It’s wild to think that Vantage Point released less than two months ago. We’ve been thoroughly enjoying Standard in that time, and hope you have too!
To develop this update for the upcoming Megacity Championships season, we had to evaluate a fresh, developing meta to see if there were any changes worth making. With the next scheduled balance update three months away, we decided to take action now so the Megacity season doesn’t centralize and stagnate around the early top performers.
This update becomes active on May 1st with the start of the 2026 Megacity Championships season.
Summary of Standard Banlist 26.05 Changes
Ashen Epilogue banned
Extract banned
Offworld Office banned
Timeline Constraints
In order to understand why it is necessary to make changes to the banlist now, we need to look at the balance update schedule for the year:
- Vantage Point released: March 2nd
- Megacities Balance Update: April 17th
- Continentals Balance Update: July 13th – 17th
- Worlds Balance Update: August 31st – September 4th
- Worlds in Montreal: October 2nd – 4th
We have two opportunities to put out non-disruptive banlists for this year’s competitive season: now, and ahead of Continental Championships in July.
Last year, we needed to lock-in the changes for 25.10 on the weekend of the final Continental Championship. With such a constrained timeline, we were unable to properly flesh out ideas, let alone test them. We had to make our decision based solely on judgement.
As Worlds is taking place earlier this year, to ensure competitors have a minimum of four weeks to prepare, any balance decisions would need to happen before some regions have their Continental Championships.
Given these constraints, we expect this year’s Worlds Balance Update (26.10) will have no changes, barring any extreme circumstances.
That being the case, we believe that taking action now sets us up to deliver the best possible update in July, to ensure a healthy and exciting meta at all the Continentals and at Worlds.
Explanation of Changes
With that in mind, our goal for this update is to create light guardrails to guide meta developments away from polarized gameplay patterns. In particular, we had three prominent archetypes from the early Vantage Point meta in mind.
Anarch ice destruction out of Sebastião Souza Pessoa or René “Loup” Arcemont pinch Corp ice suites from both sides. The Tungsten Tailor flattens the small and midrange ice so Devil Charm can be saved for the largest, most expensive ice. If the Corp has a less-than-ideal start, these Anarchs can put them in a vice and hold them there for the whole game.
Haas-Bioroid: Precision Design with Flood the Market (Flood PD) has a variety of options in deckbuilding and in game to weave between rush and combo. If a Runner list cannot consistently contest the board while setting up in the opening turns of the game, they’ll get swept away by the rush of tempo assets and draw.
While Flood PD has a handful of tools to create a rushing torrent, the array of tools available to Ob Superheavy Logistics is as expansive as the ocean. Mavirus gives Ob natural equity into Runners relying on viruses. The Stavka + Hafrún combo demands Runners have multiple ways to break a single piece of ice. Event Horizon pinches Runner clicks on pivotal turns. And all the while, Runners must stay above 8 credits and 4 cards in hand.
We elected to make three bans that will have light to moderate impacts on these archetypes without defanging them entirely, while also having some beneficial additional effects on the meta.
Ashen Epilogue
Sebastião’s early and midgame can be inconsistent. He is heavily dependent on draw order and can lose his most powerful tools to The Price, Lago Paranoá Shelter, or hand management struggles. In spite of this, Seb has the ability to churn through the stack, get set up, and then use Ashen to restock his tools and lock any Corp out of the game.
We expect Seb and Chisel Charm Loup to adapt and continue to see play without Ashen, but both will be forced to think carefully about how they use their tools throughout the game.
Offworld Office
The best agenda for Flood PD to score first is Offworld Office. The funds it provides can be used to protect key assets, ensuring Fully Operational stays at full power, and allowing the PD player to focus on drawing cards rather than gaining credits. By forcing Flood PD to spend more resources on early scoring, we hope that Runners will have more opportunities to set up and find windows to contest.
Extract
Extract gives Ob an on-demand way to search for any card in R&D, while paying out more credits than a Government Subsidy. Extract’s flexibility and premium credit gain are a part of why we think Ob would stay on top of the meta no matter what Runner developments occur over the Megacity season. Removing it forces Ob players to make more compromises in their economies, allowing Runners different angles of attack.
Other Considerations
No Changes
The general consensus amongst the team was that, with a different set of logistical constraints, we would have had a slight preference to make no changes with this update. In an ideal world, we would be able to see another month of meta developments before needing to make a decision on whether anything needed to change.
