I've never gotten into the LCG format, but have been playing CCG's since MTG came out(along with all the other games that came out then).

The main thing that has kept me and my friends interest in CCG's for all this time has been the drafting format. Every now and then when we get an itch to play some CCG we go down and buy a box or two of the latest MTG booster boxes and draft away. Seeing as FFG is trying to bring back Netrunner (something we played back in the day), we got exited again, but… we were sortof wondering… how does drafting work in the LCG format? I'm guessing it doesn't, or do we have to somehow construct our own boosters after we open up the LCG box?

The only LCG that has drafting rules is the Warhammer Invasion core set has rules and cards to use for drafting.

I don't think it would be that hard to come up with some though, even if they aren't official. Gotta see how the game works first though, and Netrunner may not be well suited for it because a Corp player can only use Corp cards and a Runner player can only use Runner cards. Can't mix them.

There is no generally accepted draft format for netrunenr mainly due to the 2 side thing… There are 3 separate draft rules I know of.. you can find them all at netrunneronline.com.. go read them.. but yes you would either need to write application to draft with or hand build the draft packs each time you with to play or make draft packs in lackeyccg or something.

Just a note on drafting.. I also think this is a massive problem with lcgs.. Drafting is probably my fav format, and people have been trying to make draft rules for coc for a while now but I do not think it is possible. This is a real shame.

Would it be possible to hold two parallel drafts? ie - one draft for Corp cards and a separate draft for Runner cards?

Then after you've drafted BOTH your decks, you can go play games as normal. Maybe this won't work for some reason, but it seems like some variant of it might.

People have been cube drafting in aGoT for years. If you wanted to draft I would recommend this format.

You could always shuffle all the corp cards together and all the runner cards together and then divide them up into "booster-pack" size groups and then draft from those. The uneven distribution model which is ideal for out of the box play, would actually replicate the Rare, Uncommon, and Common format pretty decently. Meaning each time you pass a specific card, you recognize it vastly reduces the chances of you getting another copy of it if any other opponent is trying to build the same style of deck. Makes the drafting decisions more difficult than if everything was x3… though I don't begin to claim that this is enough to replicate the feel of a typical CCG booster draft.

For the Corp, wouldn't the limit between Agenda Points and deck size rule out drafting?

Other non-collectable card games have had some success with drafting methods as well. 7 Wonders is a game whose core mechanic is drafting, and Race for the Galaxy and its expansions are as close as you can get to an LCG format without actually calling it such; the drafting variant for that game, in my opinion, is my preferred method of play (deal out the entirety of the cards between the players in 5-card pods, rather than have a community draw/discard pile).

I think drafitng might work very well with LCG also. Warhamer: Invasion tried it already. Biggest problem with drafting Netrunner with only core set is that there is 7 factions so there will be many bad picks which doesn't match your other factions (well we don't yet how factions work in Netrunner). Also you have to draft Runner and Corp deck. Drafting only Runner or Corp makes it harder because half of the card will be useless for you. I think CoC system from all LCG might work best for drafting. Could try some kind of draft format for CoC where every player drafts 30 card deck or something. I think this might work surprising good.

Until we get the deckbuilding rules and find out exactly what sort of faction mixing is allowed, I'm not sure we can really tell what sort of draft might make sense. Also, we need to know how the identity cards fit in.

Dude seriously. Stop posting. No one wants to here your logical and measured responses. The whole "voice of reason" schtick is getting old. Don't post again until you have something inflammatory and insulting to say. If you can slag the company or paint Christian Peterson as some CEO of an evil empire out to ruin all gaming all the better.

(and yes, this is sarcasm in case anyone here is doubtful).

Thanks for keeping the tone of conversation positive and elevating the conversation to one of measured intellect rather than knee-jerk reaction. Not just on this thread or board, but on bgg also.

Penfold said:

Waaaah!!! You've discovered my secret. Now I have to change tactics…

OMGWTFBBQ! Fantasy Flight runed this grate game! Factions are stupid and you won't be able to play any of them out of the core set because theres not enuff cards and the dots will mess everything up and FFG doesn't know how to play or talk 2 anyone. They shuld have just left it alone becauz they do't know how to do anything but mess everything up like a bunch of jerks. ps - their rulebooks haz errors in them 2 and their overproduced plastic figures touched me inappropriately.

(did I do that right?)

(P.S. He actually behaves like this during his semi-weekly games of War of the Ring.)

