Pre-emptive Action - The Post Rotation J-How

So this the first really interesting post-rotation Jackson Howard replacement effect. No influence, neutral, terminal, not tutorable.

Would love to hear everybody’s thoughts on this card.

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If your HQ is flooded, how are you going to get agendas into archives and play this on the same turn?

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Yeah. Ice archives early? It’s not as out there as it once was, considering we have Omar on the way as well. Planning to do it though, and getting the cards in there. It’s clearly not as good as the ol’ king in yellow.

You can cover the same space jackson has with this and special report/disposable HQ/sensies actors union, as those cards do even out your hand, probably more efficiently than jackson, but don’t drag back key cards (say, those biotics, or that ice the anarch destroyed) into your pool. I don’t think this is a sole solution, you don’t really want the agendas sitting in archives for a turn. And you don’t want to run reuse either.

Hmm, how about Reuse?

Icing archives early has potential to slow the temujin money fest as well.

However this card does nothing in the situation you most want early Jackson - when you mull into a bunch of agendas and no ice.

All the new cards which do help in that situation are flipping 2-influence yellow ones :<.

It took Wizards of the Coast years to realise card draw was too fundamental an ability to restrict to one faction. Jackson’s ability to cull cards is likewise too fundamental to give the best examples entirely to one faction.

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Yeah, this.

It quite handily replicates the worst (i.e. least fun-generating) part of Jackson - being able to endlessly recur assets and force the runner to trash them - but not the best (most fun-generating) part of being able to handle agenda flood.

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There’s specialist cards for that. Corporate shuffle, special report, disposable HQ. None quite as versatile as Jackson, but you aren’t going to get that. Shannon Claire if you don’t care about mass, but want the same effects.

I’m not saying there aren’t cards for that; the problem is that the only ways to proactively deal with agenda flood are NBN cards that cost 2 influence! (Disposable HQ whilst useful isn’t proactive as you have ensure the runner hits it to get the effect which is hard when you’re flooded early)

It’ll worsen the jackson problem of NBN having 3 influence more than every other corp if we need to start playing 2-3 copies of special report and disposable HQs.

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Ok, not saying Jackson isn’t a good card. But I had the joy of playing some core/genesis decks a couple of weeks back and the agendas are really not quite that bad, though glacier has it tougher. It also meant you saw your key cards less often, that was more noticable. Makes you think how much Jackson is used to make the agendas go away for now, that it’s effect is a crutch to slow the game down for many a corp. “Flood” exists, sure you can be unlucky once in a while, but how often do you see someone complain about flood when they saw 20+ cards of their deck and didn’t score a single agenda? I don’t think it’s the end of the world if Jackson disappears, but I do think it’d speed up the game. Preemptive action is happily going to reshuffle your sansans, but if you want to filter your deck, you’ll need something else.

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With Noise and DLR around, I think you need Jackson, and Pre-emptive is not enough.

If they plan to get rid of Noise with Core 2.0, I’m fine with Jackson going out as well.

Jackson’s best (in terms of fun) feature is that he can salvage otherwise disastrous games where a genuine flood occurs. But this happens pretty rarely, particularly with every deck running multiple Global Food Initiatives. So yes, most of the time Jackson isn’t used for that, and instead it’s shuffle back three agendas so that 9 ice can be installed before scoring the first agenda, or a dozen assets, or whatever.

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Yep, the “I drew literally all agendas and no ICE on a draw (and mulligan) at the very end of the bell-curve” is not fun.

But the existence of Jackson Howard allows deck building that is more ICE-light than would otherwise be the case. Or at least it allows ICE-light builds without accepting the full extent of the downside that low ICE builds bring vis-a-vis variance. (Low ICE gets you less ICE, obviously, but the less ICE you have also makes for a greater effect of variance in your random draw. A deck with low ICE is a lower defensive strength deck, but it also has a wider spread of potential defensive strength dependent on draw.)

Encouraging two or three extra ICE in a deck because you can’t rely on Jackson Howard actually nudges the game back towards “standard” ICE versus icebreakers Netrunner. (Or people can run more “efficient” ICE levels and accept the downside in the odd game of course. But that’s their choice to push their luck.)

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Dlr rotates when Jackson does. With the new MWL, does anyone play Noise anymore

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I think it’s a very poor Jackson replacement as it does not address agenda flood. Without testing it, it seems the risk of leaving agendas in archives unprotected for at least a turn is too high of a risk to make it worth it.

Personally, I wish they would have made Special Report neutral instead, no matter how fun it is to bring Snares and Museums back.

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it’s too strong to be neutral.

I don’t think I’ll play this card. I’m already down to 2 Jacksons in most decks, and the only times I really need him are against DLR, which will rotate. The extra draw is nice but NBN has Sensie now. I would like to see some draw options for other factions. The flood issue isn’t too alarming, IMO. Just score your agendas.

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Fixed that for you.

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The reason Jackson was played so commonly was he was versatile and solved a lot of problems. If you have to include multiple cards that have his effects but are not as good, you are not fixing your problem, because now you have a deck of Jackson replacmemts and not a deck of good cards.

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Confession: I hate Jackson so much. IMO, trying to fight one’s way back from those brutal end-of-the-bell-curve moments is waaay more fun than “I spend 0 credits and a click to whisk all of my agendas away to safety whenever I want”

Preemptive Action is an appropriate solution to agenda flood. It means that if you find yourself in the absolute worst-case scenario as corp, you have to take a chance to get out. You can decide whether to keep your agendas in hand, or to put (some of?) them in an even more vulnerable place for a turn and hopefully shuffle them into R&D, or even to try to score them. In short, it’s a card that invites you to play Netrunner.

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