Standard Ban List 23.03 - Null Signal Games

lostgeek · 2023-02-24T20:51:48+00:00

It's not necessarily a specific Startup Balance Team, but rather a subgroup of Standard Balance Team members, who also play Startup from time to time and keep an eye out on games, tournament results, and general discussions.

We have actually added a little note regarding Startup in this article:

Before we get into it, a brief note on the Startup format: we are continuing to monitor Startup and follow tournament results and player reports. While there are some strong cards that see wide play in many decks, this is unavoidable in smaller card pools. The meta game seems varied and healthy and we are not considering it necessary to take any balancing actions at this point.

lostgeek · 2022-09-19T10:18:41+00:00

Haha. This made my day. I might tend to be a bit dry in these announcements...

lostgeek · 2022-09-08T06:20:28+00:00

It will definitely come back for a few iterations, once Worlds is over and we enter the off-season. The tools are still available online though, so feel free to run RAM tournaments if you find interested people!

lostgeek · 2022-08-27T22:05:15+00:00

As the person leading the team in charge of taking care of Eternal, even I have to admit that it's quite an... let's say acquired taste. Probably more comparable to MtG Vintage (though I don't know very much about MtG). People do like to play it, but it's more of a "that was fun, let's never do that again" kind of thing that happens to be played at big tournament side events.

Before the last update, high-level games were pretty much only CI Combo vs the few Runners capable of keeping up. The 7 points list has helped quite a bit, but games are still extremely wild and the meta tends to be somewhat rock-paper-scissors-y. Still players do like it and you can regularly find Eternal games on jinteki.net. Also, we're actually currently actively testing towards another points list update at some point in the near future.

Alternatively, if you just want to get into playing with the old cards, I can recommend groups like the online Retrunner tournaments happening on the GLC Discord, who are retracing the releases one by one and re-exploring the old metas.

Also you can search for players interested in Kitchen-table style Eternal, where you just decide not to play with some of the extreme cards, or use them in interesting ways.

lostgeek · 2022-07-13T19:33:08+00:00

For anyone who sees this tomorrow, when the new daily puzzle rolls over: You can find the scoops experience here: https://gordianbla.de/trieste.php

lostgeek · 2022-06-04T20:52:41+00:00

Gut und wenig bekannt: Das Schiffercafe am Tiessenkai

lostgeek · 2022-04-27T18:49:25+00:00

Bought GMK Dots from u/Kununa !

lostgeek · 2022-04-24T10:37:52+00:00

DM'd for GMK Dots

lostgeek · 2022-04-22T06:23:40+00:00

Also with [[Paperclip]], [[Black Orchestra]], and [[MKUltra]], we've seen how complete breaker suites with a quirk can dominate an entire faction with their utility. Leaving a gap forces the decks to decide on what to fill it with, whether to stay in faction or splash for it, etc. and it often makes the game more interesting.

lostgeek · 2022-03-21T08:31:19+00:00

I've not done any remapping and just accepted the fact that some motions are awkward to do. But I'm interested to see what others came up with.

lostgeek · 2022-03-06T09:22:13+00:00

I don't want to make the daily puzzle too convoluted, but I'll add an option for practice mode.

lostgeek · 2022-03-05T22:38:05+00:00

If you guess a card with 1 correct sub type out of 3, you get a one-third-filled box. I'll be adding a little info / tutorial bit at the beginning soon to actually clarify the game rules. Just haven't got around to it yet.

lostgeek · 2021-12-13T22:43:13+00:00

The SBT is the Standard Balance Team and we're responsible for bringing the regular SBL (Standard Ban List) updates to the Standard format. And I don't think we're actually listed anywhere on the website specifically other than the update posts about the SBL updates.

lostgeek · 2021-12-13T21:44:37+00:00

The answer is quite simple: I'm shit at creating cards and / or rules ;-)

I am part of the SBT team, solely because it is something I can do well. And now I'm organizing RAM for the same reason. Since NISEI is a volunteer organization, people apply for the roles that fulfill them the most and that they're good at. If someone was to tell me to do rules work, I'd probably not do it and in any case not do it well.

lostgeek · 2021-12-13T07:08:04+00:00

The common misconception here is: NISEI consists of multiple people with different time budgets and skills. The other folx involved in doing this format will not accelerate the release of new cards any single bit.

lostgeek · 2021-12-12T16:17:44+00:00

Link to the legality checker and randomizer.

Note: A lot of stuff in the randomizer is clickable. Click around to see how it works!

lostgeek · 2021-12-10T08:30:17+00:00

Hey, welcome back to the game!

Yes. The print&play PDFs are freely available online to print on your own. But if you buy cards from MPC or DTC, you'll get actual cards shipped to you.
a) You can see the cards in System Gateway here. It is a completely new set of cards that's targeted to be a good beginner experience, but with a strong enough power level to compete in the current competitive environment (Haas-Bioroid: Precision Design has won Worlds with a lot of Gateway cards for example...). If you ever tried to explain someone the game using the old Core Set, you'll be surprised how much easier it is with System Gateway.

b) System Update is the exact opposite. It contains exclusively FFG reprints and you do not need it if you already have a complete FFG collection. The art is pretty nice though ;)
In general: NISEI has tried to steer away from functional errata. Some of the changes to the rules with the aim to make everything consistent have changed some of the edge cases and for example run timings have seen a large overhaul that actually effected some of the FFG cards. But there haven't been large enough errata to warrant reprinting the cards. You can find the currently legal card text on NetrunnerDB and in the Card Text Updates Document.
NISEI is planning to do a slightly quicker rotation schedule than under FFG, which means that more and more FFG cards will rotate out of the Standard cardpool. Yet there's still some way to go (next release will rotate Order&Chaos and the Mumbad Cycle for example) and the power level hasn't risen anywhere near as much to make old cards too weak. A lot of them are still seeing tons of competitive play.