It's working though… I haven't lost a game yet, which is frustrating Jerry to no end I'm sure

Douchery. U haz it.

Yeah! Nailed it on the first try! <fistpump>

So, um, drafting… In Magic and in most other CCGs as well, you use cards as resources. This means that if you pick up a couple of cards from faction/color X then you can try to make sure they're good by acquiring resource cards of faction/color X as well. In Magic, this is Lands. In another game such as Call of Cthulhu all cards are resources of their own color, so you just need to grab more cards of that faction.

Netrunner doesn't do this. Instead, bits are the basic resources you use to pay for cards - and everyone gets those the same way during gameplay. You do probably want to nab a few bit-producing cards during the draft, but they still don't match up with any particular faction. So, the good news is that the normal worry about having the right resources doesn't seem to exist in this game.

However, there's another implication to this… Most games need to have some mechanism in place to prevent gamers from cherry-picking the best cards out of every faction for their deck. Typically, resource matching is one of these mechanisms. Put too many factions in your deck, and it becomes harder to draw the right resources cards at the time you need them. Since that doesn't exist in Netrunner, I believe that there needs to be a rule to limit faction mixing. What form it takes we do not yet know, but something is going to be there whether it's based on number of cards, number of dots, number of factions, etc…

This will affect drafting! At some point, you may receive a set of cards where none of the cards are legal for your deck because they're all out of faction (maybe more people are trying to draft that faction for instance) and you've run out of whatever kind of out-of-faction points the system allows you to have. What do you do about this?

There are only a few options I can think of:

1. You don't get a card. At some point this may also result in your deck being under the legal card limit causing more problems.

2. You can pick a card, but you have to drop some other out-of-faction cards from your deck to "make room". This can also result in too-small decks.

3. The normal out-of-faction limits don't apply in draft format.

#1 and #2 seem problematic, getting to the end of the draft and having one or more players with an illegal deck is a big mess. Do you redo the whole draft? Is it just going to happen again? I can't see a game designer wanting to have things work this way.

So, is it #3 then? Looks like it. The normal rules would either not exist at all, or be relaxed to the point that it's really hard for the problem to happen. I don't even know how close those two options are to each other - if they're very close it makes sense to skip the restrictions entirely because it's simpler. I think that's actually feasible too. The out-of-faction limits mainly exist to prevent "broken" decks or combos. But, these only exist because a player can freely choose every card in his deck. In a draft format, that's not so. The other players now become responsible for making sure you don't get all the best cards or all the pieces to a ridiculous combo, because they can take those cards away from you so that they're no longer an option.

Naturally this is all conjecture since we don't have the rules yet. There may not even BE any official draft rules, in which case I'm obviously talking about the ones the community will make up But, it seems reasonable that it might work like this as the alternatives have significant issues and the need for faction mixing limits appears to be reduced in draft where other players can be the watchdogs against unbalanced designs.

And of course, you still need to hold two drafts - one for Corp cards and one for Runner cards. I don't see any way to get around that.

What do you think, sirs? Are there alternatives that I missed or can you think of a way to get around the illegal drafted decks problem?

I think Netrunner doesn't work so good with drafting. There could be some rules of course but Netrunner main strengths lies elsewhere. CCGs works very good with drafting because booster packs makes this very easy. Of all LCGs I would say Netrunner drafting would be the most difficult to try to implement in a good way. I am interested to try draft format anyway.

Also cherry picking might not be so big issue with Netrunner. Usually you pick a focus for your deck and build your deck according to this. Factions picks the focus for you and you will cherry pick best faction cards anyway but it comes from smaller card pool. I see factions limiting deck building but not adding much for the game. Factions can be important for the theme and feel of the game for me tho. But again we don't know much about Netrunner factions yet.

In AGoT in drafting you used to be able to pick your faction after you drafted cards, and you could play two factions in an "alliance" where the normal gold penalty didn't apply to things in either faction, but it required more power to win the game. Something like the first could work for Netrunner, and some sort of variation on the second could probably work.

We'll have to see how factioning is done in the game and what kind of deck building restrictions go along with it.

Factions are such a sacred cow in CCGs, and I have no idea why, outside of the fact that they have existed since Magic: The Gathering, and that they are necessary to fit the setting of certain games (AGoT for example). They allow players to "explore the flavorful distinctions" of each faction, but they also restrict deckbuilding to a certain degree, which admittedly varies from game to game, but always puts some sort of obstacle in place that limits what players can create, what types of strategies can be viably merged together within a deck, etc.

