It’s hard to see anywhere it will be overpowered, but the tempo hit for the corp could be real though. However I’m not sure how much most criminals want to slow down the game. It’ll be interesting to see whether this can be a tool to buy slower crim decks time to set up without having to clear siphon tags.
It’s not as fundamentally powerful as Siphon, so it might struggle on that account. I still prefer it to a card like Architect though, which is awesome, but clearly too far above the curve. Balanced is best.
Now that we’ve learned that the boat may or may not be a lie, its possible that the releases are being intelligently staggered based on the expected availability of the next cycle… If they stick with 42 days between packs:
28-Jan
10-Mar
21-Apr
2-Jun
14-Jul
25-Aug
The 6th pack would arrive just about the right amount of time before worlds, allowing for the next set to be released at worlds (but probably not legal).
I honestly still find it hard to believe that they hold inventory in a warehouse for 6 months without someone sneaking the spoilers out… but those pack 6 mispacks looked pretty convincing.
Why do people think this card has anything to do with indexing? It literally does everything indexing would do on its own if you play CBI first. Indexing only does anything if you play it before this, thus knowing the top 8-10 cards of R&D. Which is hilarious, to be fair.
Would have been nice to be a card that doesn’t get dumped on by Crisium for crim, but who knows. This feels like it will see more play out of faction.
EDIT - I totally misread the card and I think it’s total garbage now, but I do understand the Indexing thing.
Well, if you were in the crazy combo land as described above, you’d index any ice that was in hand to the bottom prior to apocalypse. Which would suck?
At first I thought it was underpowered, but the more I think about it, the better it seems. I have no new points to make, but the amount of situations it can be useful in is huge. Especially out of faction.
Exactly what I was thinking. I will have 2 days from street date for my first playable Store Championship so having extra time to theorycraft and test it is awesome for me.
I think it’s a card you’d have to play it to find out, but it seems like the other situation where it might be good apart from making the Corp redraw a combo is if they’re hot on agendas in HQ. If you have to ditch three or four agendas onto R&D as the Corp, what are you going to do? Draw for two turns, re-flooding yourself and going nowhere towards your goal? Maybe you were aiming to overdraw and pitch the agendas into Archives: that plan’s out of the window for the time being too.
Rather than stopping the Corp when they’re on top, it seems like a way to kick them in the windpipe when they’re down (a la Reina Headlock).
The obvious question is why not Legwork instead, to which I suppose the answer that would make make CBI Raid more useful is some combination of: less dangerous, sets the Corp back more, still gets a payoff even if you misjudged their HQ, and play both cards!
While people have noted the issues this causes CI, someone on Reddit pointed out that allowing CI to rearrange the top fifteen or so cards of their deck can cause some interesting Accelerated Diagnostics combos.
I think the card might be fun and effective in particular decks, as noted above… but an Account Siphon replacement? Unless you have some corporation deck shuffling set up - outside of faction - then you are getting at most in the most beneficial situation (corp wanting all five back as soon as possible regardless of order, which the corp chooses) a turn of tempo hit.
This may stall better than the Account Siphon on a 15+ credit corporation, but that’s getting mighty situational. I am looking forward to trying it in the Pheromones Shop deck though, because I think the hit would be basically free of charge for Gabe and allow for further silly-setup against NEH blitz, which it has issues with (at least in my minimal testing).
