With the release of Vantage Point, the Startup Format Curation Team knew that Corps were going to see a major power injection and attempted to write a balance update to correct it. We consider this update to have been broadly successful, but we have some remaining concerns about the speed with which Corps are able to find the win, often outpacing the speed with which Runners can get set up to challenge them. We have written this new update as a corrective measure ahead of the Megacity Season.

This Banlist may be used immediately for casual Startup Play, and is intended to be used for all Megacity Championship Startup side events.

Summary of Startup Balance Update 26.05 Changes

Offworld Office – Banned

Corp decks have the following deckbuilding restriction: A Startup Corp deck can only contain a maximum of 4 agenda cards with a printed agenda point value of 3 or greater.

Explanation of Changes

Offworld Office

With the banning of Seamless Launch, it became necessary for corporations to telegraph their agendas, making scoring anything larger than a 3/2 or 3/1 a significant risk. In an ideal world, this is counter-balanced by the payoff of the various 4/2s and 5/3s in the format being high impact. This has broadly played out as we expected, and has been a positive outcome of our previous balance update.

Of all the 4/2s available, we have noticed that Offworld Office is by far the most widely pursued of the available 4/2s, and that it provides uncharacteristic upside for the risk associated with scoring it. In essence, by refunding the 4 four credits used to advance it, plus an additional 3, it pays for the ice or upgrades needed to defend it, and acts as a significant tempo bounce-back for the Corp. It also provides enough of a raw cash injection to make scoring the next agenda, or attempting to play Myōshu, very achievable for scoring Corps across factions.

Overall, we hope that the removal of the 7 to 14 credits often provided by Offworld Office has a positive impact on side balance, and helps disrupt Corps from consistently chaining together agendas to win faster than the Runner is able to get their board state set up.

Relaxing the 3-Point Agenda Restriction

With the release of Vantage Point, we tightened the restriction on 3-point agendas down to three in order to create a more equitable spread of agenda suites between the four Corp factions. Our initial testing found that Haas-Bioroid decks playing three Méliès City Luxury Line and one Send a Message were excessively strong, owing to limited multiaccess in the format and the scoring support tools released in Vantage Point.

However, we believe that the banning of Offworld Office significantly limits the ability of HB decks to quickly build unassailable servers, which opens room for us to give the faction some grace instead of asking players to settle for agendas which do not meaningfully contribute to current play patterns. Although Jinteki and the Weyland Consortium are not able to benefit from this loosened restriction, both factions have strong agenda suites which we believe will remain competitive with Haas-Bioroid and NBN.

The Future

For the future, we are looking forward to receiving useful player sentiment and deck performance data from the upcoming Megacity Championship side events. We encourage any TO hosting a multi-day megacity to attempt to run a Startup side event if they have the capacity to do so!

We hope to release our next balance update towards the end of the Megacity season, to be in effect for Continental Championship Startup side events.

Startup Balance Update 26.05 Full Contents

Corp

NBN: Reality Plus – Banned

Let Them Dream – Banned

Offworld Office – Banned

Seamless Launch – Banned

Mercia B4LL4RD – Banned