With Off Meta Month kicking off this Sunday (December 1) with the Eclipse Format tournament, we asked Council, the inventor of the format, to talk us through their approach for selecting the card pool and the banned and restricted lists for the format. We’ll let Council take it from here, while taking some notes in case they share any deckbuilding tips! For details on the Eclipse format, see here, and check Always Be Running for the event times.
There’s no singular answer on what made me think about the Eclipse format, but I hope it makes for a good story.
I really like the Kitara Cycle, and in my view it is the best designed cycle yet (although the Liberation Cycle is close behind). The cycle includes many powerful cards, but none which were as blatantly above the curve as the most pushed designs in the Flashpoint and Red Sand Cycles were. When NSG announced that Kitara was going to be rotated early during Worlds 2023 in Barcelona, I started thinking about how we could celebrate the cycle before it leaves.
A short time ago, a good friend of mine made a custom format using the FFG card pool that I thought was cool. This encouraged me to make my own format as a way in which to celebrate Kitara. As I think the late FFG-era design had a lot of problems, with lack of playtesting and corporate greed leading to highly pushed designs, it felt best to pair Kitara with the earlier cycles, which it had never shared the cardpool with outside of the Eternal format. Early NSG sets, on the other hand, spend a lot of time replicating and learning from FFG’s designs, which culminates in the more refined and innovative designs in the last two cycles, and hopefully going forward as well. I therefore made the decision to pair the earliest and latest FFG sets with the later NSG sets for the Eclipse format card pool.
The Eclipse format is the result of many discussions with Unband members (shoutout to Meryu for being my sanity check) and other really strong players, but ultimately it is my brainchild, and my own perspective on Netrunner as a game. In some ways it tries to replicate the feeling of Netrunner in 2018, when both sides had access to very powerful tools. But it is also a deliberately slower format than Netrunner in 2024. Rashida Jaheem is restricted. There is no Seamless Launch, no HB: Precision Design, and the Corp win conditions that take their place are in the form of powerful defensive assets and upgrades (such as Lakshmi Smartfabrics or Caprice Nisei). In another way it’s also a history lesson for newer players on what kind of cards used to define Netrunner without having to deal with Eternal level power, which I personally feel can be a bit intimidating.
Balancing Philosophy
My Ban List philosophy was to target cards that:
- Disproportionately homogenise the meta
- Are far above the power curve (ex. Bloo Moose, if it were in the card pool) and unambiguously best in slot
- Create experiences that aren’t really fun (ex. Keyhole, Gang Sign) or interactive.
The Ban List is ultimately a work in progress. I’m eyeing a couple of problematic archetypes I let slip because, like all of us, I have my own biases. I don’t want to change the ban list before the tournament even if potentially problematic combos come to light, so as not to invalidate the effort people put into deckbuilding. However, there are likely to be some changes after the event.
The Restricted List originated as a “watch list”, i.e. it was a list of cards that I thought had the potential to be bannable, but I was curious to see what they could do. When it came to Tributary, my brain went “this is a unicorn candidate” and as the list of watch list cards piled up, I decided to turn it into a restricted list.
Deckbuilding Tips
Band together! Deckbuilding is always easier when you have people to bounce ideas off of, and even small groups of 2 or 3 can develop things in ways a single person can’t. If you ask in the Netrunner online communities like the Green Level Clearance Discord, you’re bound to find people to test with.
Otherwise, my advice for people who feel a bit overwhelmed is to pick a restricted card and build your deck around it. Many cards on the Restricted List enable win conditions that you can build your whole strategy around. My second piece of advice is to not think about solving the meta, and instead try to find a deck that genuinely expresses you. I believe the big cardpool allows for self-expression to a large degree- and my hope is that we’ll see a tournament where people play decks that really reflect their favourite ways to play. For me that’ll be Silhouette, and whatever Jinteki brew the cauldron bubbles up with! However, there’s definitely some groups out there brewing monsters, so beware!
