Is Singleton the Best Format for CCGs?

By Chris McGinty of AccordingToWhim.com

There is a format in Magic: The Gathering called Singleton where you build decks that can only have one copy of any card that’s not a basic land. The reason that this format was created was probably similar to the reason that Neal’s Draconian Banned List existed in the game of NetRunner. When the same decks keep getting used, gameplay has a tendency to become stale. Also, a deck can play very similarly each game if it’s built around the concept of having four copies of everything important. Singleton in Magic: The Gathering was probably created as a means by which to say a deck that plays slightly differently each game creates more variety of play.

While Nathan and I don’t shy away from constructed play in NetRunner, one of our favorite ways to play is to bust out a Starter Deck. The nice thing about Starter Decks is that while they were somewhat randomized, it was in a way that mostly played very balanced. This required certain assurance that the Corp had enough access to Agendas and the Runner had enough access to Icebreakers. These got their own rarity, known as Vital. Vital was like a common card, but a certain number of randomly selected Vitals were in every deck. A NetRunner Corp Starter Deck had to follow the rules for deck construction of a 60 card deck, and the Runner Starter Deck had to have enough Icebreakers of all three types. There was only one copy of each randomized card, and you got a good variety of play. This means that you could play multiple rounds NetRunner with two starter boxes and have decidedly different games most of the time.

When I learned of Neal’s Draconian Banned List, I decided to go through and create a Runner deck and a Corp deck that didn’t use any cards that were on the banned list. Because of the fact that I wanted to use as many cards as possible to get a feel for the format, I created the decks to be Singleton. The result was that out of all the constructed Decks that we ever made, these two were among Nathan’s favourites to play. I think that with a relatively lower power level and a variety of cards you would get to play, even though we were playing with only two decks, we tended to have a great variety of games.

I always sort of realized that even using Neal’s Draconian Banned List that there were probably decks that you could construct that would be somewhat broken, but I never really worried about trying to find out because we enjoyed playing with the Singleton decks so much. This was actually one of the big takeaways that I got from NetRunner in terms of tools for game design. The more variety that you can create out of simplicity, the better your game will be.