Hello from the Development Team! We hope you are enjoying preview season as much as we are—it is a joy to see little trinkets we have worked on for a very long time finally being shown off to everyone.
In this article we get to show you a card, and want to do it our way! Our job is to steward cards from the moment they leave Design’s hands until they get released, ready for the Standard Balance Team to ban. Today we are telling you about the whole history of a card. We’re going to dig deep into the archaeology of this card and inspect all of its strata, and what people said about them: a long series of inventions, plots and conspiracies.
The card in question is a new Haas-Bioroid asset, Humanoid Resources. Its history begins a long time ago:
Rebellion Without Rehearsal
The Liberation Cycle had a lot of experimental designs going on for a while. Over time those got smoothed down to much simpler effects, and some cards that were in earlier playtest versions look unrecognizable now. For example, early versions of Rebellion Without Rehearsal had a card by the name of ‘“Human” Resources’ that would “Neutralize” runner cards. You may think you want to know what “Neutralizing” a card means. Reader, you don’t want to know.
In fact, that mechanic was something of a dead end, and the whole of HB’s mechanical identity in Rebellion Without Rehearsal (RwR) was changed to focus on derezzing cards, resulting in this design:
“Human” Resources
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HB Asset
—-
Cost: 2, Trash: 4, Influence: 2
—-
When you rez this asset, load 3 power counters onto it. When it is empty, trash it.
{click}, hosted power counter: Gain 2{credit} and draw 1 card. You may install a card from HQ.
Ultimately, the conspiracy to ban Rashida failed. There were multiple factors for this, including the fact that the narrative concept and art brief for the card seemed to not entirely fit a pure economy card in this slot. As usual, Dev took to brainstorming alternative directions, and “Human” Resources as we know it disappeared for a while. But much like Netrunner itself, the best designs don’t die so easily.
Elevation
The following set, codenamed “Dawn”, had its own share of powerful meta cards. See, for example, the early card ‘Bullet Point Time’:
Bullet Point Time
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HB Asset
—-
Cost: 6, Trash: 5, Influence: 3
—-
When your turn begins, lose {click}, then resolve any number of the following:
– Gain 1{c}.
– Draw 1 card.
– Install 1 card from HQ.
– Place 1 advancement counter on an installed card you can advance
Despite a nerf to the trash cost—all the way down from 5 to 3—this card was really not okay. An inability to sneak into a remote and trash it meant a quick loss to fast advance plays that could easily get past an R&D lock. Plus HB had plenty of other fast advance tools in the set, so this felt a bit overkill.
At that point, someone was reminded—wasn’t there a nice value card that was cut from a previous set that we may want to look at again?
“Human” Resources rejoined the playtesting server again. With a fresh set of eyes, we were struck by a revelation. We wanted to print a card that encouraged squeezing a lot of value out of it, and we were trying to align incentives on it such that people would click it three times, but that was an inappropriately complex way to go about things. If we wanted people to dedicate their whole turn to this, all we had to do was force them to:
This Socratic dialogue was the last piece we lacked before getting sudden inspiration for the final form of the card. To me, the way that things unfolded is a great example of how our work in Development prioritizes teamwork over authorship: everything is created by collective discussion, so choral that we often forget which idea came from whom.
As soon as we happened on the next version, we knew that we wanted *this* to be it: it’s elegantly written, it’s fun to resolve, it rewards deckbuilding acumen, it’s powerful but doesn’t go in every deck, it’s interesting in and out of faction. We experimented a little bit with the trash cost and influence, but the card was clearly there. Every Dev member and playtester who interacted with it reacted strongly:
We even got amazing art and flavor text for this card from the Visual and Narrative teams. We cannot understate how much this helps make the card feel real, and how easily we forget the importance of this event every single time. We spend over a year working on each set, and at the end, there’s a glorious moment where we finally realize that what we have worked on will actually be out in the world soon.
Humanoid Resources
Haas-Bioroid Asset
Play cost: 1 – Trash cost: 1 – Influence cost: 2
, : Gain 4 and draw 3 cards. Install up to 2 cards from HQ (one at a time). You may play 1 operation from HQ.
“Deploying in T-minus 5…”
Illustrated by Martin de Diego Sádaba
A simple story
All turbulent developments are turbulent in their own way; but there are also simpler developments, all alike. A few times every set, the Design team hands us an absolute gem, that not only doesn’t need reworks or redesigns, but doesn’t need any change at all. Every single number stays the way it is from v1 to release. Here is such a card, with no story to tell:
Otto Campaign
Haas-Bioroid Asset: Advertisement
Play cost: 2 – Trash cost: 2 – Influence cost: 3
When you rez this asset, load 6 onto it. When it is empty, trash it and gain .
When your turn begins, take 2 from this asset.
“Don’t be scared of the Ottos, kiddo. They’re building our future!”
Illustrated by Mauricio Herrera
Join us in Kota Kalimantan when Elevation releases on April 24th 2025!
