Romulan Minefield
Writing about this card after designing it is a bit of a minefield for me, ha ha ha.
The official reason given for the ban is on the card page:
Errata Team 2 July 2018 wrote:Romulan Minefield is part of a powerful combo involving free plays and a draw engine, IDIC: Power of the High Command, without cultural enforcement. Due to concerns from the Errata Team and players, Romulan Minefield is banned to avoid warping the rest of the competitive season.
On pre-errata IDIC: Power, you could draw cards for Schemes even without having any Vulcans in play, so people were playing all-Romulan decks that seeded IDIC: Power anyway just to generate card draws. This was crazy good. Following the maxim "ban the thing with the smallest impact on the game, not the thing that is 'most to blame,'" the CC took Minefield out of circulation (instead of Power, which was
briefly discussed).
However,
IDIC: Power was fixed (or, in the eyes of some players, yes I'm pre-empting you Armus, spayed, (pun intended)) in September of this year, yet Minefield remains banned. What's up?
I don't have access to the current Errata team forums. (Which is for the best.) But I think Errata is aware that, while the Minefield/Power combo was particularly degenerate, there were
concerns that Minefield was still too good even without Power... particularly in an environment with
Holographic Camo (which had not yet been banned). Were those concerns justified? Hard to say, since Minefield was legal for such a short time and nearly everyone used it with Power. I'm certainly too biased to judge.
There
was public discussion of making Minefield into a unique card, like some other schemes... but, without the comprehensive "scheme" support Vulcans have, that seems to turn Minefield into binder fodder, and guts its designed intent. The proposal to remove the "for free" text completely ran into similar problems: it corrected the problem, but also made it very hard to use the card as intended.
What
was Minefield's intention, you ask? Well, here I can speak with authority, since this is the one card on the ban list where the idea came straight from my brain:
Romulan Minefield is supposed to be a
defensive card. The mechanical "flavor" for
as a whole was defined as "we turtle up at
Drone Control Room," making DCR an extremely tempting (and virtually undefendable) target for an opponent. Minefield is supposed to help a
player block (or at least slow) an aggressive opponent who is trying to attack DCR. You play a bunch of them between
your own missions, then mostly ignore them. If you want to use them aggressively against an opponent, you have to burn card plays, just like
Subspace Warp Rift (which is binder fodder). Originally, only Drone-class ships were immune to Minefield's effect (making it a VERY focused
card), but we decided
Chess Game decks might like to use it to defend the Neutral Zone, so we extended it.
What I think we overlooked in Design (other than the Power/Minefield interaction, which we very obviously missed) is that there are
a lot of
missions in the game, and this made it relatively easy to use Minefield aggressively, heavily polluting your opponent's part of spaceline at the very low cost of "free". Moreover, an aggressive opponent is unlikely to allow you to actually put your missions next to each other -- aggressive opponents almost always interleave missions. Because of this, despite promising playtest results, Minefield
never really got used the way Design hoped. It was almost universally used offensively.
If I were redesigning this today, I'd probably pitch this text instead:
Plays on your mission (for free if a non-homeworld whose only printed icon is ). Span is +2. Passing non- ships must stop here for rest of turn or incur damage.
That would limit free plays to
Covert Installation (NZ),
Covert Rescue,
Establish Medical Complex,
Extraction,
Iconia Investigation (NZ),
Inspect Strategic Snare (great combo, as intended),
Investigate "Shattered Space" (NZ),
Investigate Raid,
Quash Conspiracy,
Strategic Diversion,
Study Lonka Pulsar, and
Supervise Dilithium Mine (Remus). That, in turn, would drive
players strongly toward playing these
missions, which only further reinforces the flavor of the faction. Meanwhile, making it "your" mission means you will always suffer at least
some cost from using this aggressively, and can't screw over an opponent who just happened to pack lots of
missions.
However, I'm not part of Errata. Even if Errata sees this and says, "Oh, that's a good idea," the proposal could easily fall apart in testing, as happens so often when a seemingly good idea is exposed to real play conditions.
This was a very self-indulgent entry, because I (obviously) care about this card disproportionately much compared to other cards on the ban list. I'll try to keep the next entry short and sweet!
Scanner Interference
Why was it banned? Exactly why MilesStuntDouble and CorbinQ said it was banned: "The 'pollution' function was used to lock the opponent's personnel on planet missions for most of the game." "Opponent's would use it to download the cards it downloads and lock me out of a mission for a turn or so and then only allow me to beam up / down three guys each turn. The card got better when tribunal of Q came out as it could come from out of the discard pile. This is one of the most annoying cards in revised. NPE for sure!"
However, the pollution cards (
Atmospheric Ionization /
Distortion Field) got errata'd back in 2010. Why's Scanner Interference still banned?
It stayed banned for a long time just because the Errata/unban process was dysfunctional. At the time, Errata was a function of Rules, and there was no precedent at the time (that I'm aware of) for releasing a banned card back into the environment without errata. There was talk of unbanning Scanner Interference unaltered in 2013, and it just... didn't happen. Many of you remember how long we had to wait between Errata in those days, which is why there's now a dedicated 1E Errata team. (We still have to wait a while, but the bottleneck is now playtesting, not the new Errata team itself.) In 2016, a decisionmaker suggested it should stay banned because
cards that have been removed from the environment shouldn't be allowed back in (because the CC is trying to phase out
cards). That was it, internally.
And, hey, the public didn't seem to mind. The first person to publicly argue that S.I. should be unbanned was apparently
hoss-drone in 2018, after
Scan and
Full Planet Scan were errata'd.
However, the Scan erratas are
exactly the reason S.I. stayed banned for the past couple of years. Errata made an attempt to errata S.I. in 2018, but testing feedback was that the new versions of
Scan and
Full Planet Scan were such bad binder fodder that releasing anti-Scan hate into the environment was just adding insult to injury. (FWIW, this assessment seems to be accurate: since receiving their errata, neither
Scan nor
Full Planet Scan has been played in a single OTF Complete event, at least not in a public deck.)
So, at this point, it seems that the only way for Scanner Interference to get past Playtesting is if it comes back without actually interfering with Scans -- a tall order, given Errata's mandate not to mess too much with the fundamental story of a card!