Independent of the other bans for this update, we believe Ob would become the clear best Corp choice over the Megacity season, likely becoming the central focus of the meta. If it maintained its impressive win rates in spite of Runner adaptation, we would then need to take significant action in the Continentals update. We would rather make some initial changes now and see how the meta adapts than run the risk of heavily disrupting a more refined meta in July, given that we would strongly prefer not to adjust things at short notice between then and Worlds.
Devil Charm or Buffer Drive Ban
Banning Devil Charm would have a large impact on Corp ice suites, which is a level of disruption beyond the scope of this update. Instead, we started looking at ways of reducing the reach of Anarch ice destruction lists and began evaluating a Buffer Drive ban.
Buffer Drive allows these decks to maintain consistency while taking advantage of stack-trashing tools, enables a baseline credit floor by cycling Strike Fund, and also has more dynamic applications through its single-use targeted recursion ability. Ashen would be hard to justify and play without Buffer Drive, but Buffer Drive can still stand on its own and enable cards like Lago Paranoá Shelter. Ultimately though, banning Ashen is more in-line with our goal of establishing a limit to these Runners’ resources over the course of a long game.
Warm Reception Ban
Alongside Synchrocyclotron, Wage Workers, Bass CH1R180G4, Nanomanagement, Red Level Clearance and Top-Down Solutions, Warm Reception is one of many tools Flood PD has to generate clicks for tempo and combo. While we found that banning Warm Reception would curb the deck’s snowball potential, simultaneously bringing down the availability of generic Corp economy by banning Offworld Office was a beneficial knock-on effect. Outside of the context of Flood PD, Corps will have a higher requirement for scoring out without spending tempo, and that is more in-line with our goal of establishing the boundaries for the meta to develop within.
In The Groove Ban
A new combo Shaper list enabled by In The Groove, Mega Magic, recently made its in-person tournament debut. While there are legitimate logistic and play experience concerns related to this deck, at this time, we do not believe it warrants any action from us.
Even as an unknown quantity, it has some natural metagame predators due to its inability to disrupt the Corp’s gameplan. Now that the combo is better understood, we think Corps can adjust their decks and play to gain equity in that matchup.
With that said, adding Ashen Epilogue was one of the key refinements that extended the deck’s reach, so with that ban we don’t expect to see Mega Magic proliferate even with In The Groove remaining unbanned.
Ob Superheavy Logistics Ban
The possibility of banning Ob has long been a concern across teams at NSG, but there has been a recent change in our philosophy. The Design and Development teams no longer give much weight to Ob interactions when creating and balancing new cards. We have agreed that when the time comes that its interaction with new cards would be too problematic, Ob will be banned and Cybersand Harvester, Svyatogor Excavator, and Extract will all likely be unbanned. However, we intend to delay this for as long as is reasonable.
Functionally, the card pool is larger with Ob in it than with Ob banned. When Ob is at a meta-healthy power level, it gives players a unique way to play the game, and a unique lens through which to evaluate cards. Looking through Weyland’s cardpool you’ll find a slew of cards that primarily or exclusively see play in Ob: Sandstone, Azef Protocol, Svyatogor Excavator, Envelopment, Stavka, Anvil, Extract, ZATO City Grid, Yakov Erikovich Avdakov, and more. For as long as continuing to ban cards that see little-to-no play outside of Ob allows us to keep Ob in the card pool, we’re happy to do that.
We still expect Ob to be relevant in the meta, and to see it rise in prominence once again over the course of the season as more interactions get discovered. Our hope is that this happens in a way that doesn’t pinch Runners from too many directions, while still keeping this unique identity as a reasonable choice for experienced pilots.We hope you all enjoy continuing to explore the possibilities of Vantage Point at Megacity Championships!
Standard Ban List 26.05
Effective date: 01 May 2026 (Competitive)
Changes from Standard Ban List 26.03 appear in bold.
| Runner | Corp |
|---|---|
| Ashen Epilogue | Bellona |
| Bukhgalter | Cayambe Grid |
| Cleaver | Cyberdex Sandbox |
| Endurance | Cybersand Harvester |
| Hoshiko Shiro: Untold Protagonist | Dr. Vientiane Keeling |
| K2CP Turbine | Drago Ivanov |
| Matryoshka | Engram Flush |
| Moshing | Extract |
| Nyusha “Sable” Sintashta: Symphonic Prodigy | False Lead |
| Rezeki | Gold Farmer |
| Trick Shot | Luminal Transubstantiation |
| Tsakhia “Bankhar” Gantulga | Nanisivik Grid |
| World Tree | NBN: Reality Plus |
| Offworld Office | |
| Project Vacheron | |
| Sting! | |
| Svyatogor Excavator | |
| Touch-ups | |
| Tributary |
