Hey everyone! Lostgeek from the Balance Team again, back from a wonderful weekend at German Nationals (shoutout to everyone who was there!).
While we didn’t want to include our thoughts on the state of Startup in the Standard Ban List announcement, as it would have been an unintuitive place for Startup players to look for that information, I didn’t have time to prepare a separate announcement before my Nationals trip. Mea culpa to all Startup players, who were disappointed by the lack of acknowledgement of the format in that article!
Balancing for the Startup format is particularly difficult, as part of its appeal is to provide a training ground for deckbuilding. It provides players of very different skill and experience levels a way to meet and enjoy this game together. This large span makes our job as Balance Team quite difficult, as we want to keep as many options for exploration open for beginners, while on the other hand providing interesting and varied games for more experienced players as well. While—similar to Standard—there are some very dominant Runner strategies in the game right now, there will be no update at this point. The format is still fresh, and the newest additions to the card pool have remained largely unexplored at the competitive level.
We are looking forward to seeing new decks and strategies emerge out of the Startup World Championship next month, and are holding off on any balancing actions until after that.
