Hi guys,
Some questions/comments/responses on the new cards:
First up The Prof. and Custom Biotics: For me these are a strange inclusion in a faction-specific deluxe set, since their game text relies so heavily on out of faction cards - why didn’t they save these IDs for the end of the next cycle? Anyway, I agree that at the moment this pair seem weak, but as the card pool grows having access to more out of factions tricks and toys will become more powerful. Cherry-picking good cards is not to be under-estimated.
Something else I’ve noticed (not sure if anyone picked up on this) but every runner ID is either “Natural”, “G-Mod” and/or “Cyborg”. It also seems to be the case that the apparently weaker IDs are naturals. I wonder whether in the future we’ll see the Corp exploiting IDs who aren’t entirely human - such that it becomes a bit of a risk to play a non-Natural ID?
Dagger: Where was this card spoiled? Anyway, could go either way depending on what “stealth credits” turn out to be and how reliable they are. I imagine there will be a suite of stealth breakers and probably a console or some other hardware to fuel them. This will probably be a clutch of cards you either take or leave en masse.
Chakana: I agree currently is pretty useless, however if virus counter manipulation ever becomes a thing this could suddenly become huge. I noticed in the new cycle there’s an event card that allows the corp to purge viruses for a single click. I think this is important because the runner can engineer situations where a virus purge is useless to the corp - i.e. the runner can restore all (or even more) of the purged counters on his next turn so the corp can never recover from the virus-lock. This card could play into exactly one of those situations.
Same Old Thing: I quite agree that with the right pool of events this can be massive, but in general spending 3 (or more!) clicks for an event is not good economy. I wonder though whether perhaps this card (and others in the C&C set) might be the first pieces of a new breed of deck that uses excessive draw and self-milling to use the discard pile as an extended hand? This has just happened in the Game of Thrones LCG and is a pretty successful build.
Paricia: I think this card is quite decent actually, but my main problem is that I don’t see that it’s good enough to displace essential cards in most “normal” builds. I think its best use is in massive R&D digging decks with Medium and RDI.
Self-Modifying Code, Sahasrara and Dirty Laundry: Awesome, nothing more to say.
Professional Contacts: I’m struggling to find any love for this at the moment. I will think on it and see if I can find good situations for it but it seems to me that it’s designed for the long game which doesn’t fit the current mold for Netrunner. I think I still prefer to just draw in quantity with events and Wyldside to get to burst economy faster, rather than slowly accrue money and cards. Throw in that he’s damned expensive and his vulnerability and he really doesn’t look like a great investment.
The Source: Hugely over-rated in my opinion. If it was simply neutral without an influence cost it might be playable, but as it is I don’t think decks will be able to find the space for 2-3 copies of this (it’s not a one-of card, especially given it’s ephemeral nature). I think its biggest issue is that it’s trashed when the corp scores - so you can’t even really use it in a deck where you’re looking to stall to buy time for a big late game.
However, perhaps the presence of this and Paricia (along with “protect at all costs” cards like Director Haas) might mean a shift away from rush strategies towards running 5/3 agendas in bigger remotes.
Director Haas: I definitely agree that she’s not great. Although, a question about how multiple copies of her work…
She is unique and the rules say “Some cards have a unique symbol (◆) in front of their title. There can be only one unique card of the same title active at a time. If a card with a unique
title becomes active, any other card that shares its title is immediately trashed. This trashing cannot be prevented.” (p.11)
And “Agendas cannot be rezzed and are only active while in a score area.” (p.8)
Haas’ text treats her “as an agenda”, therefore she is active, and therefore the Corp could trash her by rezzing a second one (recovering the 2 agenda points) so maybe she’s not so bad?
Thomas Haas: The more I think about this one, the more I think he might actually be the card of the set. Let me explain…
Firstly, note that you can never lose the money on him - there is a step before accessing cards where the corp can rez and use paid abilities so if he’s about to be accessed you can always drain the cash and trash him before the runner gets to him. Secondly, since you’ll never rez him until you need him it means you can (in theory) have multiple copies of him in play (and advanced) - it’s an unlikely option but considering he is a kind of secret economy it might be worth splitting the money across multiple copies as it will change the runner’s psychology.
The next thing is that because you can advance the balls off this guy he will look exactly the same as your big agendas. The current mindset is that a card left with three advancements is suspicious and four is definitely a trap. So now the runner has a choice - faced with a four+ advancement card, do they make a run? If this is Tommy then it could be a huge resource drain for nothing, but it could be a project Beale looking for a big score or a Junebug looking to close out the game in style. Tommy makes over-advancing agendas viable, which in turn makes over-advanced traps more believable too. So essentially runners will now have to make a decision: do I run on massively over-advanced servers?
The author says he’s a trap, looking to induce a run. But I think he’s more than that. Once the runner chooses not to run, they probably never will so you can score your big agendas more reliably.
I don’t think I have much more to say to be honest. Most of the other corp stuff looks pretty lacklustre - especially the ICE. Very disappointing.
I can Melange past a few Siphons but getting hit every few turns with one would be debilitating.