Now that all the cards have come out, does it feel weird that there’s been basically zero support for Nero and Jesminder? Palana got Harvester (ugh) and Agroplex with Political Dealings as support (plus it was generic enough to not need support), NBN got Salem and his Hospitality plus Waiver and KGR TV; all spread out over several packs. Meanwhile Nero gets Reflection (admittedly it’s hard to design support for “Gabe but for wimps”) and Jesminder gets Maya and that’s it. Jesminder especially could have really used more support cards.
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It does seem strange. Geist was handed an entire breaker suite and console.
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It seems they’re often happy to drip feed over a cycle or two. Gagarin only started getting it on with the end of San-San, Geist & Hayley are still getting moree support. They still haven’t been nice to Laramy though.
Additionally, not all runners are neccessarily archetype defining. Some might be better viewed as options for archetypes that are defined by other ‘good stuff’ cards, and there will be a sliding scale between these two extremes.
Turning Wheel suits Nero pretty well. Mongoose too (you don’t have to be scared of a potential second sentry).
Info Shifting is almost better then legwork for Fisk.
I think if info sifting was free, I might play it. As it is it’s gonna stay in the binder until either corps are playing more + handsize or there are better mechanisms for flooding them.
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IMO it’s already tough being Crim thanks to Crisium; this strikes me as another interesting card that’s difficult to justify in the game environment.
i would say that they were designed with previous cards in mind, like Account Siphon, Code Siphon, and Vamp for Jesminder, and Au Revoir for Nero, plus their consoles, but also as tech against corp cards, like Data Raven, Gutenberg, Turnpike, Hunter, for Jesminder, and facecheck-punishing sentries that kind of made criminals lose a bit of favor, like Komainu and Cortex Lock, plus he helps one of the criminal runner’s goals of forcing rezzes to make the corp broke. either rez that ICE, or i get some credits from Security Testing, or rez it, and i get to jack out anyway. Nero’s ability could almost read: spend a click to force the corp to lose x credits, x being the cost of that massive sentry they were hoping to punish you for facechecking, then run wherever you really wanted to in the first place, with the corp too broke to rez anything on that server.
Geist as a contrary example seemed to have gotten a LOT of cards… in the last cycle and this one, but i don’t think they just designed these new IDs to be completely without support or purpose. i think they fill very different design spaces
Yeah, I think Info Sifting is cool, but “run events that require successful run on HQ” is such heavily trodden ground that adding more just makes corps protect HQ harder (weakening the criminal siphon/legwork/pol op/etc gameplan, not strengthening it).
If it had some other trigger so that the corp would have to defend more than just HQ, it could be cool. That goes in general for criminal, it feels like aside from Inside Job (so they double-ice stuff) and getting credits from un-iced remotes (sec testing, bank job), criminals are pegged to HQ more tightly than any other faction to any other server.
I think that Turning wheel and (maybe) spy camera will help criminal get better R&D pressure + multi-access. Geist got a shitload of support from this cycle (tech trader, sports hopper, bazaar, spy camera), but other criminals much less so.
i have to wonder if info shifting would have been overpowered if it worked on an archives run like a sneakdoor run. a sneakdoor event.
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If it cost a bit more, this might actually have been a really neat version of the event.
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Whaaaaaaat? I’ve seen a legwork miss all 2 agendas in my hand before, I think it’s a special kind of stressful to have to choose whether you MIGHT lose 2 agendas, or none at all, over definitely losing 1. Of course, like legwork, it’s not a card you really want to just run against Jinteki Willy Nilly™
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Just came here to say how much I absolutely love that Red tape is literally tying up Yog.0. The flavor, it’s so crazy good.
Pity it didn’t come out back in Genesis cycle, it would have been all the rage.
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I agree that it’s not a great choice, but choosing between definitely 1 agenda or maybe 2 agendas is still a CHOICE. For example, if the runner only needs 1 agenda to win, the corp will definitely choose ‘maybe give them two agendas’. That’s why legwork will continue to be played way more than Info Sifting without major new cards to support Sifting.
The other disadvantage of Information Sifting is it’s rare that you have two agendas in hand you feel are equivalent in your mind - usually one agenda is just better than the other. So if, for example, you have an Astro and a Beale in your five-card hand and your opponent Sifts you, you could put the Astro in the two-card hand and the Beale in the three-card hand and probably preserve at least some of the value.
This falls under the greater header of “giving your opponent opportunities to outplay you is bad” problems, of which IS has loads.
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It’s as uncertain of a choice as a psi game, or you simply give the runner a guaranteed chance to get 1 agenda. I rely on psi games plenty, this seems not too much different. I would try playing it with CBI Raid for some interesting play potential. You could sift, see no agendas, and CBI Raid. Then you could see the rest of the cards through R&D or more HQ runs. It’s probably not straight up superior to Legwork, but it has such a powerful effect, it’s at least worth playing alongside it.
Right, except like Psi games, the corp gets to define the terms of the game and has an inherent advantage in them. I don’t think most runners consider a Psi game something to aspire to play, except in the worst of situations. And if you run the numbers, if your opponent has two agendas in five cards, Legwork will only come up empty 10% of the time. Whereas if I Sift, I can’t ever be sure that my opponent is forcing me to flip a coin for both agendas. And the fear of missing an agenda means you have to consider whether to make the horrible choice of whether to take the pile with 2 or the pile with 3, based on “wine in front of me” sort of second-guessing.
In short, unless you’re some sort of master of reading your opponent, I feel like random chance will usually beat a fixed game.
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Fair enough, but shouldn’t we all aspire to be masterful? 
I still think it’s absolutely worth playing with fisk, or Wanton Destruction and Comet. We can surely agree it’s an interesting card.
The runner keep the tag from Breaking news.
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Okay, I was wrong about Exchange of Information. I thought the card was good before, but it turns out it’s excellent.
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