With Worlds 2024 a little over 5 weeks away, we are excited to share the 24.09 banlist update. When we released the 24.05 banlist update, we knew it would be a step in the right direction, but weren’t sure how much follow-up would be required. We’ve been thrilled to see consistent meta developments across several months of competition. Our sentiment about the meta is positive overall. There’s a diversity of archetypes for both Corporations and Runners as well as good side balance – albeit at a very high power level. For this banlist, we operated on two guiding principles: any change should support the existing meta, and maintain stability for Worlds. We also wanted to prioritize giving players ample time to prepare. This means that a light touch is preferable to big changes that disrupt an already healthy meta.
Summary of Standard Banlist 24.09 Changes
World Tree banned
Click here to jump to the full ban list.
Explanation of changes
World Tree offers Runners unmatched value for a steep deckbuilding and in-game cost. Once you’ve found and installed World Tree, and stabilized your economy, you can now upsell your installed cards when you make a successful run. In Rebellion Without Rehearsal, Shapers gained multiple cards that allowed them to find World Tree more consistently (Muse), cheat around the install cost (Trick Shot), and make their way through ice (Physarum Entangler) to get value out of World Tree. The true strength of this deck is that it can consistently get its powerful engine running with a large deck size. No longer constrained by deck slots, Arissana Rocha Nahu with World Tree can play one-off tech cards to easily adapt to any problematic match-up. With these World Tree lists being able to adapt to a variety of Corporation threats, it’s hard for Corps to account for all of the silver bullets a World Tree list can present.
Going back to our guiding principles for this update, we believe the meta is in a healthy place. The one X-factor in our meta analysis is World Tree Ari. While its initial presence in online tournaments hinted towards meta dominance, we have not seen this pan out… yet. We do not know why many players have decided to put down this deck. But, for the biggest event of the year, we expect players to pick this archetype back up since it is so versatile. To avoid a potential situation where World Tree Ari presents itself as a deck with answers to anything Corp decks could throw at them in an otherwise healthy meta, we decided to ban World Tree itself so no other archetypes would be impacted.
Other considerations
We considered many other ban targets (and an unban) but we struggled to find candidates that would align with our guiding principles. Here are some insights into what was considered and why we ultimately decided against these candidates being a part of the update.
Shaper meta prevalence
Rebellion Without Rehearsal introduced several power cards that brought Shaper into the limelight. While the faction represents a large portion of the field, there is an incredible diversity of viable archetypes, which we are happy to see. We discussed various options for reducing Shaper’s power, but didn’t find a suitable candidate that met our “light touch” philosophy. So, for now, we are content to let Shapers have their time in the sun.
Trick Shot
Trick Shot encourages proactive strategies rather than sitting back and setting up. This is a space that Shaper has struggled to successfully occupy for some time and we’re excited about this change. Trick Shot’s more proactive nature also helps to shape (pun intended) the faction’s overall gameplan and slot choices. While a Trick Shot ban would hit all of the archetypes, it might shift Shaper’s playstyle and change the meta more than we were looking to do for worlds. With all that said, we will be keeping a close eye on Trick Shot moving forward.
Self-Modifying Code
With the release of Muse, Shapers were given more options (and redundancy) for their tutor effects. Self-Modifying Code (SMC) was an appealing candidate for reducing the power of Trick Shot while hampering our primary target: big deck World Tree lists. However, we’ve seen some Shaper archetypes pop up that are not relying on a full playset of 3× SMC, and some that can easily do without any. Since an SMC ban would disproportionately affect the different Shaper lists, we believe that this would reduce archetype diversity and have a larger shake-up on the meta than desired.
Gold Farmer (unban)
Since the Bellona ban, NBN has dipped in popularity. While Reducation Azmari kill lists have found success, we wanted to explore ways to improve NBN’s meta presence. So, we tested an unban of Gold Farmer.
The key realization we had from initial testing is that Gold Farmer’s power relies on the Corp’s ability to force frequent interactions with ice. While Reeducation Azmari welcomes the addition of Gold Farmer, the best play patterns against this list rely on a small number of strategic, high-impact runs. As a result, Gold Farmer’s impact felt more marginal than we’d usually expect from a card of its power. A scoring NBN archetype showed potential but felt like a strict downgrade from an AgInfusion list incorporating three Gold Farmers. The real nail in the coffin was that Runners found Gold Farmer frustrating to play against across all the test games.
