Since the inception of the Startup Curation Team back in early August, we have been working tirelessly on how best to improve the current state of the Startup format. We are excited to share the 24.09 Startup Balance Update with you.
For more on the Startup Curation Team’s philosophy for the format, check out Lucy’s Love Letter To Startup.
As a team, we have identified a number of key aspects that are intrinsic to the structure of the Startup format that we wish to emphasize. These include, but are not limited to the following:
- With a limited card pool, Startup presents a highly learnable environment that allows someone to experience the breadth of the format and begin to learn patterns of play quickly. It also reduces the number of threats that a given unrezzed card could represent, making it easier for newer players to build confidence in their decision-making more quickly.
- The smaller card pool also creates a space that is easy to deckbuild within. Decks made by simply taking the available economic tools and adding a player’s personal favorite cards for each role (icebreakers, agendas, ice, other supporting tools), have a viable place in the format.
- Given the limited number of cards and thus the reduced number of ways cards across sets can interact, Startup generally has a flatter power curve, allowing a wider variety of cards generally considered weaker in other formats to find a home and see usage. This has the effect of letting a wider breadth of the design space of any new set see play and success at events, celebrating as much of the card pool as possible.
- Startup generally tends to have a lower power level, which puts emphasis on Netrunner fundamentals such as managing click efficiency through basic actions and the usage of cards over a larger number of clicks in a longer game, while being more forgiving to mistakes due to the time available to recover.
All of these aspects can only really shine if the format is sufficiently balanced, and the Startup Curation Team has dedicated itself to ensuring that this is the case.
The Startup format as it currently stands is entirely dominated by glacier decks out of Weyland Consortium: Built to Last, which uses a combination of overly oppressive ice, extremely efficient economy and the lowest agenda density possible to build board states that make running altogether unfeasible. This has the twofold effect of pushing Runners generally towards non-interactive value engines and severely punishing run-based economy options. These pressures significantly narrow the number of winning strategies available to Runner decks.
With this update, we are aiming to directly decrease the prevalence of these glacier decks. We hope this will allow for more proactive strategies to flourish and increase the diversity of viable playstyles across the field.
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Summary of Startup Balance Update 24.09 Changes
Tributary banned
Pharos banned
Creative Commission banned
Corp decks now have the following deckbuilding restriction: A Startup Corp deck can only contain a maximum of 3 agenda cards with a printed agenda point value of 3 or greater.
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This Balance Update is effective immediately for online play. Tournament organisers running Startup events in the next two weeks may opt not to enact the changes made in this Balance Update. The organizers for some upcoming events taking place next weekend (28-29 September) were informed about these changes in advance. After this grace period, the changes will go into effect for all events.
Explanation of changes
Tributary skews the value proposition of any run and can completely neutralize Runner aggression. Given the lack of ways to deal with it efficiently in the Startup Runner cardpool, Tributary renders any strategy that relies on run-based economy completely uncompetitive. As the Standard Banlist Team concluded earlier this year, this has the added effect of pushing Criminal decks out of the Startup metagame. Banning Tributary is one step that we are taking to rectify this.
It is widely recognised that the addition of Rebellion Without Rehearsal brought a lot of power to Shaper in comparison to the other factions. In a format as small as Startup, this is even more pronounced. Having access to a strong long-term value engine in Aesop’s Pawnshop, using Muse and Coalescence as fuel, we have found that Shaper decks could consistently outperform their peers economically with little effort, which then gave them a basis to overshadow the other factions in all other aspects of the game as well. In addition to that, Creative Commission gives Shaper a strong economic option that allows them to recover from large upfront investments, and therefore is often even superior to the gold standard of Sure Gamble, while being largely inaccessible to the other factions. By removing it from the pool, we hope to level the playing field on the Runner side.
Now to address the elephant in the room: Weyland glacier. Throughout our testing, there were always a handful of Corp decks that sat way above the curve and warped the entire metagame around them. The common factors powering those decks were:
- They use Charlotte Caçador to quickly outpace the Runner economically if they are unable to contest it.
- They use very strong, highly taxing ice to make reaching Charlotte economically unfeasible.
- They include only 3-point agendas to minimize the risk of losing on central servers.
All of these conditions together, coupled with a lack of effective options for Runners to protect against high amounts of damage, create an environment where the threat of Punitive Counterstrike is able to completely halt any interaction between the Corp and the Runner. This archetype of deck is strongest in Weyland, where the additional threat of Clearinghouse can force runs and kill the Runner if left uncontested. We seriously considered just banning Punitive Counterstrike or Clearinghouse outright, but our testing showed that this did not solve the issues outlined above.
Shifting our focus to the underlying problems that lead to the prevalence of these decks, we first started by attacking the strong ice that Built to Last has access to. One Pharos with three advancement tokens on it is nigh impenetrable for Startup Runners, who don’t have Tsakhia “Bankhar” Gantulga, Hush or Poison Vial to help deal with it, or Pinhole Threading to help get around it. Runners are forced to interact with it using hard credits, which is a very difficult ask unless you are playing Pressure Spike (which further cements the disparity between the Runner factions). Banning it is a significant step towards weakening the highly uninteractive strategies being deployed out of Built to Last.
The next measure we took was to consider banning Charlotte Caçador, as she serves as the main economic backbone for those highly glacial strategies. In our testing, this had the desired effect of pulling down Punitive Counterstrike strategies to a level that they could be teched against, and if that were our only goal, then we would be satisfied here. However, decks that included only 3-point agendas were still outperforming most other strategies, so a Charlotte ban did not have the desired effect of increasing the diversity of playstyles on the Runner side.
Given that Startup is inherently a slower format than Standard, in which games take place over more turns and clicks, decks that pursue slower strategies are already favored, especially if they do not aim to win by scoring out. The fact that 40-card minimum deck size identities are able to include only six agendas significantly increases this advantage.
In a larger cardpool, this problem could be solved either through the presence of strong multi-access options or ways to produce more agenda points for the runner, such as Mad Dash. Unfortunately, the former is gated behind the strong defensive tools that restrict Runners’ ability to run consistently, and the latter just don’t exist in Liberation Startup.
Given these circumstances, we feel the need to address agenda compositions of this kind directly. We see two options for doing this using bans only: either ban Send a Message, or ban the 3-point agendas released in Liberation (Salvo Testing, Fujii Asset Retrieval and The Basalt Spire). Banning Send A Message would leave NBN without any available 3-pointers, and banning three cards to deal with a problem that is not directly connected to the text of those cards feels excessive. Taking either of these options would represent an intervention that is more disruptive than we would like. Therefore, we chose to take the middle ground of restricting the number of 3-point agendas you can play in a Startup Corp deck to three (3). This functionally increases the minimum number of agendas in a 44-card deck from 6 to 8.
We are very aware that this introduces another layer of complexity to deckbuilding, which may seem like it goes against our stated mission of making Startup the best place to learn and experiment with deckbuilding. However, because of the reality of Startup being a slower format that rewards playing such lean agenda suites, warping the fundamental structure of the interactions between Runner and Corp, we believe that this is a problem that would inevitably need to be addressed at some point. The nature of the Liberation cardpool forces us to take that action now.
NSG balance teams have not employed a structural change of this kind before. As such, we will be monitoring the response to this decision very closely, and are willing to adjust it or pivot to one of the other options outlined above if needed. We hope that the magnitude of the changes that we are implementing with this article shows the commitment the Startup Curation Team has towards this format, and that they encourage players to return to Startup.
