Upstalk Text Spoilers

New Cards and Spoilers
1

These spoilers from reddit may not be accurate. If they are real, there is some big stuff here.

1 - Domestic Sleepers (HB) : Agenda (2/0) [Click][Click][Click]L Place 1 agenda counter on Domestic Sleepers. Domestic Sleepers is worth 1 agenda point while it has at least 1 agenda counter on it.

2 - Next Silver (HB,2) : ICE (3cost, 1str), barrier NEXT Silver gains “>End the run.” for each rezzed piece of NEXT ice.

3 - Lotus Field (Jinteki,1) : ICE (5cost, 4str), code gate
The strength of Lotus Field cannot be lowered.
End the run.

4 - Mutate (Jinteki,3) : Operation (cost 2)
As an addition cost to play this operation, trash a rezzed piece of ice.
Reveal cards from the top of R&D until you reveal another piece of ice. Install and rez that ice in the same position as the ice that was just trashed, ignoring all costs. Shuffle R&D.

5 - Near-Earth Hub: Broadcast Center (NBN) : Identity (45/17), Division
The first time you create a server each turn, draw 1 card.

6 - Primary Transmission Dish (NBN,2) : Asset (rez 2, trash 3)
3 (recurring credits).
Use these credits during traces.

7 - Midway Station Grid (NBN,4) : Upgrade (rez 4, trash 4), Beanstalk, Region
The Runner must pay 1c as an additional cost each time he or she uses an icebreaker to break a subroutine during a run on this server. Limit 1 region per server.

8 - (unique) The Root (Weyland,3) : Asset (rez 6, trash 4), Beanstalk
3 (recurring credits). Use these credits to advance, install, and rez cards.

9 - Taurus (Weyland,2): ICE (cost 5, str 5), Sentry, Tracer
Trace(2): If successful, trash a piece of hardware. If your trace strength is 5 or greater, trash a piece of hardware.

10 - Mother Goddess (Neutral,0) : ICE, mythic
Mother Goddess gains the subtypes of all other rezzed ice.
End the run.

11 - Galahad (Neutral,1): ICE(cost 2), barrier, grail
When encountered, you may reveal up to 2 grail ice from HQ. For the remainder of the run, Galahad gains the subroutine of the revealed ice in the order of your choice.
End the run.

12 - Bad Times (Neutral,0): Operation(cost 4)
Play only if the Runner is tagged. The Runner’s MU is reduced by 2 until the end of the turn.

13 - Cyber Threat (Anarch, 3): Event(cost 1), Priority
Play this event only as your first (click). Choose a server. The Corp can rez a piece of ice protecting that server. If he or she does not, make a run on that server, during which the Corp cannot rez ice.

14 – Lamprey (Anarch,2): Program (cost 1, MU 1), Virus
Whenever you make a successful run on HQ, the Corp loses 1c. Trash Lamprey if the Corp purges virus counters.

15 – Paper Tripping (Criminal,2): Event(cost 4), Priority
Play this event only as your first (click). Remove all tags.

16 – Power Tap (Criminal,1) : Resource(cost2)
Gain 1c whenever a trace is initiated.

17 – Nasier Meidan: Cyber Explorer (Shaper): Identity (1 link, 45/15), Cyborg
Whenever you encounter a piece of ice that was just rezzed, lose all credits in your credit pool. Gain credits equal to the rez cost of that ice.

18 – Social Engineering (Shaper,2): Event (cost 2), Priority
Play only as your first (click). Choose an unrezzed piece of ice. If the Corp rezzes that piece of ice this turn, gain credits equal to its rez cost.

19 – Leprechaun (Shaper,2) : Program (cost 2, MU 1), Daemon
Leprechaun can host up to 2 programs. The memory cost of hosted programs do not count against your memory limit.

20 – Eden Shard (Neutral,1): Resource, Virtual, Source
Whenever you make a successful run on R&D, instead of accessing cards, you may install Eden Shard from your grip, ignoring all costs. (Trash): The Corp draws 2 cards. Limit 1 per deck.

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2

Welp, 1 influence on lotus field, R.I.P. yog

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3

Legit.

Time to bury Yog, hopefully. F Sucker and Parasite, too.

Let the burial of Core cards begin.

(Also, 2 Identities. Nice start to the cycle.)

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Lotus Field looks like a near auto-3 of until the meta shifts, as it completely trashes several decks prominent in the environment right now. Looks like it’s time to bring out the Cyber-Cypher…

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Part of me just wants to run yog + personal touch now

Edit: Knee jerk card evaluations

Sleepers: Can the runner use it while it’s scored? HB has been wanting a 2/1, but each copy of this increases agenda density. You can do a lot of interesting things with it though (all 2 pointers + sleepers, all 3 pointers + sleepers), might be strong if the runner can’t use it.

Next Silver: More reason to run morning star, and by ‘run morning star’ I mean put it in a deck and then cut if for parasites.

Lotus Field: I really don’t want to break codegates fairly, Knight might come back into popularity to help get around this. Dusting off a copy of torch might be right now.

Mutate: Will inspire gimmick trick ice decks, not sure if they’ll be good. It is a third set of ice tricks though.

