I’ve always loved card games. I collected Pokémon cards as a kid, d-d-d-d-dueled with Yu-Gi-Oh! monsters in my middle school classrooms, and dabbled in competitive Magic in college. I first encountered Netrunner in 2014 when I walked into a board game cafe hosting their biweekly meet-up. The players were welcoming but the gameplay was alien. I borrowed a rulebook and, 45 minutes later, was handed a Weyland deck featuring Scorched Earth.

Through the lens of a competitive Magic player, I read Scorched Earth as a souped up Mind Rot. I built a gameplan around landing a Scorched Earth, thinking that if I managed to resolve just one Scorched, I could win the game through card advantage.

My opponent ended an aggressive turn with four cards in hand while I had a full HQ. I used all of my credits to play Sea Source into 1x Scorched Earth leaving them with zero cards. “Got ‘em”, I thought to myself. On their turn, my opponent clicked to draw four times in a row and calmly passed the turn back to me. They had the same board state, credits, and cards in hand as their previous turn while I spent my next turns struggling to recover my economy. In that moment of realization, I fell in love with Netrunner. Toto, we aren’t walking the planes of Magic anymore.

The Dawning of Vendetta

Elevation marks the largest rotation in Netrunner’s history. We say goodbye to 391 cards, and while not all saw regular Standard play, Corporations were especially reliant on the power and flexibility of rotating cards. For every change we made, we had to balance the competing priorities of the Standard and Core Set formats, while replacing the foundational staples found in System Update 2021. Each card needed to be as concise and elegant as possible while promoting novel gameplay for every player, whether they’ve been playing for ten days, ten months or ten years.

Elevation was designed to pair with System Gateway and create new and exciting staples for each faction. System Gateway is an amazing product, but with only seven non-identity cards per Corp faction, it only represents a fraction of each faction’s ethos. Notably, Weyland is missing cards that represent their well-established habit of murdering impudent runners. The modern equivalent to Scorched Earth, End of the Line, was printed in Parhelion, and Punitive Counterstrike was leaving Standard, so we were presented with a clear opportunity to create a new modern murder classic in Elevation.

In late 2023, the Design team started exploring different ideas for a new take on Punitive. They shared some initial concepts, looking to get feedback from Punitive enthusiasts across the NSG and playtest servers. One comment that stuck with me throughout development was from an anonymous member of the Standard Balance Team. They identified two issues with Punitive Counterstrike’s impact on gameplay:

1. Punitive rewards sitting back on piles of credits, promoting a defensive and slow play style.
2. Punitive punishes low impact central runs, promoting passivity from the Runner.

Several more conversations spun out of these threads, exploring what people did and did not like about Punitive over its decade of play. On April 15, 2024, the Development team released v1 of the set, codenamed “Dawn”, to playtesters, including the first take on the card that would become Measured Response, then known as “Vendetta”.

Vendetta (Apr 15 ‘24)
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Weyland: Operation: Black Ops
—-
Cost: 5, Influence: 2
—-
Play only if the runner stole an installed agenda last turn. 

Do 4 meat damage. The Runner may pay 5{c} to prevent 2 of that damage.

The Development Team was excited for this new direction for a Punitive-inspired card, as it addressed both of the above issues. The installed agenda clause prevents abrupt, game-ending central runs, while setting specific credit costs reduces the focus on slow credit accumulation.

However, initial playtest feedback was muted – the card didn’t provoke strong reactions and rarely came up in conversations. The only recurring complaints were that it didn’t feel fair to die to three copies of Vendetta independent of how many credits you had as the Runner. 

It can take months to properly evaluate whether a sense of fairness is an underlying issue of the card itself or if it’s representative of larger issues in the ecosystem. The context of the surrounding cardpool determines how you evaluate individual cards, and more than half of our context was rotating. So we stuck to a systematic approach, to refine the set through incremental improvements. With each new playtest release, we got a better grasp on the NSG-only ecosystem and began pinpointing the source of these gameplay issues.

Advancing our Agenda

During the first five months of development, we released nine major updates for playtesting, each one updating over 50% of Elevation cards. In version 4 (Jun 15, ‘24), we reshaped all of the ice in the set, changing subtype, cost, and strength distributions. By our 7th version release (Aug 1, ‘24), we locked in the mechanical themes for all identities, reworking seven identities in the process, including the Weyland identity designed to play with Vendetta. 

At the tail end of August, Vendetta came up as a ‘Card of the day’ for discussion in the playtest server. The sentiment from playtesters was clear: Vendetta was failing to live up to its potential. To land a kill, Vendetta asked the Corp to meet a lot of requirements, while the Runner had many options to circumvent Vendetta either via credits or by hammering centrals.

Our 9th version release (Sep 12, ‘24) was significant for a couple reasons. We began locking in mechanical roles for as many cards as possible for the Narrative and Visual teams to ramp up their work. Up until this point, we had shifted the roles of 20 non-identity cards in the set and it was time to stabilize the card slots. This release was also the first one our three new team members contributed to. And, after five months of playtesting, Vendetta saw its first change.

Vendetta (Sep 12, ‘24)
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Weyland: Operation: Black Ops
—-
Cost: 2, Influence: 3
—-
Play only if the Runner stole an advanced agenda during their last turn.

The Runner loses 4{c}.

Do 4 meat damage unless Runner pays 4{c}.

With some fresh perspectives added into the mix, we brainstormed this version after taking some inspiration from another iconic Weyland card: Economic Warfare. Our thought at the time was that taking half of the credit payment and making it credit drain would keep a single copy of Vendetta relevant.

