I think Stealth might be the only thing that Andy does uniquely well at compared to other criminals IDs. The starting hand size lets you find your combo pieces early on. If they ever print an ID that’s just flat out better than Andy and people start using that new ID for generic good criminal stuff, I think that stealth will still be Andy’s nitch.
The only reason Stealth isn’t unbearably overpowering is that it, by definition, requires a lot of moving parts.
Consider the impact of a Switchblade that would need 1 stealth credit to work instead of two - this is what you’d create, for the first half of the game or so. Consider how balanced Refractor would be, if it had a base STR of 5. Same thing.
Another thing you’d mess up is how much influence it costs to get permanent stealth credits for the various breakers. When you’re playing a stealth deck, you’re not just gated by the availability of stealth credits and needing to fish for the cards, you’re also gated by their permanency - the only inf-free source is temporary, and the only general-use source both costs influence and is a program (thus leading to MU-related deckbuilding restrictions, vulnerability to trashing and increased clunkiness factor). If you create a runner that has a general-use recurring stealth credit, you break all of this:
It can be used from turn 1, getting the whole suite up much faster
It doesn’t cost influence
It lets you have more stealth credits in total, thus turning off a significant part of the counterplay currently available
I can maybe see an ID like you described if the stealth credit’s use were restricted to the breaker type that’s in-faction for the ID. That way, you’d just break one card instead of the whole set… but in general, it still strikes me as a really bad idea to do something liek that. At the very least, it would have to have, like, 10 inf.
I get your point, but ID abilities are supposed to actually be useful. I’m not sure why Silhouette (the STEALTH operative) didn’t have this ability, but I could see a 45/10 runnner with 1 recurring stealth credit being balanced. Maybe it can only be used for stealth breakers or abilities as opposed to just general use for icebreakers.
Free stealth icebreaker credits from turn one would be terrifying even with super low influence - look at how Valencia is able to leverage her free credits for runs already.
If you make a stealth ID ability it shouldn’t be faster stealth but more powerful stealth in my opinion: something like “Whenever you install a stealth card put 1c on $THIS_GUY. You can use these credits to pay for using icebreakers.” something that magnifies the stealth rig’s power (with 4c ghost runners and the chips giving you a one-off activation of their non-favoured breaker type) without making it faster (…and opens up janky combos with installing things repeatedly :))
BP is for every run though, 1 recurring credit isn’t. You still have to have breakers to even use your “free” credit and it may not be useful (eg, refractor vs enigma). Keep in mind that stealth breakers are spread across all 3 factions so limited influence would hurt the ability more.
I just realized this is off topic, maybe it should be moved to Imaginary Cards.