With the release of Elevation, the Standard format says goodbye to the Red Sand Cycle, the Kitara Cycle, Reign and Reverie, Magnum Opus, and System Update 2021. This huge rotation—known colloquially within NSG as ‘the great yeet’—produces some unique challenges for balance.
While not all of 391 rotating cards saw regular play, Standard Corp decks are more reliant on cards from those sets than Runner decks. Losing Rashida Jaheem alone is enough to completely change the landscape of the format, but Corps also lose a number of win conditions and tech options. As a result, the smaller card pool clearly favors Runners. With this update, timed for the release of Elevation, we are targeting several Runner staples to promote healthier side balance.
Summary of Standard Banlist 25.04 Changes
Cleaver banned
Creative Commission banned
Daily Casts banned
K2CP Turbine banned
Moshing banned
This update is effective with the release of Elevation on 24 April 2025 for casual tier events, and on 10 May 2025 for competitive tier events.
Explanation of changes
Ice Balance
Those of you paying attention to the cards previewed from the new Learn to Play decks may have predicted that the tide was rising against Cleaver. The powerful System Gateway fracter has been on the chopping block since late 2023.
The Standard Balance Team (SBT) discussed the potential of a Cleaver ban with Development and Design during the end of Rebellion Without Rehearsal development, as it was significantly constraining barrier design space. Ever since Paperclip rotated, Cleaver has been far and away the most efficient non-disposable fracter in Standard. We want icebreakers to have clearly defined strengths and weaknesses moving forward, and Cleaver’s ‘weaknesses’ only really mattered against barriers with incredibly high strength, where most fracters would struggle anyway. Cleaver flattened the design space of barriers, which was especially concerning since barriers are typically the most vanilla ice type, with their power directly related to their cost-to-break ratios. We kicked off Elevation playtesting with Cleaver banned, and we never looked back.
While it didn’t start out on the playtesting banlist, K2CP Turbine did not last long—it was added just three weeks into testing. Turbine has been on our watchlist for years now. Even when it wasn’t in the top performing decks, it still exerted an invisible force, keeping ice-based strategies down. In the lower power level of Elevation Standard, Corps could no longer afford to rush out against Turbine doomrigs. All ice felt ineffective, even with Cleaver already gone.
The removal of Turbine gave the Design and Development teams room to explore more interesting and nuanced effects to keep glacier strategies in check in Elevation.
⬩ GAMEDRAGONTM Pro
Shaper Hardware: Mod
Play cost: 2 – Influence cost: 2
When you install this hardware and when your turn begins, you may host this hardware on an installed non-AI icebreaker.
Host icebreaker gets +1 strength. Abilities that increase its strength last for the remainder of the run (instead of any shorter duration).
Illustrated by Elizaveta Sokolova
GAMEDRAGONTM Pro was designed specifically to be most effective against hyper glacier strategies relying on large, vertical servers. Where Turbine provides a flat economic boost continually from install, to save credits with GAMEDRAGON you need to call your shot and commit to the right icebreaker each turn—especially if you are running into unrezzed ice. GAMEDRAGON also gives Corps the ability to mitigate its impact via ice positioning. However, even with these nuances and counterplay built into the card, at 2 influence, GAMEDRAGON is a worthwhile consideration in Anarch or Criminal.
Generic Economy
Throughout Elevation playtesting, we ran into a significant problem with side balance. Corp lost many hugely impactful cards to rotation: Rashida, NGO Front, Border Control, a litany of key defensive agendas. From a big-picture perspective, smaller cardpools by their nature disadvantage Corps more than Runners. Corp decks must be built with several different kinds of tools—agendas, economy, ice and win conditions—while Runner decks can generally be more flexible.
With the smaller cardpool restricting Corp options even further, it was a struggle to put competent Corp decks together. This led to most playtest formats being Runner-favored. Moreover, Corp was losing their most ‘unfair’ tricks to rotation. ‘Fair’ and reliable Runner decks that simply printed money, camped the remote, and built up multiaccess to close out were able to throttle the Corp. Games were often long and grindy, but they were secretly over by turn ten.
