With copies of Downfall landing in hands (and home printers) around the world, Runners recovering from all the excitement of the European Championships, and North American Championships already looming, we’re turning our sights towards Uprising and subsequent releases. Most importantly, how our next releases will be timed and what this means for rotation.
Firstly, we’re extremely happy with how Downfall has turned out and how it’s been received by the community. But we want to make sure we take the time to reflect on what we’ve achieved and learned from our first release, get the various designers, artists, writers, developers and many more that make up our volunteer tiger team fed and watered, and make sure we continue to deliver the best possible product now that we’ve got this experience under our collective belts. As such, while production and playtesting of Uprising is well and truly underway, we currently expect to release it in Q4 this year, with a more precise date to be announced in the coming month.
Secondly, one of the strongest community responses from our earlier Outreach Survey was the desire for a smaller and more manageable Standard cardpool. As NISEI has established an entirely different release model with System Core 2019 and Downfall, we need to revisit some of the assumptions about rotation to make this happen. The previous rotation model was built around a five-to-seven-cycle cardpool, with the deluxe boxes remaining indefinitely. As we’ve already shown by rotating Terminal Directive and the Revised Core, with the release of System Core 2019, we intend to change the script a little.
The Lunar Cycle and Creation and Control will rotate from NISEI Standard when Uprising is released.
We’ll be following up soon with some more in-depth discussion from the team about how this decision came to be and what it means for upcoming releases, but we wanted to get this information out there sooner rather than later. That said, a few early considerations we’re making:
- Creation and Control contains some of the oldest and hardest-to-find cards in the game. While some of them have grown to be staples, many are simply less refined (though no less loved) designs from early in the game’s life.
- Rotating Creation and Control gives us an opportunity to explore new directions for Haas-Bioroid and Shaper without being limited by the design constraints of some of the same cards that have been defining them for nearly six years.
- Having said that, some key cards will receive direct reprints, and some familiar reimaginings will be seen in Uprising and other releases. We still want to retain the unique characteristics of each faction that have made them so compelling for players.
Rest assured that we didn’t make this decision lightly, and we’ve been testing and tweaking to ensure that Shapers, Haas-Bioroid, and Runners and Corps of all stripes remain exciting and competitive in both new and familiar ways. Losing cards is always difficult as a player, but we feel it is time to thank Creation and Control for its service and leave ourselves room to grow.
After all, modification is at the heart of building stronger code.
