For those of you who haven’t seen the Liberated Mind announcement, there is a 0-cost neutral limit 1 per deck event. It allows you to switch your identity to another one within the same faction when you play it. WTF?! Think of the possibilities! You could swap Andy for another identity after you draw your opening hand. You could swap The Professor for Kate midgame. You could swap an identity for a low influence identity like Kit. This will be a pain at tournaments as well. Is there any card that tutors for events? If so, this card could break the game. Or it could be absolute trash. Thoughts?
It’s a very good card. It’s definitely going to lead to an Andy renaissance, switching to Leela, Gabe, Iain, or even Silhouette as the situation merits.
The questions arises as to whether it will be as good in the other factions. You have to assume it will be played in Valencia, who can switch to Maxx is she’s playing a fast game vs. NEH, or to Quetzal if she needs to break a wraparound right now. Whizzard and Kim are also possibilities.
For shaper, the most popular target will be Kit, who has an excellent ability at the cost of low influence, although switching to Jesminder vs. Data Ravens, CT if your console is MIA, etc.
It’s best to think about it as a cheap utility card that can fill numerous roles. People will probably hold it often, waiting for some game breaking moment to use it, but I think it will frequently be correct to just play it for value. It’s absolutely going to be good in Criminal, probably worthwhile in Anarch, and a bit questionable in Shaper, depending how the “normal” shaper decks of the future shape up.
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Wouldn’t it need some tutoring for consistency? Clearly it is a card with a huge impact, but the limitation of 1 per deck makes it hard to simply draw it at the right time (= early in the game?).
I think the way you should be playing Rebirth is in IDs that are blank after the opening turn, and you should kind of pretend it doesn’t exist until you draw it. Valencia and Andromeda are not unplayable IDs now, and you can just choose whatever ID is appropriate when you draw it. An analogy would be a card that is sometimes Sure Gamble, sometimes Daily Casts and sometimes Kati Jones.
What you don’t do is get your Iain Stirling deck and switch it to Andy and add a Rebirth, but what you do do is get your Andy deck and sometimes draw Rebirth and change into an appropriate ID.
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I believe that is intentional as a drawback. I don’t think FFG really wants you to be able to reliably build your deck around having two ID powers, just have it as a cool option to help out certain IDs.
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We have artist colony coming out to help Shapers, Logos and Andromeda for Criminal, and Club Pancakes for Anarachs. Would love to do a Valencia, Rebirth, MaxX blackmail recursion sorta deck cause i love jank
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I agree, it is meant to be an ‘unreliable ID reviver’.
you just wait, there’ll be a card in criminal that tutors for anything. oh wait, it’s called Andromeda
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Damon will be so happy when we tutor up Rebirth with our Logos.
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Anyone know the percentage chance of Andy having it opening hand?
(45 choose 8) / (45 choose 9) = 24.3% chance of having it in your opening hand.
If you mulligan you have two chances, so it’s (1 - (1-.243)^2) = 42.7% chance if you always keep Rebirth and mulligan every hand that doesn’t contain Rebirth.
Edit: this is wrong. 44 choose 8, not 45 choose 8, which results in 20%. Thanks for the corrections below. Alternatively, the much more intuitive 9/45 = 20% chance of having any given card in your hand works since we only can have one copy of Rebirth.
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Can you lend me your brain?
Maybe my brain is wiped out after a long day of store champs, but this doesn’t seem right at all. 1 copy of Rebirth must be either in the 9 cards in hand, or the 36 in deck. With no mulligan, isn’t it a straight 1/5 (20% chance) that it’s in the former category?.
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I think you are right there. Also corroborated by this method of calculating it
1- choose(44,9)/choose(45,9) = 0.2
(1 - probability of not getting rebirth in hand).
eta: or this is probably what Corence was trying to do: choose(44,8)/choose(45,9) = 0.2
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I hate this card. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s powerful in any way but even thinking about printing such a card is just awful, completly invalidates the core concept of the game.
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Design space unfortunately, is meant to be explored. In some cases you get a card like Rebirth which is reminiscent of the cycle of wishes from M:tG’s Judgment set from Odyssey block or you get a heaping mistake like they did with the Dredge mechanic from Ravnica: City of Guilds. Throw in the Time Spiral block and you have created the scourge of eternal formats.
Surprised you didn’t complain about the restrictions in design space based on the fact that a card like Power Shutdown exists.
Can I point you to this interesting thread, sir? 
Flip identities, mini-factions, 6-per-deck, alliances; (at what point) has A:NR “jumped the shark”?
Maybe I should add ‘Rebirthing’ to the thread title too, but it’s already too long as it is…
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20% is right. And 36% if you always mulligan for it.
It’s a good card, but I don’t think it’s worth that much in Shaper or Anarch. Unreliable, takes influence, not that many strong IDs if you draw it late.
For Andromeda, I imagine it’ll be auto-include.
Why would I complain about PS. It’s a good card. Rebirth is more likely to be comparable, at least from the brainfart level to MTG ante cards. It compromises the knowledge of deck archetypes and meta knowledge.
Having a big difference between having interesting card design and awkward card design that means you need to bring every ID ever printed with you when you play Netrunner. The concept of “Wish” cards in Magic is, if I’m not mistaken, that you get a card from your sideboard, something you have with you anyway and, indeed, something you expect to take cards out of to put in your deck.
I don’t consider Rebirth good card design and it has all of the hallmarks of bad design:
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Limit 1 per deck
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Requires you to bring a stack of IDs with you
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Doesn’t open up any new strategies or deckbuilding challenges or anything, you just put it in Andy and Val without thinking or with regard to the rest of your deck
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Violates the key concept of “you build your deck for an ID and you play that ID the whole game”
There’s a lot of card design that could be explored without being Rebirth. There is some design space you just should not explore for various reasons, and I think it’s reasonable to say that Rebirth probably fits that section of design space.
Either way, it’s printed now, and it’s not going to break the game, but I’d rather it wasn’t printed.
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