Our newest expansion, Uprising, becomes legal for Competitive-tier events today, while the Lunar cycle and Creation & Control simultaneously rotate out of the Standard card pool. With all the excitement about the new toys in Uprising, it’s time for your friendly neighbourhood MWL committee to swoop in and take some old toys away!

Jokes aside, however, we were actually happy with the state of the game after MWL 3.4 and the Uprising Booster Pack, with one exception: the Dummy Box Liza decks, variations of which took down multiple nationals and placed highly in other tournaments. With the metagame still in flux from rotation and the release of Uprising, we have decided that the next regular MWL update will have to take a ground-up approach, testing multiple cards that are currently banned or restricted to see if they can be freed, for the reasons we outlined in our last update.

This will require significant testing, meaning the next MWL update won’t be out for some time. But we’re not willing to allow Liza to continue her reign as the best Runner for that long: the deck is far too good, absolutely dominating Corps that aren’t packing tag punishment, and forcing decks that do have tag punishment into slotting niche cards which are useless in other matchups.

As such, we have decided to issue a minor MWL update to address this issue, with only one change:

Banned: Liza Talking Thunder

Banning the ID, rather than restricting (or banning) some of the cards in the deck, allows us to remove the problem deck from the meta with no collateral damage for other Runner decks, except for those which use Liza with DJ Fenris.

The new MWL will be in force for Competitive-tier Standard events on 31 December, 2019.

In other news, we’ve welcomed three new faces onto the MWL Committee! They are Laury Plant (@Caknuckleguy, also in NISEI’s EDIT department), Raja Doake (@ajar), and Guy Patching (@cliquil). They join the existing committee members: Austin Mills (@icecoldjazz, Head of Organised Play), David Withington (@divadus, Lead Developer), Gregory Tongue (@CritHitD20, outgoing Lead Designer), Seamus Macleod (@seamus), and myself (Michael Papadopoulos, or @manveruppd online). The selection process was tough, as we were overwhelmed by both the number and the quality of applications we received. Thank you so much to everyone who applied!

Finally, a reminder that Playtester applications are still open, not only for MWL testing, but also for new product testing (which, in this testing cycle, means System Gateway and System Core 2020). Playtesters are crucial to our work, providing not only the gameplay data we need to make decisions, but also qualitative feedback and invaluable advice. If you’re interested in helping out, follow the links to the application forms!

Standard MWL 3.4b

Effective 31 December, 2019.

Changes from Standard MWL 3.4 appear in bold.

Corporation

Removed Restricted 24/7 News Cycle Bio-Ethics Association Bryan Stinson Global Food Initiative Clone Suffrage Movement Mumba Temple Friends in High Places Obokata Protocol Hired Help Whampoa Reclamation Jinteki: Potential Unleashed Museum of History Mumbad City Hall Mti Mwekundu: Life Improved Sensie Actors Union Zealous Judge

Runner