To Mullligans or no? That is the question.
The question of whether there is merit in the use of the Mulligans rule in Android: Netrunner has come up in my mind recently. Since I started to play the game, I have adopted my old approach to Mulligans, as a legacy of my long experience with the original game. As such, I deliberately never employ the Mulligans rule. Still, with the emergence of Andromeda as a second Criminal Identity and the clear advantage of being able to look at nine cards in a starting hand, and then choose to redraw this massive opening hand, I thought it worthwhile reconsidering my stance.
The original Netrunner game had no formal Mulligans rule. In fact a months-long debate dominated the netrunner-l mailing list (as the main global community of Netrunner players) as to whether the Mulligans rule should be introduced, in particular for tournament play. The detractors held the day in the end, attesting that the need for a Mulligans was offset by improving one’s Corporation deckbuilding skills. The focus on the Corporation side’s perceived need for a Mulligans was brought about due to the negative play experience (NPE) of not being able to adequately defend against the Runner in the early turns and various luminaries such as Daniel “Beats” Schneider argued strongly against the use of the Mulligans by demonstrating how to compose a deck which would present the NPE only in the most extreme situations.
Nevertheless some local play environments chose to adopt an “Iceless Mulligans” rule which permitted the Corporation player to reveal their hand to their opponent - proving there was no Ice in the opening hand - and then redrawing. While this did give the Corporation (but not the Runner) some capability to tune their opening hand, it also served to reveal some of the cards in their deck, and so showing some of the strategy that the deck was predicated upon. In a game where information is power, this early warning to the Runner as to what to expect from their opponent served to offset to a degree the effectiveness of being able to redraw. Deck construction was still needed to offset the effect of having only unrezzable Ice in the opener. Some groups also balanced this by allowing the Runner to employ a Mulligans only in the instance that the Corp had taken the Iceless Mulligans option.
In examining the Android: Netrunner Mulligans rule, I want to cover the following issues: How is the Mulligans rule correctly used? Considering the rule’s merits in isolation, should the game permit it at all? Thirdly, should a player generally accept, acknowledge and use the Mulligans rule, and finally when is it specifically appropriate to utilise the rule assuming that you do consider it an appropriate option to employ.
How is the Mulligans used?
I’ve noticed that there are two approaches to employing the Mulligans rule to redraw the opening hand (“opener”). One is to set aside the initial opener and draw a new starting hand, before reshuffling the original hand back in. The second is to shuffle first and then redraw the opener. While the Glossary in the A:NR rulebook is vague on the correct approach, p.5 states that the correct way to redraw is to shuffle the original opener back before drawing a new starting hand.
Aside from following the proper rules laid out by FFG, there is a justification for why the rule is as it is formulated. The redraw of the opener should include the same chance to draw any of the cards that were in the initial opener. This is important because if a deck includes cards that are specifically useful only in the early or late game, then there needs to be an equal chance to draw any of them in the opening hand. The consequence of including cards that are useful only in one stage of the game in a deck should be that there is a chance that they will appear at a stage where they are not useful. This is why deck designers think long and hard as to whether it is better to include one, two or three copies of a Console in a deck; especially given that they are Unique, and cannot be overwritten (trashed by installing another Console) without employing some other card function such as Aesop’s Pawnshop.
Without the reshuffle prior to redraw, then there is a chance that a specific opener might include many late game cards. Setting this hand aside before redrawing instead of shuffling it back eliminates the possibility of having the cards appear in the opening hand again, and unfairly optimises the performance of the deck. This eliminates some of the risk inherent in the deck design choices when including one or more copies of these types of cards. Likewise if a certain card is inherently more powerful in an opening hand than in a late game scenario, being able to set aside a hand full of late game cards before redrawing unfairly optimises the deck to produce these early game cards more regularly, skewing its performance.
Thus through fairness as well as to act according to the rules, the Mulligans redraw must happen from the full deck including the initial opening hand.
Should Android: Netrunner permit the Mulligans rule?
Stepping away from the hard reality of the rules as written (RAW), there is a question as to whether the game itself benefits from the Mulligans rule? Although there’s a simple yes or no answer to the question, the justification of either one of these choices is what is more interesting. I do not expect that the argument presented might impact on the game one way or another - it’s not necessarily within FFGs interests to listen to the argument presented for or against, as they might better focus on tightening up the rules in other areas orthogonal to this article’s point.