Besides being absolutely busted due to overtuned numbers, the shape of this effect had some generic design issues that came up quickly once it hit testing. The credit thresholds Runners had to reach to survive multiple copies were unintuitive. The card also lost focus by trying to do multiple things—was it a tempo tool or a self-contained kill card?

Vendetta (Oct 16, ‘24)
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Weyland: Operation: Black Ops
—-
Cost: 3, Influence: 4
—-
Play only if the Runner stole an advanced agenda during their last turn.

Do 4 meat damage unless Runner pays 8{c}.

With the next version release, we streamlined the design again, keeping the advanced agenda clause as a way to have a linear, upfront requirement, and reducing the scaling cost for multiple copies. We continued to try to nudge this design into place by adjusting the play and credit prevention costs on the next four versions released throughout November and December.

Onto early 2025. With eight months of playtest experience, we were finally able to vocalize Vendetta’s fundamental issues that had been present since v1. Vendetta has the explicit requirement that you install (and now advance) an agenda, and have that agenda get stolen, but also the implicit requirement that you have 2-3 copies in hand to get the kill. This much set up on top of the hefty credit cost was not worth the hassle unless you were guaranteed to kill. The Corp identities that can place an advancement counter without a credit or click investment, most notably Pravdivost Consulting: Political Solutions, had become the only homes for Vendetta, removing any nuance or counterplay. There were no numerical values that would allow this design to thread the needle and feel balanced. 

Worst of all, Vendetta had failed to create its own archetypes in Weyland and live up to the iconic, faction-defining gameplay of Punitive. But, we now understood that the issue lay in the restrictive play condition. On Jan 6, ‘25, we tried a big change at the same time as Narrative gave the card its final name: Measured Response.

Measured Response (Jan 6, ‘25)
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Weyland: Operation: Black Ops – Double
—-
Cost: 0, Influence: 3
—-
Play only if the Runner stole or trashed a Corp card during their last turn.

As an additional cost to play this operation, spend {click}.

Do 4 meat damage unless the Runner pays 6{c}.

While the pushed numbers made the card far too strong, it also shifted the card’s role to a tempo tool leaving the idea of being a kill card as a pipe dream. Our goal for this slot was to make sure Weyland had a baseline damage kill card in the core sets, so while this version was worth playing, it still wasn’t living up to our design goals.

With our Development deadline now just one month away, we considered whether End of the Line could fit into the set. No-one was satisfied with the idea, but we couldn’t delay the whole set for this one card. One last shot… don’t miss.

End Game

Testing the Jan 6, ‘25 version gave us invaluable insight into what happens when the Runner faced retribution each and every turn they interacted with the Corp. It felt suffocating. While we clearly swung the pendulum too hard, this experiment reaffirmed that the emotional stakes and play experience of the card were dictated by the play condition. The windows you have to play the card determine the emotions this card evokes. The “Stolen an advanced agenda” clause looked like a great fit for Weyland on its surface but, in play, it asks Weyland to set up a trap. They are spending resources, proactively, to bait in the Runner.

While discussing the state of Weyland with a playtester, they shared a perspective that really resonated with me: Weyland aren’t the faction that goes out of their way to kill you. They build walls to keep you out; if you overstep they will turn their attention to you and reply with a Measured Response. It’s just business.

If you overstep, you die. This became the new vision for this card. Over the course of 48 hours, I went through ten different iterations, rapidly prototyping. I posted my findings within our internal Dev channel and it spawned the single longest thread we’ve had to date: there were over 500 messages in that 48 hour window. On Jan 14, ‘25, we shared an early preview of a new Measured Response to playtest to get impressions and have people start testing it. The card we locked in as the final version just six weeks later was almost identical. I am thrilled to share the new iconic Weyland kill card: Measured Response.

Mechanically, Measured Response uses one of our new evergreen mechanics, Threat, as a play condition to allow the tension of the game to ramp up naturally. As the threat level increases, both players start planning and anticipating when the threshold will be passed. Then, when the threat level hits 4, the dynamic of the game changes. The Runner is forced to reevaluate their resources each time they interact with the Corp’s board. And the Corp’s resources also take on new importance—securing a kill with Measured Response can be expensive both because of the hefty play cost and the need to defend the card while it waits in HQ for the runner to overstep.

This combination of play conditions entirely avoid the issues of dying early game to an inopportune access off of a central server. It can turn on very quickly with a couple of ‘lucky’ accesses, but if that happens before the Runner has invested time into their own gameplan… That sounds like a perfect representation of overstepping to me.

Requiring both the threat level to be at 4 and a successful run changes how Measured Response wants to be used in comparison to Punitive Counterstrike. Instead of sitting back and feeding agendas, Measured Response works best when the Corp is accelerating the pace of the game. If the Runner is up 4 agenda points to the Corp’s 0, they have control over when they put themselves at risk. But when the Corp is at 4 points, they’re in the driver’s seat, forcing interaction by threatening to score out.

I am so happy with how the thematics and mechanics of Measured Response weave into one another to make this a truly iconic card for Weyland. Even more so, I am proud of where we landed given all of the competing constraints, ambitious timelines, and sky-high expectations for Elevation.

Elevating the Game

Game development is an unusual mix of science and art. How long does a set need to stay in playtesting before it’s ready? How many versions does a card need before it’s understood? For Measured Response, it took five months of ecosystem correction, another five months of exploration, five(ish) days of iteration, and then five weeks to balance. Each card in the set has its own story—this one just happens to be a bit more dramatic than most. An immense amount of attention and effort was put into each and every card in the set by all of our product teams, and I am proud to see that effort reflected in the final product.