1 hour ago, shosuko said:

It does - some people prefer thematic or casual play where they enjoy the game through experiencing the game on a surface level. Those who are more competitive prefer decks more optimized for performance than style. These decks tend to focus on the specific meta game rather than what looks fun

But I don't think that optimized decks fall in to the category of 'unfun' decks. Or non-thematic. I usually always build my decks to where I have fun playing them.

I guess what I'm saying is that just because a deck is optimized doesn't mean it's unfun to play. I'm also of the opinion that non-optimized decks are no fun to play. Especially in an LCG format where all the cards are available to you. I mean... if you were going to a fancy restaurant and the choice of attire you had available to wear was between a nice suit and sweats and a t-shirt with holes worn in, why would you ever choose to wear the sweats and t-shirt?

2 hours ago, Sparks Duh said:

So essentially what I'm getting from this statement is that you'd rather play crappy decks against crappy players playing crappy decks than to have a good time at a tourney. I guess that makes sense???

Not really sure how you managed to read what I wrote and get the exact opposite meaning. Essentially, I'd rather play decks that are fun to play against friends playing decks that are fun to play against than be miserable playing solitaire while someone sits across the table from me also playing solitaire.

For the record, I would love to have a good time at a tournament. Sadly, the tournaments themselves don't really allow for that.

57 minutes ago, Sparks Duh said:

But I don't think that optimized decks fall in to the category of 'unfun' decks. Or non-thematic. I usually always build my decks to where I have fun playing them.

I guess what I'm saying is that just because a deck is optimized doesn't mean it's unfun to play. I'm also of the opinion that non-optimized decks are no fun to play. Especially in an LCG format where all the cards are available to you. I mean... if you were going to a fancy restaurant and the choice of attire you had available to wear was between a nice suit and sweats and a t-shirt with holes worn in, why would you ever choose to wear the sweats and t-shirt?

What kind of insane masochist would CHOOSE to wear a suit if casual attire were an option? O_o

34 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

For the record, I would love to have a good time at a tournament. Sadly, the tournaments themselves don't really allow for that.

That's weird. I ALWAYS have a great time at tournaments. I would love to have a good time playing casually. Sadly, casual games don't really allow for that because they are boring as hell... You know... playing the same person over and over again. I'd rather get out and meet people who would be potential friends and lose very game I play than sit across from the same person all the time. Even in a non tournament setting, I get bored after playing the same person a few times. I need to get a new opponent to play against. And tournament settings allow you to play against a lot of different people. And people you may have never even played against. And you also have the chance to get cool prizes in the process. I understand that casual play has its place, but I can only find fun in it for so long. Then I just get bored. I need new decks to play against, new play styles to play against, and new friends to play against. Even discussion is better when you play in tournaments. It's fun discussing strategy or deck building options with other players that you normally wouldn't interact with. It's fun traveling to new cities that you never go to and enjoying what that city has to offer with new friends you just made that are local to show you the sites. Eat at that restaurant that everyone has to eat at when in town, etc... It's fun doing last minute deck testing to see if your deck is gonna be good or not. It's fun to help other players test their decks. And it's oh so much fun to win tournaments.

Some people enjoy the added pressure, the higher stakes feeling of the tournament environment. Other's don't. If you belong to the second group, you may have to consider if you are doing yourself a favor by playing in a competitive environment were all players are supposed to play their best decks and strive to win. I'm a competitive player, myself, (which is not the same as a competent player, mind you) and I play to win and try my best to do so, with a caveat... clan loyalty. I want to play the Shadowlands/Spider or, if nothing else is available, a corrupted deck. But with this limitation I will always try to play my best, and even will get annoyed if my opponent isn't doing the same. For me there is nothing more annoying than a deck than is not designed to win, but for instance to fill the board with cards and tokens, just for the hell of it. This happened for a time in our meta, where one player played this janky deck which always went to time. And he wasn't even able to understand why people groaned when they were paired with him... in his mind he was playing a perfectly fun game.

On 21.6.2017 at 9:51 PM, phillos said:

I think there are three simple changes that would make the LCG model more dynamic and lower the barrier of entry further down the line.

1.) Rotate faster. It doesn't have to be a dramatic change from the current policy. Maybe on the fourth or fifth cycle throw the first out. That is around when we started to get rumblings about rotation being too slow in Netrunner.

2.) Never stop releasing deluxe boxes. Have a deluxe box between each pack cycle. That big dump of cards is needed to awaken the fanbase. The slow trickle of packs are fine to keep things moving, but you really need that surge of excitement.

3.) Allow deluxe boxes to rotate at the same rate as the pack cycles. Collecting too many of these deluxes boxes and allowing them to remain "evergreen" bloat the card pool and increase the barrier of entry.