The “yes” case, I think, is somewhat simpler to argue than the negative. The inclusion of the rule allows players to hedge against sub-optimal (i.e. downright negative) draws which can impact on the positivity of their play experience. This is especially true of the Corporation side of play, where an opening hand full of Agenda places the player in an immediate vulnerability of losing. It isn’t hard to encounter anecdotal instances of first turn wins from the Runner merrily plucking seven points of Agenda from the hand or top of R&D. The Corporation player facing an opener heavily loaded with Agenda is in a double bind; they need to be able to draw to get Ice to defend the vulnerable Agenda in hand, but each draw puts them closer to needing to discard at the end of their turn, and can in effect further concentrate the vulnerability, as well as telegraphing to the opponent the vulnerability because the Runner can see that the Corporation is desperately looking for certain cards and is not installing early defences as would be expected.
Thus a Mulligan of some kind, even a modified variant such as the aforementioned “Iceless Mulligan”, serves to mitigate against unfortunate draws for the Corporation and hence enhance the game experience for everyone. I say everyone, as while any Runner may gladly take the easy win, it doesn’t really provide the exciting exchange of attack and defence, and the knife-edge battles sometimes determined by single decision points and sheer nerve. This excitement is what draws people to the game in the first place and so any rule that serves to enhance the possibility of this occurring is then considered a good one.
The affirmative case is weakened slightly by the consideration as to what is a bad draw for the Runner? A lack of economy cards might constitute a bad draw, but these are not required for the Runner to be able to do what they need to early on, which is to run. In fact, I think the case can be made (weakly) that there are perhaps no bad opener draws for the Runner, but that there are some which are better than others. The option for the Runner to be able to freely redraw (without penalty) means that there are two chances for that player to get one of those better openers. This may not necessarily be a good thing.
Thus there’s an inherent unfairness in permitting both Corporation and Runner to redraw their openers. Where a Mulligans redraw for the Corporation is a hedge against a negative play experience (getting overrun with no defences and so losing unfairly), the redraw for the Runner is instead a chance to optimise their opener to better attack the Corporation, pushing them to the defensive and so leading towards that self-same negative play experience that the Corp redraw seeks to mitigate.
The outright negative case is more of a principles-based argument than a value-based contention for the positive. The use of the Mulligans is something that can encourage the development of combo-oriented decks that rely upon specific cards to come into hand, usually needing at least one or more of the pieces to manifest early. There’s a decent discussion of Combo decks over at the Stimhack site. Part of the skill of designing a combo-oriented deck, which are quite valid design choices that I would encourage in the game, is being able to make it work even when the combination doesn’t come together in the course of the game.
The ability to Mulligans in playing a combo-oriented deck removes some of the inherent risk that good deck design seeks to militate against. Allowing a Mulligans thereby indirectly promotes bad deck design by allowing the player to have another bite of the cherry. As such, in a principled argument, I would suggest that the Mulligans rule is not a positive one for the game, and should be removed.
Removing the Mulligans?
If the Mulligans rule encourages the development of bad deck designs, setting aside environmental factors that would otherwise work to remove them (such as a heavy loss rate in facing top flight players in a tournament setting), should the rule be dropped?
In investigating this suggestion I make the assumption that any customisable card game is healthier with a competitive or tournament scheme. Perhaps then we could consider that for the presumably more experienced tournament players that FFGs floor rules for A:NR tournaments could be modified to specifically preclude the use of the Mulligans rule. This leaves the Core set RAW untouched, but serves to encourage the design of better decks, tighter combo decks that perform faster in play (which given the tight time frame for tournament matches would be a boon), and generally make the tournament environment a showcase of strong deck design. It also means that casual, non-competition play, where the Mulligans rule serves to provide the most benefit can continue to use it.
Counter to this idea, I think it is self-evident that changing the rules of play between casual (learning environment) and tournament (competitive environment) can serve as a barrier to entry for players. Assuming that the casual player drawn into his first tourney might well be unfamiliar with the floor rules, they may be quite surprised and dismayed to discover that the ‘hedge’ against bad draws is barred to them. This potentially negative experience may be enough to put them off wanting to compete in tournaments and so reduce the growth of the competitive scene. If the assumption of a growing competition is a positive to the health of the game, then barriers to entering competition play need to be avoided.
