Regardless, the Nexus vs. Guard interaction can result in a change in game state (tagging and ETR). It’s a legal play.
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Initiating a trace is itself a change in the game state, if I recall correctly. But in any case, the effect only has to have the potential to change the game state to be activated, and in this case one of the outcomes – a trace failure – would initiate a change in the state. Unless you are in a very peculiar case where the Nexus literally cannot fail (e.g. a high link runner and a very broke corp), it has the potential to have an effect. If all possible outcomes of an effect had to result in a change, you could never play a Cerebral Cast (because it is possible that both players bid 0), nor could you ever initiate a trace that you weren’t guaranteed to win.
I think part of the confusion is that traces are generally* part of the effect of an ability, not the cost. Traces can ‘feel’ like a cost, because most of the time the corp wants the trace to be successful in order to achieve something else. So it seems at a gut level like the ‘cost’ of Midseasons is 5 + winning a trace. But in game terms the cost is just 5 credits, and the effect is the whole trace algorithm and it’s potential outcomes. Think of it like Beth Kilrain-Chang – the cost is 2 credits, the effect is installing a resource with a series of If-Then statements. Even if those If-Thens will all resolve to false in the immediate future, you can still install her.
*I’m pretty sure this is universally (not just generally) true at the moment, at least off the top of my head. I suppose it’s theoretically possible to have an ability that reads “Trace(0):” as a cost. It would be… unclear… how that would work (presumably the effect would fire even if you lost the trace?) and probably result in huge headaches in this thread, but atm I believe every trace is a part of an effect, rather than a cost.
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OK, yes. If “trace is an effect in and of itself, and traces have the potential to change game state” is the rule, then I agree with the original response that you can use Security Nexus on Guard. Yeah, it gets stickier when you take into account the edge cases like a trace that you are guaranteed to win that can have no positive effect, but I’m happy to let that ride for the sake of simplicity.
Initiating a trace changes the game state. This was ruled by Damon regarding Punitive Counterstrike in the Democracy & Dogma UFAQ:
http://ancur.wikia.com/wiki/Democracy_and_Dogma_UFAQ
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Yes, exactly. Foxfire and Nexus initiate traces as their effect. It doesn’t matter if the result of the trace is irrelevant.
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Slightly OT, but to those interested, our cries have been heard; Adjusted Matrix has been updated, and it’s behavior is now clear and very well-defined. It now does… absolutely nothing.
At least there’s no confusion anymore!
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Sorry I misspoke; it does have a very real effect on the game in that it still turns your breaker into an AI so that you can self-purge your shame off of a Swordsman.
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What happens if you install Adjusted Matrix on an Icebreaker that is Hosted on Dinosaurus?
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I assume they’re going to release a rule update that provides a narrow rule to allow this. But it’s…deeply odd.
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The problem is that you can’t spend click paid abilities during a run right?
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Yes. If you could you could, for example, use symmetrical visage to draw a card and gain a credit during a run.
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The very first deck I ever brought to “competitive” Netrunner (a GNK) was a Yogasaurus Kit deck that used Paint Brush mid run to turn everything into code gates.
The world became a darker place when I learned that I couldn’t.
Letting clicks be used mid-run in general is likely game breaking (for reasons like this, leap-frog knights, mid-run emergency Kati, etc.). If they do leave this wording, they will have to make some sort of rules update, but need to tread carefully.
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…
Oh wow.
If you could use clicks mid-run, a whole lot of things change.
For example, Clone Chip isn’t broken.
Savor-Faire becomes unplayable.
Facechecking ICE would happen a lot more regularly.
So yeah, I think they’ll look at the templating on that card a bit more…
Ideally? It’ll read “Lose a click: Break ice subroutine”. At best it combos with Adjusted Chronotype, and it doesn’t cause far-reaching ramifications or need a rules re-write. Note that you just literally can’t use ‘click’ abilities. If the cost of an ability were, theoretically, ‘lose a click’, you could still use that ability.
It’d just look a bit weird to newer players. (There’s precedent in the Bioroid ice; they say ‘spend Click, Click’ instead of ‘Click:’ It would also be analogous to the tap symbol in That Other Game, because some abilities say to tap untapped things without using the specific symbol, which gets around some hard limits that symbol implies.)
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if you don’t have a click to lose, could you still use the ability? I feel like you could with that wording.
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“click: break ICE subroutine. This ability can be used during encounters with ICE.”
Golden rule makes everything kosher. You want it to be spending vs. losing as some card effects proc off it.
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No; See Enigma. (Additionally, you must be able to pay costs to use abilities.)
That templating works, too. Even more interesting in that it actually has only one paid ability window where you can use it, specifically during the encounter itself… (So I like this templating more than mine, even though it’s a bit more wordy and takes more card real estate, it’s sufficiently clear.)
I suppose it boils down to whether you want it to trigger Heinlein or Chronotype. … Wait, no, Heinlein triggers off Losing, as well… Are there other cards that care about Spending vs Losing clicks? Chronotype wants you to Lose it, Heinlein doesn’t care either way…
If the cost is to lose something, you have paid the cost of losing, even if it doesn’t actually result in losing anything. In the case of Enigma it says lose if able, which is an important distinction and treated differently. So with the templating provided, you would want to change it to:
Lose a click, if able: break…
But now this looks weird. It looks even more like you could use the ability without actually losing a click.
In terms of existing cards that care about the difference, I don’t know an exhaustive list off hand. I’ll check nrdb later. But, from a design perspective, you probably want to keep “spending” and “losing” distinct. Otherwise cards you intend to work off of losing might end up breaking in some edge case where you’re “losing to spend”. Granted, this is already slightly muddled by Wyldside and Hard at Work (though they are forced, so maybe “lose” is right there).
I think you could still do it your way, but instead say:
Spend a click: break…
Looks odd given that there already a template for spending clicks (as actions), but I don’t think there’s any way of getting around it since the game has linked clicks with actions (which was probably a design mistake).
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Heinlein grid triggers off of both spending or losing a click, so it doesn’t matter in this instance.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but why is this so different than the Bioroid option that says “The Runner can spend [click] to break any subroutine on Heimdall 1.0.”? Or Adam’s ability that lets you spend clicks to break?