Gold Farmer remains banned because testing evidence suggests it is more likely to help the non-NBN archetypes and Runners found games with Gold Farmer less fun.
HB meta prevalence
Various archetypes around Precision Design, Asa Group, and Sportsmetal have consistently had a significant presence at high-level tournaments over the last months. We do feel that this indicates a consistent framework of Haas-Bioroid decks with a few slots to adapt for the expected Runner meta game. At a large high-stakes tournament such as the World Championship, this might lead a number of players to return to HB after experimenting with other powerful, but higher-variance decks.
To bring down the power level of HB a notch, we have looked at multiple possible bans but have ended up deciding against each of them as their impact was much higher than the slight adjustment we were looking for.
Gatekeeper
Gatekeeper serves as a double threat, both providing early game tempo and serving as a relevant late game ICE if the corp can afford to keep it unrezzed. Hitting both of these effects leaves tempo-based HB in a hard spot often struggling to get to a scoring position before the Runner overwhelms them.
Luminal Transubstantiation
It is hard for us to balance the meta around high variance, high impact effects that are limited to one copy per deck, as Luminal Transubstantiation is. While its ban would act as a slight debuff to every scoring HB deck, it would also take away one of the biggest threats that an installed card in HB can represent, so we ultimately decided against a ban.
Honorable mentions
Your Digital Life
In its worst case, Your Digital Life (YDL) is an efficient tool for bouncing back from low credit totals. In its best case, YDL can be the entire economic backbone for an archetype. We think YDL will need to be addressed at some point before it rotates, but it currently enables so many Corp archetypes that a ban would too heavily impact the meta.
Punitive Counterstrike
While Punitive Counterstrike decks are seeing strong results, all Runners have easily included tools (e.g. Steelskin Scarring, The Class Act, and Stoneship Chartroom) to fight against it. Punitive decks are seeing less success, suggesting that the strongest Runners (and the strongest players) have adapted. Our concern with Punitive lies more in the way it warps the metagame rather than with any issue with its winrate. Reeducation Azmari especially can win the game so early and punish interaction that it makes any Runner outside the top handful of decks much less viable. However, a Punitive ban would drastically change what threats Runners have to account for and would be a larger meta shift than we were aiming for.
Overall notes on meta game diversity
Overall, we are happy with the diversity that we see in the game as most Corp factions have multiple viable and varied archetypes available to them. On the Runner side, both Anarch and Shaper have powerful lists that can compete. There is not a single deck to point at, but rather multiple ways of presenting a lot of value and efficiency, which forces Corps to go for more extreme strategies such as the Reeducation Azmari or Horizontal Thule lists to spread the Runner’s options thin.
The overall high power level makes it hard for less conventional options to be viable. The Runner decks are already teched out to withstand a wide variety of threats and Corps are deploying highly specialized strategies. We are aware that the state of the meta game can be punishing but currently do not see a way of evening out the playing field through bans alone. So, we are counting on future sets to adjust the division in power level and reshape the game.
A Note on Startup
The new Startup Curation Team has been hard at work and will have an update to the format to share within the next two weeks.
Standard Ban List 24.09
Effective date: 13 September 2024
Changes from Standard Ban List 24.05 appear in bold.
| Runner | Corp |
| All cards with the “current” subtype | All cards with the “current” subtype |
| Bloo Moose | Archived Memories |
| Bukhgalter | Bellona |
| Clan Vengeance | Breached Dome |
| Crowdfunding | Cayambe Grid |
| DreamNet | Cyberdex Sandbox |
| Endurance | Dr. Vientiane Keeling |
| Kabonesa Wu: Netspace Thrillseeker | Drago Ivanov |
| Knobkierie | Engram Flush |
| Liza Talking Thunder: Prominent Legislator | Formicary |
| Mars for Martians | Game Changer |
| PAD Tap | Gold Farmer |
| Rezeki | High-profile Target |
| Salvaged Vanadis Armory | Hired Help |
| Watch the World Burn | Kakugo |
| World Tree | Mass Commercialization |
| Mti Mwekundu: Life Improved | |
| Nanisivik Grid | |
| Obokata Protocol | |
| Project Vacheron | |
| Reconstruction Contract | |
| Shipment from Tennin | |
| Slot Machine | |
| SSL Endorsement | |
| Tithonium | |
| Tributary | |
| Whampoa Reclamation |