As such, either the rule should be kept consistent between both casual and competitive environments. In other words, it should be removed from both, or retained in both situations. If the contention that the Mulligans is good for causal play is right, then the argument seems to be that the rule should be kept for all. Keeping in mind that the use of the rule is elective (see below) then while removing it would be a negative for the game, keeping it allows those who dislike it to choose to ignore the option is they so desire. Is this perhaps the most fair solution? I want to return to this point later. As an aside to close out this section, it is certainly possible to see that in causal play environments there would be no issue with employing a ‘house rule’ permitting the Mulligans in some form, and were it removed from the RAW, I could definitely see some local environments adopting this option as a response.
Should the Mulligans Rule be Modified?
Perhaps the issue with the use of the Mulligans rule is its current execution. As it stands there is no penalty for choosing to exercise the option, and so faced with a poor hand, it is an easy decision to elect to redraw. If the rule were to be modified so that there was some incumbent penalty in redrawing, this may serve to balance out the issues that I see with the rule. Or instead there might be a modification to the rule, such that it was a conditional, rather than open option.
In the latter instance the aforementioned Iceless Mulligans would be a prime candidate. The constraint of requiring that the Corporation draw no Ice in order to redraw their opener would militate against most abuses by combo-decks (at least until someone finds a decent Iceless design for an A:NR Corp deck - something that is a ways off, I expect). I might step outside of the argument here to address at least one contention against my stance in this regard - that my motivation is to return the A:NR game to the ‘glory days’ of the original game, instead of coming to realise that A:NR is a new game and one that I should simply choose to get used to. While I’m prepared to deny that outright, more germane to the argument is the points raised by Beats Schneider as far back as 1996/7. In essence these were to build better Corporation decks, by ensuring that you used the right blend of Ice for defence early and late, ensured that your deck had enough early game money to be able to afford to rez this ice and to play the opening turns more tactically. I’ll return to all three points in more detail below.
An alternative consideration that could work for the opposing side, namely the Runner, is that rather than having a precondition before being able to employ the rule, there should be a cost incurred. At the moment, as stated before, there is no drawback in electing to redraw. This makes the strategic decision to employ the Mulligans weaker than it might be, say, than if there were a cost/benefit trade-off consideration to take into account. As an example, if the Runner Mulligans were permitted but only at the penalty of losing a starting credit, then the decision to use the Mulligans in the hope of lucking into an economy card like Sure Gamble or Magnum Opus becomes harder. While the redraw may indeed provide one of those cards in the opener, the penalty imposed for the Mulligans imposes an additional click cost to draw a credit before the desired card can be installed. This slowing of the first turn may be penalty enough that it serves to offset the advantage gained by the redraw.
Another consideration here for a modified Mulligans rule might be that the opening hand is removed from the game. This variant might be appealing as it could be applicable to both sides of the game. The attraction of this variant rule is that strategizing about whether to employ the Mulligans must take into account that a handful of cards that may be very beneficial late game (but awkward early game) will not be available for play at all in the case of a Remove Mulligan. In the case of a Corporation player taking this option, the possibility that any late-game Ice clogging an opener which would provide the Corp with endurance in the case of a long game must be foregone to redraw. Likewise end-game cards that the Runner might be intending to close out the game with are lost. The potential issue that I can immediately see with this variant is that it could have the effect of trimming most decks down from the standard minimum 45 cards to 40, and Chaos Theory (Genesis Cycle #46) could drop from 40 to 35 cards - potentially gaining even more efficiency from her deck size. Worryingly, an Andromeda (Genesis Cycle #86) deck using a Remove Mulligan would go from 45 cards to 36 cards.
Again, I doubt that this essay is likely to have any serious impact on the thinking of the design team for A:NR, so perhaps it is best to treat these ideas as an interesting thought experiment.
Should you use the Mulligans?
Given that a) it appears to be better to keep the rule than to discard it, and b) it is a player choice as to whether to employ the option to Mulligans, the question is should you use the rule, and if so when should you use it?
On principle, my gut feeling is that no, you should not use the Mulligans. A:NR is a game of bluff and deception and the better you can develop these skills the better player you will become, especially in casual play. Likewise, you should strive to developyour deck building skills to minimise the instances of bad draws. Daniel "Beats" Schneider's arguments against the Mulligans in O:NR stand the test of time. Rather than reiterate them all here in detail, the summation is to attend to two things (i) credits and (ii) Ice, in deck design and one in play, namely (iii) tactics.