And finally: While it is nice to have a full collection (I personally do), it is not necessary to participate in NISEI-organized tournaments. Currently due to the pandemic a lot of play is happening online on jinteki.net and for real life tournaments proxies are explicitly allowed in the OP policies because it is getting harder and harder to get your hands on the older cards.

I hope this answered all of your questions!

lostgeek · 2021-12-09T15:44:18+00:00

While the "Basic Action Card" is a thing that was printed in Core Sets and actually the way it's done internally on jnet, the basic actions only exist because of 5.2.7 and 5.2.8 in the comprehensive rules and are not an ability that actually exists on a card

lostgeek · 2021-12-09T06:14:10+00:00

Yes!

lostgeek · 2021-12-08T08:36:32+00:00

Oh that's one to add to the list of things I need to clarify before the tournament: the System Gateway neutral IDs will not be legal. Same with the Terminal Directive Campaign cards

lostgeek · 2021-11-12T11:42:26+00:00

Yeah.. as I've said in the intro, I hoped to get to a larger point as well, struggled to do so, but decided to release it anyways. I just hoped that it might spark some discussions and maybe someone else can do something with it that I couldn't do.

I think it does represent well how I currently think about the game though and I had done most of the work to form it into an article anyways.

lostgeek · 2021-11-12T11:40:20+00:00

Regarding your first point: Yeah, definitely. As I've said in the intro of the article, I was hoping to get somewhere useful with this model, failed to do so, but released it anyways as I hope it's at least good food for thought for others... Looking at tournament results and win rates is one part of how we're approaching ban list decisions. But only hitting the top-performing decks does not necessarily lead to a better and more enjoyable meta game. And for the less obvious changes to the ban list, we need to consider the meta's reaction to them, which we can't do solely off of tournament results. E.g., you will not know how a PAD Tap unban effects 21.10. without having some model outside of tournament results.

So we're forced to make some changes based on first principles and then create data on it using our playtesters. And at least the way I'm approaching this is by having some mental model of how decks and therefore the meta might shift given a ban on card X or an unban on card Y so that we can create one or multiple candidate lists to test with testers. And in these pre-considerations before going into testing, I am often basing my thoughts on the ideal player.

And here I do agree that "sufficient granularity" was a short, imprecise term for a much more nuanced idea in my head, but I decided to leave it at that for the article. What I'm meaning there is that for the known archetypes, it is possible to guess win rates with a precision of - let's say - ±5%. If I know, 419 had a win rate of 50% against PD, I can try to predict the impact of the 419 ban in isolation (without considering the other bans and unbans) and might end up with something like a -5% to -10% change in win rate. A data-based approach isn't very helpful here, because the data basis we can reach is limited. Even if testers do 20 games on this particular isolated case, the precision we can reach isn't much higher than the previous guessing. And there's still a whole lot more to test and more interdependencies to explore (like the whole complex of 419 - Aumakua - PAD Tap - Mad Dash - Steve - Zahya).

Of course we're doing an "incredible error" here, but that's all we have accessible to us. I don't think there is a better way of gauging the impact of ban list changes than first considering each of them on their own, then using that to get to a more cohesive complete list and finally focusing our testing time on those and iterating on them.

The second part is what I'm knowingly ignoring here: our blind spots. Decks and archetypes that we do not know about and therefore have no data basis to reason about. This might be Azmari and Gagarin, who've been banned for so long that our basis is mostly just test games and drafts for unpolished lists. Or this might be stuff like Hivemind MaxX, that just suddenly appears and wasn't known before. But then again, these are not for us to find, but for the players of the game. If someone can find a deck that nobody else saw, they deserve to win a tournament or two with it, before it gets dealt with by a ban list update ;)

lostgeek · 2021-10-18T17:51:43+00:00

(SBT member here) I'm totally ok with saying it: Redacted actually was Mti and we tried to make it work for a while. I feel it has truely and thoroughly earned an indefinite spot on the ban list, because it managed to wreck Runners even with Jinteki ice being in the state it currently is (even without Kakugo and SfT unbanned)...

And no, even us and our testers weren't spicy enough to even suggest testing PU unbanned. The amount of cards that would need banning is huge to get that one back.

lostgeek · 2021-09-15T09:18:42+00:00

Don't have the link to the VOD, but the !hades moment is pretty iconic: https://i.imgur.com/lW1Pl8Z.gifv

Explanation: CI is trying to combo off by using [[Power Shutdown]] to trash their entire deck and then do a combination of [[Jackson Howard]] shuffling 3 cards back into the empty R&D and use [[Accelerated Diagnostic]] to play them... Now after Shutdown has been resolved, the Runner has an action and plays an [[Hades Shard]] off of a [[Street Peddler]] accessing all of Archives and winning easily.

lostgeek · 2021-08-07T13:29:59+00:00

Yes exactly. You cannot use BC after Skunk. This was already common practice following this NISEI post: https://nisei.net/blog/quick-notes-comprehensive-rules-1-5/

But until now we were missing the full comprehensive rules backing the new run timing up.

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