In order to prevent the Design and Development teams from being forced to implement power creep on the Corp side, we used targeted bans to even the scales. Specifically, since our biggest concern was the reliability of ‘reg’ Runners, we wanted to target the most reliable economic tools. The aim was to incentivise runners to play economic packages that relied on synergy, with more clear-cut weaknesses.
Early in Elevation testing, Daily Casts was banned to encourage testers to explore the alternative economic packages available. However, we found that this ban had a very positive impact on the meta, as it forced runners to rely on synergistic in-faction economic packages rather than the easy consistency of Daily Casts. These packages, such as the run-based economy in Criminal, or the slower and more involved drip economy in Shaper, introduced their own set of weaknesses, which in turn gave Corp players more tools to exploit Runners.
Moshing may not seem like it provides the same level of reliability as Daily Casts in a vacuum, but in the current Anarch card pool it is extremely consistent. Moshing was a niche card upon release, but the printing of Steelskin Scarring and Strike Fund transformed it not only into a powerful way to get from zero credits to Sure Gamble money, but also a potent source of card filtering or outright draw. Anarch was still overperforming with Daily Casts banned, so we decided a Moshing ban was the most reliable way to force Anarchs to figure out new ways to keep their fire lit.
Creative Commission is the most direct nearprint of Sure Gamble the game has seen, and its presence warps Shaper in ways that can be quite subtle. Its dirt-cheap cost allows for efficient recovery, giving the faction an easier time against tag-based and asset-based strategies where liquid credits are more relevant. We’re hoping this ban encourages shapers to rely more on Telework Contract and Environmental Testing, neither of which is as reliable as Creative Commission. We expect that Shaper’s greater reliance on resources with a slower payout will cement tempo-based decks as a natural problem Shapers need to consider spending influence to manage.
Other Considerations
Luminal Transubstantiation – We considered unbanning Luminal as a way to strengthen Corps, with the intention of providing a shot in the arm to Haas-Bioroid and requiring Runners to respond. We eventually determined that this would not be the right way to strengthen the Corp side as a whole. As a 1 per deck card, Luminal is unlikely to change what archetypes are available; it just makes games where it happens to be scored more explosive. In playtesting, we found plenty of fun, playable archetypes in HB without Luminal, though we will consider an unban if we find HB needs to be strengthened.
Bravado – Originally, we intended to ban Moshing, Creative, and Bravado as a package to hit all three factions equally. However, in playtesting we found that, without Aumakua, Diversion of Funds, or Daily Casts, Criminal had already taken several hits to the reliability of its engine. Moreover, while Moshing and Creative Commission were incredibly reliable, and enabled economy packages with almost no risk, Bravado still involved a significant amount of risk for the Runner: you had to risk hitting an ice while committing three credits that couldn’t be used during the run. Above all, the card is fun, so while we are keeping it on our watch list if Criminal becomes too dominant in the format, we did not believe a preemptive ban would serve the metagame the way we wanted it to.
Devil Charm – As ice destruction decks utilising Devil Charm and Arruaceiras Crew have been a powerhouse in the Liberation Cycle meta, we considered banning Devil Charm in order to minimize this archetype’s presence in the new Elevation meta. However, we found this was a case where rotation significantly helped us: with Aumakua rotated, the archetype, while still strong, was not nearly as able to reach the oppressive board states which have defined Standard since the 24.12 ban list. It now has significantly more difficulty cracking a server open, and earns fewer rewards for doing so. We will, of course, be laser-focused on the development of this archetype in the new meta.
Standard Ban List 25.04
Effective date: 10 May 2025 (competitive events), 24 April (casual events using Elevation)
Changes from Standard Ban List 24.12 appear in bold. Note that formerly banned cards which rotate out of the Standard cardpool with the release of Elevation no longer appear on this list.
| Runner | Corp |
| Bukhgalter | Bellona |
| Cleaver | Cayambe Grid |
| Creative Commission | Cyberdex Sandbox |
| Daily Casts | Dr. Vientiane Keeling |
| DreamNet | Drago Ivanov |
| Endurance | Engram Flush |
| K2CP Turbine | Gold Farmer |
| Moshing | Luminal Transubstantiation |
| Rezeki | Nanisivik Grid |
| Trick Shot | NBN: Reality Plus |
| World Tree | Project Vacheron |
| Tributary |