A typical 45-card Corp deck in O:NR had between 6-9 agenda cards, and it is important to keep in mind that in the new version of the game this is probably increased to 7-10 for a 45-49 card deck, due to the lack of Tycho Extensions, as well as the need to such a deck to contain 20-21 pts of Agenda instead of only 18 minimum. As such where "Beats" notes that a standard opening hand of six cards is likely to see one Agenda card and an unfettered Runner able to go three deep (trashing, etc.) into R&D has something like a 50% chance of stealing an Agenda, these numbers are even less favourable to the Corp in A:NR. The counter to this is not the Mulligans rule - which makes no difference to the chances of drawing one or more Agenda in the opening hand, whether it be the first or second draw - but instead building to accommodate this fact.
Credits
An early turn for the Corp with no credit gaining is a weak start; where it might be possible to lace a 45-card Corp deck in O:NR with seven or so Accounts Receivable (i.e. Hedge Fund Core #110 in the new game) the upper limit of three per card in A:NR makes this impossible as a hedge (pardon the pun) against weak credit openings. All the assets provide a later payout than is acceptable, and so serious consideration needs to be given to the other Operation credit gainers (Beanstalk Royalities Core #98, Green Level Clearance Genesis Cycle #70) to improve the chances of being able to rez early defences against the Runner's probing attacks.
Ice
One of the reasons that Ice Wall (Core #103) gets played in many competitive decks is the advantage that if offers: it's cheap to rez, acts as a real stopper with its ETR subroutine, and with advancement can be tuned, late game, to maximise the pain point for the Runner's Fracter of choice (poor, poor Aurora). It serves as the ideal early game Ice and as such should be the model of what you want to see coming from your deck in the opening hand. Of course not every draw is going to front with two of these, as it depends on the amount of Ice in the deck and it's distribution across the range of costs. Cheap Ice isn't always easy though - Archer should count as a lot higher cost to rez than only 4. The point is that if you design in enough early game Ice, you should be in a position within one to two turns of installing one or two Ice a turn and through Operations or manually clicking in credits to rez full defences on the two most vulnerable central servers.
The idea is that you should be able to minimise the corner cases of a weak draw by tightening and improving the deck design. In a tournament situation, where you're playing for more than sheep stations, if the (rare) bad draw from a good deck design does arise (the unlucky five Agenda cards in the opener), then one can use the Mulligans rule to redraw confident that the bad draw is unlikely to re-occur. Otherwise it makes sense to try and play around the bad draw, seeking to deceive the opponent into thinking that a weak start in fact reflects a position of strength and forcing them to reconsider their strategy.
Tactics
Going hand in hand with the ability to install cheap ice and rez it is a question of where to install it? Rezzing an Ichi 1.0 (Core #62) on HQ when the Runner has no insrtalled programs makes little sense - you're down 5 credits, have lost the offensive option of the Ice being able to trash programs unexpectedly later and even if the Runner has no space clicks with which to break the subroutines, it doesn't end the run. So what have you told the Runner? That there's something in HQ that you're willing to spend ineffectually to seek to dissuade them from approaching, like, say Agenda! Better perhaps to have installed the Ice on R&D, dropped a weaker, cheaper but effective stopper on HQ just in case, and not rezzed if they assault R&D. If a Medium (Core #10) comes out, the hefty investment in Ichi may well pay off, and if you're forced to rez an Enigma (Core #111) on HQ instead, then the relatively benign piece of Ice doesn't telegraph a vulnerability of concern in the HQ.
Peripherally, Identities can mess with this consideration. As an example, Gabriel Santiago (Core #17) decks are often predicated on a HQ attack strategy 1. As such the player of Gabe has a reason to run HQ, even if they believe that there is no value apart from the identity ability to do so. In other words even if you, as the Corporation player, have successfully sold them the idea that a weakly defended HQ contains no Agenda, despite having a handful, they may run anyway for the easy credits and "get lucky". This lucky draw may prompt another run on a gambler's fallacy and so eventuate into an easy victory that was not merited by player skill, but rather is driven by the identity's ability instead. Such is the nature of the A:NR game and its inclusion of Identity abilities. In this regard, knowing what each opponent's Identity can, or is likely to do, may serve to force a decision to exploit the Mulligans rule, despite the principled dismissal.
