Hi everyone! I’m wowarlok and I’ve recently joined NSG to take on the role of Format Lead for Eternal.
I’m very excited and grateful to have the chance to help shape NSG’s most powerful format. I can’t wait to make it the most fun and welcoming it can be. For now I want to share with all of you my vision for Eternal and what the future has in store for the format.
Vision for the format
Eternal is a very varied format. Its competitive metagame is characterised by a wide array of extremely powerful decks at the top, and an even deeper pool of jankier lists ready to throw curveballs with interactions between cards from the whole game’s history. With its deep cardpool Eternal is a goldmine for experimental deck builders and power players alike.
I think there are two reasons that people are drawn to play the format:
- The chance to play powerful cards and do powerful things.
- The chance to play with old cards and experience their interaction with the new ones.
I myself love the format for both of these reasons – I’m always on the lookout for the next wild interaction and how to push it to the extreme to win games.
Currently I think that the format delivers quite well on the first point: there are many decks that do very powerful things and feel unfair to both play as or against. The range of powerful options is also broad, from fast combos to oppressive prison, extra wide asset boards to massively taxing glacier.
On the other hand, the power level of the format in general does a bad job at delivering on the second point: the best decks are too good and too capable of dealing with any threat the lower tier decks can present. While the top tier are competitive with each other, they tend to crush anything that’s not tuned for maximum power.
Goals
It’s no secret that Eternal isn’t the most popular of formats. Even veteran players sometimes feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of cards, and the format is prone to severely punishing mistakes, which can be intimidating for players approaching Eternal for the first time. Because of this, the players who do want to play Eternal have a hard time even finding opponents to play, in person or online. This vicious circle hurts the format and pushes players away.
The main goal I am aiming for is to make Eternal appealing to more players by fixing the issues that the regulars of the format experience while shaping it to be more welcoming to new folks. I will be working with colleagues in NSG to make sure that the community gets exposed to Eternal more, and to provide more chances for all of you to play the format in organised events in the future.
In the shorter term, I have a few initial objectives for balancing the format:
- Reduce the gap between tier one decks and the rest of the competition. By this I don’t mean that I want to kill archetypes, but I want to at least give the best decks more weak points that the opponent can exploit. An example that might be familiar to the Eternal playerbase is the Ob: Superheavy Logistics deck using Estelle Moon and Mutually Assured Destruction, a very fast and consistent kill combo deck. I think it’s fine for the deck to be that fast, but such a deck should be brittle and susceptible to disruption to compensate for that speed.
- Make generalist disruption and tech cards less common. Currently, a lot of suboptimal strategies struggle to play against a few frequently included tech cards, especially on the Corp side. To make matters worse, many of these cards are great into most matchups, making the opportunity cost of their inclusion way too small. Even the best decks have trouble playing against some of these cards and have to balance that by threatening to win the game extremely fast, before their opponent can deploy their disruption.
My end goal for balance in Eternal is to reach a metagame that is powerful yet diverse, where people can feel like they’re playing Netrunner – not some totally different game – just at a high power level. To get there you can expect an update to the points list based on the results from the tournaments that have happened since the last update, as well as some community testing. If you would like to help out in the testing process you can join NSG’s Eternal Testing discord server (currently under renovation) to help review the potential changes and express your opinion about them.
If you want a taste of Eternal before jumping in yourself, or you just want the chance to see some old cards get played, you can catch the next round of the Eternal Super League happening live this Sunday at 7 p.m. UTC. This week is the last one the players will play with their current decks before having a chance to update them to better tackle the meta. You won’t want to miss it!