Shouldn't the goal be to afford as much customizability as possible? I feel that factions are counter-intuitive in that regard, and to that end, I say it's time to slaughter the cow. In other words, let's leave out factions when they aren't necessary for a specific game, as is obviously the case with Netrunner given its prior success.

MarthWMaster said:

Not necessarily. If there were no factions e.g. in CoC, everyone would include the most cost-effective cards and combos in their deck, and deck diversity would dwindle drastically. That's just the reason why there is a list of restricted or banned cards.

In addition, each of the different factions (or to an even higher degree, also traits) can focus on a specific concept / theme. Thematically, that's nice, imo.

This doesn't mean that factions are a must-have in A:N. I haven't played the original NR, and don't know the Android universe, so I absolutely can't tell. But we are getting away from the original topic… Drafting would be really nice for LCGs, but I can see it can come together with difficulties. I look at it as Penfold does - until we know how faction restrictions are realized in the game, there's too much speculation…

Did you play Netrunner competitively? Seriously within a year it was ridiculous, with a handful of deck archtypes that used the biggest and best cards to accomplish the goal possible and everything else was ignored unless you didn't have enough of the rares or uncommons to field the deck you wanted. If that was the case then you used cards that were distinctly less efficient, than everyone else and generally got squashed early and often.

IF bag and tag is a viable deck type in the new game what you will see is decks that are going to be 80% (or greater) the same and that variance of 20% will slowly be reduced as specific decks start racking up wins or the card pool deepens. What will prevent this from being the case? Because almost undoubtedly the most efficient cards are going to be split across 2 or more factions. This means that each player is going to have to make some serious decisions about how to build a bag and tag deck. Which corporation has the best means of Tagging the runner? Which corporation has the best means of bagging the runner? Which one has the best way of being able to afford the proper ice and winning the trace attempts? Which corporation is going to have the best protective/stall cards to slow down or punish the runner while you are setting up all the pieces?

Any artist knows that restrictions demand for more creativity, not less. Finding how to say/do what you want within the restrictions is part of what makes a creative genius stand apart.

MarthWMaster said:

I agree partly with this, it depends how factions are done. The genius idea in MTG was that factions can be mixed freely but you have to have specific resource to play specific faction card. This sounds very basic now but it wasn't then. If you want to cherry pick just the best cards for your deck you have to have specific resource to play them also (like if you want to play powerful blue card you then need blue resources). This factioning offers a lot of thinking to the deck construction. Just putting the best cards to your to your deck might not be good because you might not be able to play them. This kind of factioning is IMO the best. Basic problem in MTG was that you need boring and sometimes dead land cards in your deck just to play other cards. CoC later fixed this (well CoC was not first one) to allow every card work as a specific resource or "land".

In AGoT there is just gold resource and there is not Lannister or Stark gold resource. So there is a heavy penalty to play other factions cards. This kind of factioning limits the deck building a lot and there is rarely many cards from different faction in the deck. This is a bit lazy game design IMO. But I am ok with AGoT factioning because it adds a lot of theme to the game. It is always cooler to play Baratheon deck than a random knight deck.

In Netrunner there is also just bits, no Jinteki or Weyland bits. So factioning could be something doing with card cost or something with deck building. I am interested to see how they handle the faction question in Netrunner. I don't know anything about Android universe but what I understand there is not huge amounts of background material. That is one reason I was surprised to see factions. I don't think many know what is Jinteki or Weyland. In W:I and AGoT factioning made more sense with a theme of the game because every faction is very well known and they work as a different factions in background material also. I hope making factions to Netrunner was a choice that made sense with the game play and was not made just because there are some kind of factions in every game. I am looking foward of the game anyway.

Just a thought, what if you didn't separate the corp and runner cards, instead of 4 "packs" of 15 runner cards and 4 "packs" of 15 corp cards; how about 6 packs of 20 runner/corp cards. Maybe 10 of each, maybe 20 at random, but it would give a bit of flavor, sacrificing the corporate side to be more efficient runners and vice versa. You do have the problem with making sure each player ends up with 2 legal decks, but given that Netrunner has fewer limitations on deck design than other asymmetric card games(World of Warcraft comes to mind), it should be easy enough for each corp player to come up with their own agendas provided the skill of the players is sufficient.