I agree! Faster rotation and rotation Also rotation to deluxe is definitely needed.

Home players don't have to care rotation. Maybe after some time Deluxe boxes can start to come back. So you can use again old deluxe. When the card pool is Large enough the meaning of deluxe sets is not so important.

10 hours ago, Hannibal_pjv said:

I agree! Faster rotation and rotation Also rotation to deluxe is definitely needed.

Home players don't have to care rotation. Maybe after some time Deluxe boxes can start to come back. So you can use again old deluxe. When the card pool is Large enough the meaning of deluxe sets is not so important.

<sigh> Some people are complaining about how the LCG card pool isn't going to grow fast enough while others are already trying to shrink it down.

14 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

<sigh> Some people are complaining about how the LCG card pool isn't going to grow fast enough while others are already trying to shrink it down.

That is because people want it to evolve over time. Netrunner has demonstrated, at least to me, that FFG doesn't really do a good job of trying to reconcile mistakes within the competitive environment. The rotation allows for the game to evolve and adapt over time, allowing for environment twisting cards to fall out of play.

Rotations helps competitive play stay fresh. Otherwise, if you just keep adding cards, it doesn't fix "bad" cards. Even printing meta for cards doesn't help. You don't want your deck to just end up being half meta for the various problem cards in the environment. That isn't fun.

11 minutes ago, Mirith said:

That is because people want it to evolve over time. Netrunner has demonstrated, at least to me, that FFG doesn't really do a good job of trying to reconcile mistakes within the competitive environment. The rotation allows for the game to evolve and adapt over time, allowing for environment twisting cards to fall out of play.

Rotations helps competitive play stay fresh. Otherwise, if you just keep adding cards, it doesn't fix "bad" cards. Even printing meta for cards doesn't help. You don't want your deck to just end up being half meta for the various problem cards in the environment. That isn't fun.

It is certainly a tough thing to manage. Netrunner launched some time ago, and there has been both good and bad with that game. LotR was that way too. The new game Arkham Horror has been great though, so I hope FFG has learned well from Netrunner, and AGOT, to give L5R the best environment possible. Ultimately we'll have to wait and see...

It's about what size to grow it to max and also how dynamic you want the card pool to be and in both cases I think some tweaking would help overall.

A smaller max LCG card pool size would help late adopters since it would lower the cost to buy the entire tournament legal card pool (legacy formats and casual games obviously don't matter in this regard). That would help with one perceived weakness of the format. That being once an LCG matures it's extremely difficult for it to attract a new player.

The second point has to do with how many "Evergreen" cards do you actually want in the game because they are immune to rotation and therefore will always be legal. Right now core sets and all deluxe expansions are "Evergreen", which means if they are causing balance issues, some sort of NPE, or just make the winning tournament deck lists too homogeneous then rotation won't fix tht problem. FFG has been very resistant to banning cards. They have issued errata, but do so very rarely (a good thing IMO since it causes confusion when the card doesn't do what it says). Netrunner has moved to a MWL, which is a sort of restricted list. Also that game has been going for five years and rotation still hasn't kicked in yet so I guess we haven't yet seen what if any effect that will have on fixing some of the perceived issues that game has at the tournament level.

The second point is also about how often do you want there to be a big shake up in the card pool to inject player excitement. The small incremental upgrade the card pool does keep a small trickle of excitement going, but Netrunner does seem to be experiencing a lull and part of that might be because they had a stretch where there were no deluxe expansions (and therefore no big windfall of cards dumped into the card pool), but also some of that might be that the relative change to the card pool keeps getting less and less proportionally as the card pool grow over time.

That's all not even taking into account the burden it's putting on the designers and playtesters to find broken combos or undesirable interactions as the game continues to grow. FFG was wise to instate a rotation policy originally even though at the time it was an unpopular announcement. That said I just think they were too conservative because they feared too much negative backlash. At the time of the announcement that policy as is made sense for that reason, but I think now given what we know from experience I would certainly be receptive to them tweaking the model.

Sure people want the card pool to grow as fast as possible in the beginning, but once you get a cycle and a deluxe box or two into the game those sorts of posts quickly dry up. We'll hit that point pretty quickly and that's when the game and it's fans mature into more long term concerns.

I would like to see a modular tournament card pool instead of a pure rotation, like seasons.

for example: This coming season the cardpool consist of (Core set, these 3 dynasty cycles and these 3 deluxe boxes) and then that can shift every 6/12 months or so. I feel that could benefit the storylines and also some broken combinations that they could just put on ice until they figure it out.

Indeed. Too Many deluxes can be a problem in the long range and Somehow redusing even those would be beneficial!