New NBN: 17 influence and an extremely relevant ability? HEIL HOWARD

Transmission Dish: probably not bad, decently expensive to trash, extra strength might come up in nbn scorch

Midway Station Grid: This is going to be a nightmare on centrals. more ways for nbn to run you out of money

The Root: Protect it for 2 full value turns and you’re only down a card, might be difficult to use it to full value as well, I’d skip this

Taurus:it’s ok? you kinda expect high strength sentries out of weyland, and you usually want to play close to their money pool, so I’m not sure how often this will hit. powerful effect though, good on centrals.

Mother goddess: Meh, better than rainbow, but not by much

Galahad: Not worth it until merlin comes out at the least, and then you’re going to want to spend a lot of your influence on neutral ice, dubious.

Bad Times: doesn’t save you when you’re getting siphon locked, but god damn does it punish tags if you can keep your money high. I think tagme will be less of an archetype.

Cyberthreat: decent if you’re scared of face checking, but this is worse than fao, and fao isn’t great

Lamprey: I can see this in siphon spam anarch, and I can see this imported into criminal and shaper for different reasons.

Paper Tripping: counters midseasons I guess, but tags are kinda binary, and if you don’t want them you’ll rarely get them, so it’s probably better just to build around accommodating that

Power Tap: I might run compromised employees or like just to get value off this thing, get to 3 link and start bumping into vipers for value

Nasier: not even going to guess

Social Engineering: can only see it in a very derez heavy deck

Leprechaun: This actually helps the professor a lot, and gives other shapers the option of opus again

Eden Shard: makes over-drawing with jackson awkward, but you need a legwork in the deck to cash in, not worth the influence personally

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Well, this is exciting. Lotus Field is obviously good, but honestly, Mutate looks pretty fun for Jinteki, too. Influence might be too high for other factions, though, since they can’t splash Precognition easily either.

Taurus is the real standout, for me. It’s expensive, but each time they fail to break it, it costs 3 to trash 1-2 pieces of hardware. That is potentially very nasty, especially against Weyland with all their Scorches – and it kills consoles, to boot.

Cyber Threat seems decent enough – Anarch’s version of Forged Activation Orders. Lamprey seems like a lot of fun if you can hammer HQ a few times (Siphons/Vamps/Nerve Agents?) the turn you play it. If they can’t up protection, might force them to purge viruses and spend their next turn trashing it – and it’s a 1-cost virus for Noise, to boot.

Power Tap seems potentially very useful, meta dependent.

Social Engineering is obviously good for Nasir, but I don’t know that it’s going to be enough to make him great. Leprechaun is really good, though. It’s basically a better Djinn, so far as Shaper’s concerned. Pop Morning Star or Battering Ram on there, and maybe a Keyhole or Magnum Opus (or even an SMC). Saves you a lot of MUs, though it’s weak to trashing/Bad Times shutouts (which, to be fair, would likely need to be pretty layered).

Domestic Sleepers is indeed the first 2/0, and looks pretty interesting. Still, while it won’t count for the runner to steal, it doesn’t count for deckbuilding either. Kind of a Corp version of Notoriety.

EDIT: Two IDs, pretty nice. The NBN one seems… lackluster, especially in comparison to Nasir/Blue Sun, but I imagine that’s because I haven’t thought too hard on it yet. It’s a third ID for the only faction without, which is nice, and requires a completely different playstyle/deck than the others. I don’t see it being as good, immediately, but at the same time, I can see a sort of FA maybe working with it. You get a card each time you score Breaking News or use an Astro Counter without SanSan.

Certainly some will use it, and there are NBN cards that make more sense there than in MN/TWIY, so… that’s something.

EDIT: Lotus Field is making Torch reaaally appealing. Along with Morning Star already looking better and better… well. Huzzah for big breakers!

Eden Shard seems useful for RDI decks. If you’ve seen the top two and can access again, trash it to try and end the game all the earlier. I’d rather an Indexing, but hey, still might help for R&D lock. (I know this was out before, but see some use for it that was previously not noticed by me).

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compare it to the other NBN identities. TWIY says 40 card deck (~3% more consistent) and the handsize is nice, but not the end all reason to run it. MN says “caduceus and draco are playable”, which is good, but you rarely get full value every turn. switch to asset econ and this gives you several card draws over the course of a game, and 2 more influence to work with

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Disclaimer: a rather negative post follows.

I have to admit I’m sorta pissed about Lotus Field. It’s not Yoggable… great. But once again, Anarch gets a pretty fat stick up the ass by virtue of this.

My main issue here is that both the other factions have good, solid options for dealing with Lotus Field in-faction (Shaper even has multiple options for making this yoggable), and Anarch doesn’t. I can’t parasite it, so basically it’s telling me that I **have to ** run three Knights, and take an ETR at an inopportune time? That means either risk being delayed by a whole turn (and an agenda score, and a lot of other things), or having 1 MU wasted by a Knight that’s installed and waiting to move onto a Lotus Field. Meh. That 1 influence is just a huge “fuck you” sign adding insult to injury.

