Off Meta Month continues this Saturday (December 21st) with the Restart Format tournament! We asked Lucille, the inventor of the format, to talk us through her approach for selecting the card pool and the balance considerations for the format. You can go to Always Be Running to find out more about the event.
Restart is one of the formats I created in pursuit of my personal goal to come up with as many unique ways as possible to play with the Null Signal Games-only card pool. Many will know me from my work on the Startup format in the Startup Curation Team, but I have a more general passion for trying to get as much potential out of the NSG card pool as possible. I’ve designed a number of NSG only draft formats, as well as having played Neo (all NSG cards) and organised a custom two cycle format (Core Set + Borealis + Liberation) for a while at my local meetups, but the one we are going to look at today is Restart.
Restart was born out of a desire to create an NSG only version of the 1.1.1.1 (Onesies) format. This was first put into the general public by Jakuza on the Stimhack forum. It involved taking one core set, one big box, one data pack, and one single other card from throughout Netrunner’s history. Applying this format to the NSG card pool gives you a core set (currently System Gateway plus System Update 2021), a cycle, a set (half a cycle), and a card. I decided to trim the single card, and instead re-focus the format to be a means of allowing people to play both historic and imagined Startup formats against each other.
This means that while the historic large Startup formats – Ashes Cycle + Midnight Sun, Borealis Cycle + The Automata Initiative – are available , players are also free to mix and match and build entirely new formats of play. This opens up interesting new decision space by, for example, allowing Shaper players to combine the power of the Liberation Cycle with the tutoring and recursion in Uprising, or for Mirrormorph: Endless Iteration to grab Working Prototype out of Rebellion Without Rehearsal! Since proposing the format, I’ve seen so many people throw together a whole range of interesting decks, and I’m excited to see which combinations prove the most powerful at the event!
Balance is a difficult topic for this card pool, as it aims to sit somewhere between Neo and Startup in power level. I have erred on the side of caution and decided to adopt the 24.09 Standard ban list for this event. Note that this is the outgoing 24.09 ban list, not the new 24.12 list – Trick Shot, NBN: Reality Plus and Luminal Transubstantiation will be legal for this event. I think it could be very interesting to attempt to balance the restart format through particular set-combination bans, for example saying Cyberdex Sandbox is banned if and only if you take Midnight Sun (due to the interaction with Mavirus); there are a lot of possibilities to explore in this space, but without enough time to fully playtest a casual format the Standard banlist will have to do!
I look forward to seeing people at the event. We will be starting registration and the player meeting at from 10am GMT on the Netrunner Event Hub Discord server, and will be playing 6 to 7 rounds of single sided swiss, with a cut to top 4 if enough people show up! The event will also be streamed on the Null Signal Games Youtube and Twitch channels.