Given that Android: Netrunner is a game where information is key, what does taking the Mulligans tell your opponent? In one sense there is little given away in the extant rule, as there is no requirement to reveal the cards in the opener before redrawing, unlike an Iceless or All Agenda Mulligans as sometimes seen in the original game's house rules. Thus the opponent ostensibly learns nothing about the deck composition due to a redraw.
In a broader sense, though, the Mulligans redraw does tell the opponent something, if not very much. Taking the redraw may indicate that you have in your deck situational cards that may be useful at some part of the game, but not at the start. Combined with the knowledge of common deck archetypes that can be played out of your (already revealed) Identity, that may be enough for your opponent to intuit something of the nature of your deck and potentially be able to play around that, seeking to ensure that the situation in which the cards are hypothetically useful.
As an example, perhaps you inadvertently reveal that you're playing a fragile tag'n'bag style deck. If so, then if I can avoid taking an early tag by digging hard for a Decoy, or ensuring that I have enough credits to keep you from a double Scorched Earth until I've got appropriate defences set up, I can close out that portion of your deck. This could in effect force a slower advancement strategy for victory which will improve my Runner deck's chances of winning.
Worse perhaps, is that the redraw may demonstrate that a deck is heavily phase-biased. As such if the opponent is able to control the phases of the game better then they can control the whole game. Controlling the phases depends on the nature of the factions, especially so for the Runner. They tend to either prefer to keep it in phase one or quickly establish phase three. Corp decks may instead quickly/carefully progress to phase two, again depending on the nature of the Runner deck and its phase preference; if the Runner does best in phase one, then a quick erection of defences is best, even at the cost of some early points given up if it minimises the eventual losses. If they Runner is a better phase three deck then it is better to carefully move to phase two, ensuring that as little as possible is given away in getting there to maximise the work that the opponent needs to do should they achieve a full Rig.
Considering the employment of the Mulligans rule on another level, ignoring it as an element of the RAW means that you are cutting yourself off from one strategic option of gameplay. A:NR consists of all the rules of the game, not just some, and so playing the whole game means playing all the options rather than arbitrarily discarding some of them. Furthermore, some Identities such as Chaos Theory (Genesis Cycle #46) and Andromeda (Genesis Cycle #84) have passive abilities that are predicated on being able to utilise the Mulligans rule to seek the best opener; removing this option when playing such a deck means that you are playing with a vastly weaker version of the Identity's ability.
Finally, what if your opponent chooses to Mulligan? Especially in a tournament situation , by electing not to do so in the face of an opponent's decision to redraw, you may be placing yourself at a disadvantage. The opponent seeks to gain an advantage by opting to redraw, and the principled denial of utilising the redraw yourself is perhaps unfair.
Addendum and Conclusion
Several times in the essay I have invoked a notion of fairness. This poses the obvious question of "what's fair"? In the simplest sense by 'fair' I mean an even playing ground, where each participant has the same chances to play the game in the manner of their opponent. No one side has an automatic advantage - setting aside questions of player skill disparities.
A little side diversion into Evolutionary Game Theory, if you’ll indulge me. If we treat the individual’s decision within the [local] community to employ or disregard the Mulligans rule as a strategy akin to the Co-operator/Defector strategies in the Prisoner’s Dilemma then there will be a stable outcome. I’m considering the cooperative strategy of the PD as the non-Mulligans side and the defector strategy as the pro-Mulligans side here. If the analogy is correct, then EGT suggests that just as the defector strategy will eventually evolve the co-operators out of the community, and by analogy then the pro-Mulligans side will eventually become so successful that the non-Mulligans side will be evolved out of the community. Of course there’s no suggestion here of what a generation might be in this evolutionary game, or how long it might take, so there’s that as a weakness to the conclusion.
On the other hand, to butcher a line from Shakespeare: "all's fair in love and cyberwar". Consider the immersion of the players into the simulated cyberspace battle between the monolithic corporate entity and the street-level cyber terrorist, drawing the players into the world of Android as an experience, rather than at the abstract level of the mere CCG. This immersive aspect to game play serves to enhance the fun of the game. As we all play the game for fun, we need to always keep this in mind. What is fun for you (and your opponent) is what's best for the game, at an individual and also at a global level.So you choose whether to hold 'em or fold 'em, and remember to Have Fun!
[1] and to a lesser extent, Andromeda, due to the nature of Criminal cards such as Account Siphon (Core #18), Lemuria Codecracker (Core #23), Emergency Shutdown (Genesis Cycle #43) and Pheromones (Genesis Cycle #86).