Oh, right - I can play Force of Nature, or splash for a Decoder. Great, exactly what the faction needed, more circumstantial weakness and deckbuilding hurdles. What do they get as compensation in the set? A FAO wannabe and a virus that’s really easy to make go away the second it would actually become relevant (and is, once again, probably better out of faction).

p.s. Also, that NBN identity is… just meh. Was it really necessary to add a card draw effect onto AstroTrains? In case that wasn’t enough, here - have two more influence! Blagh.

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I think most Never Advance decks will switch the ID instantly. They don’t rely that much on traces (Ash being the only important trace in that deck most of the time), they run asset economy and 2 extra influence is really nice - after adding 3x Eli you have 14 left, which is enough for 3 Ash 2 Caprice, 3 Ash 2 Biotic Labor, or 2 Ash 3 Snare 2 Edge of World for a more trap oriented build.

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Never Advance is basically obsolete now, isn’t it?

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Why? I’m playing it quite a lot with decent results. It’s not as taxing as HB Red Coats, but it’s close and the threat of starting the Astrotrain helps a lot. A server containing Ash + SanSan protected by 2-3 pieces of medium size ice is costly to destroy.

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It’s interesting, a lot of this has the ring of truth about it, but one or two things don’t quite make sense to me.

I agree about Lotus Field. Yog has been slowly moving out of the Criminal/Shaper meta for a while now but Anarch really need it. And it confuses me that it’s in Jinteki. But then it confused me that Ashigaru was in Jinteki so, you know.

On the other hand, Cyber Threat is a very nice card for Anarch, miitgating the risks around crashing into sentries. And it actually has an influence cost that will deter it from used out of faction. Social Engineering also feels like it might be a decent splash in Reina decks. I’m less enthused about Lamprey - pushing Anarch even further in the Siphon/Vamp direction at a time when the meta is punishing it more and more (witness Bad Times in the same set). And it’s more MU for non-breakers.

Domestic Sleepers won’t be going anywhere near NEXT anytime soon. It’s the one ID that really can’t deal with the extra agendas - even if it is effectively risk free. But NEXT Silver and Mother Godess might give it a decent boost. And Mutate feels like it might work well out of HB.

Speaking of going out of faction - even at 4 influence, Midway Station Grid could be a nasty splash in Jinteki Glacier decks with their mutliple subroutine ICE.

The prospect of Astrobiotics or NBN Tag n’ Bag with free card draw (ok probably only four cards a game for Astrobiotics) and, more importantly, 17 influence, is pretty terrifying…

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The new NBN ID seems amazing. Probaly not a scorch/midseason/psycho deck and you have to take out some ICE (Draco/Caduceus/Viper) but with the recent releases there is actually alternatives for ICE now and getting additional benefits from playing Marked Accounts / PAD seems great. Additional influence is icing on the cake.

Leprechaun is the card that solves all the memory issues for Shapers but the rest of the runner cards seems mediocre or very niche. Compared to them the corp cards are pretty strong, both Jinteki cards are really good. Domestic Sleepers is a interesting card, probably very strong since there is little downside to playing it. Bad Times is so good, both Jinteki and HB have been screaming for non-influence tag punishment and it gives more teeth to midseason NBN decks.

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I fully agree with PeekaySK. Lotus Field is really worth getting angry about. This is the first card preview to actually make me very annoyed and disheartened.

Whose genius idea was this shit?

I think it’s great that FFG decreased the amount of Datasuckers I see out in the game by making other programs with high MU requirements better choices. You kind of have to choose between Datasuckers, Magnum Opus, Keyhole, and Sneakdoor Beta. You can’t have it all due to memory constraints. So if other attractive options are abundant, why heavy handedly destroy one of the most interesting cards?

I really enjoy the interaction between Datasuckers and fixed strength breakers, parasites, atman. Someone at FFG got a bit grouchy and overreacted to losing one too many games against decks running it.

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Can the Runner use the ability on any scored Agenda? (answer is self-evident)

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In all fairness, it can still be a fake. Also, remember that a data pack isn’t really a complete product balance-wise, a full cycle is. So for instance, the existence of D4vid somewhat mitigates the stuff I’ve written about earlier.

Still, that doesn’t change the fact that we’ll have to live with each “intermediate” balance state for at least a couple of months - if Lotus Field is real, this summer will be a really shitty time to be an Anarch. I just hope Upstalk doesn’t hit before all the Regionals I want to go to, otherwise I’ll just have to play Shaper again :confused:

I’d expect orange to get some pretty amazing stuff (read: not Cyber Threat) in this cycle to compensate. And when you think about it, we already know it won’t be their current, as that’s just another ICE str reduction (and not a particularly great one, at that).

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Hmm I wonder if Domestic Sleepers will make a 6 543 agenda setup work for HB. Your opponent has to steal 3 out of your 6 3 pointers, but you only need to score 2 plus a sleepers.

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…unless they’re packing Notoriety :smiley:

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Oh no! Anarch has to import a Decoder! The best Anarch deck currently in the meta doesn’t even run Decoders.

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To be fair, Anarch already “has” to import 12pips of Siphon to be close to competitive, though :).

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