April 2026 Ban Update
by saff
- Government Takeover is banned
- Tributary is banned
Ban Reasoning
Government Takeover
Government Takeover’s primary function is reducing agenda density in decks that either do not plan to ever score out or use a combination of cards to score 6 points in one turn. Both of these can lead to very long games as the Corp’s main goal becomes to slow the game down and continue hiding the few agendas they have. In combination with certain support cards, it was possible to create games where the runner has very few avenues towards victory without extremely specific counter-strategies. In the interest of allowing games to be completed under normal tournament time constraints and encouraging interactive games, Government Takeover needed to be removed.
We had looked at targeting Red Planet Couriers instead, but that only removes one scoring combo application of Government Takeover without addressing the larger problem of agenda density, in effect making the issue worse by removing a way for the Corp to close out the game.
Tributary
Tributary was showing up in too many decks and had an excessive warping effect in each game it was played. Unless the Runner is playing ice destruction or similar strategies, it presents a constant tax through the entire game that particularly impedes run-based economy and complicates board state much more than one ice should be able to.
As Tributary was a natural, near-omnipresent soft-counter to Endurance, further attention will need to be paid to how Endurance fits into the meta moving forward.
tags: bans