imperial player really needs to apply some smarts and analysis and a lot of guess work to win.
It’s a great game though. Up there with Eldritch Horror for me.
Mark, you might know this, but my experience is that the tough part for the Imperials is resisting the temptation to use their mission cards. Unlike the Rebels, the Imperials have to do a lot of boring actions like “move assault carrier, drop Stormtrooper off at remote uninhabited planet, end turn”. You might want to use your dudes to play cool cards every turn, but that’s never a good idea. The Imperials need to do a lot of uneventful legwork to box in the Rebel base. Meanwhile, the Rebels are sabotaging, doing quests, training Jedis, inciting Wookiee uprisings, and generally implementing their own action movie. Oh, look, now you get to put a Super Star Destroyer into production that won’t come into play until three turns later and when it does, it will probably never even see a Rebel ship. Bureaucracies, man.
Also, I print out a checklist of the Rebel missions for the Imperial player to reference. The Imperial player has to manage Rebel missions just as much as the Rebel player!
-Tom
Yeah, I usually ran about 50/50 for my leaders between missions and “moving dudes.”
Some of the missions are important like getting the superlaser online project card and boosting the subjugated systems.
I got this for the family at Christmas, and we’ve been having a great time with it. Our games have told some memorable stories: Luke dueling Boba Fett, me doing my best impersonation of Tagge warning “We are VULNERABLE” just before bad things happen to the Empire, General Veers leading a ground assault on the secret Rebel base (on Dantooine, not Hoth). Then there was Wedge blowing up a Death Star, using the card that has you roll three dice – just as three X-Wings always flew together to do a “trench run” in the movie.
I like the mechanics, too. The asymmetry brings to mind the COIN games; the game actually got me to talking to my kids about Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, which is a good thing. I think it’s fun to search for the hidden Rebel base, except that it makes solitaire play tough. (On BGG you can find links to an app that will hide the base for you if you want to play the Imps, and someone is developing an Imperial AI if you want to play as the Rebels.) Our games have had real tension. Yes, the experienced player will usually win, but there’s an upside – I can go easy on a newb opponent, and they won’t really notice. :) I don’t mind the combat. I like that there are two damage types, implemented pretty cleverly, and I don’t mind the combat cards. I’m not sure what I’d suggest to improve it. I don’t want to play a whole hand of Hearthstone to decide one battle.
I agree. The combat is fine, in my opinion. If anything, it could be simplified (leader scores becoming just dice bonus and getting rid of cards), but for a game that already takes this long to play, the overhead the combat brings is not too bad.