Sand & Salvation - Custom Big Box

Hi all - Now that applications for lead designer for NISEI are complete (congrats @crithitd20), I realized I don’t have much use for this custom big box I made while NISEI was still in its infancy and figured I’d post it for the heck of it.

It matches the numerical breakdown of R&R, with one exception: it introduces “spashable” agendas with a subtype Affinity. These are agendas which are neutral but which cost influence for three of the four factions, and which have a thematic overlap with its “main” faction.

The setting is the American Southwest, rendered nearly uninhabitable for most people in the wake of catastrophic climate change. HB is scheming to build a new mega-city to rival SanSan around what remains of Phoenix, while Jinteki uses isolated facilities in the Mojave Desert as secret testing grounds for new pharmaceutical wonders bred from the deadliest diseases - using remote desert communities as unwitting test subjects.

The set can be found here: Sand & Salvation - Google Sheets

Enjoy. As always, I’m happy to hear feedback. I’m still planning on applying to participate in the design team, so some of these designs may get cannibalized for future card submissions.

I’ve also created a channel on the slack for it for those who prefer slack to this forum - #sandandsalvation

5 Likes

I actually really like your cards, I might even “test” a few, thanks for sharing!

A couple questions:
Memory Management:
Is it: “look at the stack and remove a card”, or is it, “search for a card in the stack (and if you find it) remove it from the game”?
Manna: I guess it is a resource?

Memory Management: I assume you mean, “do they have to know what they’re looking for before they search.” As currently designed the answer is no; they can take anything they want (but only one copy of it, if the deck plays multiples).

Manna: Correct, it’s a unique resource. (I didn’t mention, but the asterisk in front of the name stands in for the uniqueness diamond.)

What kind of use are you invisioning for Red Rock Limited? A lot of the time I rarely have more than one click left when stealing an agenda, and even then I don’t use them for much high value stuff

Predominantly it’s twofold: one, it synergizes with agendas that care about clicks (Ikawah Project and this set’s Vertical Integration, allowing the deck to spoof Haarpsichord), and two, it punishes runners who run earlier to click through Bioroids, want to stretch out the corp’s ice cash, or just generally want to poke early and develop late.

Then there are other in-set synergies - Wyatt can’t be clicked through, and it feeds clicks to Grassroots Campaign, which in turn also feeds off cards like MCA Austerity Policy and Interconnection.

Also it’s conceivable there’d be some kind of wacky Deadcoats variant that plans on giving the runner tags at the same time it feeds them an agenda so they can’t clear.

Isn’t it antisynergistic with Ikawah? If you’re stealing it youre losing a click, so you’ll lose even fewer clicks from the identity

More so they can’t steal more than one agenda when using multi access/if you install multiple agendas, a la Haarpsichord, since when they lose their remaining clicks they can’t pay that cost again.

I feel that Memory Management is too powerful in it’s current form. You can name any card that’s not even in the meta (even a banned/removed card) and then just look at the runner’s stack to gain a full picture of what the runner’s plans are and gives the corp too much of a boost for a single tag.

Either the effect should be lowered or the corp has to be punished for naming an incorrect card (at which point, corps will almost always name Sure Gamble or Daily Casts). Another thing to note is the rule that players may get to see the runner’s decklist before a game in higher level cuts (Worlds/Continentals/Nationals/Regionals). At this point, a program removal could just swing the game too far to the corp (though at least this may give runners an incentive to not take single copies of programs).

I’m a bit conflicted over Field Testing as well, though I guess Fetal AI was a much higher power level than that.

Other than that, I like the ideas going into these cards!