Not in the same deck per say, but individual it does so. If you’re choosing between Gila Hands and Chronos Project, for example, the presence of Turntable in the meta pushes you toward Gila.
Similarly, if you’re choosing between Pri Req or Source Fragment, Turntable pushes you towards the Pri Req.
So would Turntable be better if it just was Burp, the flavorless console?
I’m willing to bite that bullet, sure. As is, the pretension at flavour just feels… almost insulting, to me. The vast majority of why Turntable is bad has nothing to do with the meta anyway.
“Uh, hi, uh, Director Haas? This is Stevens. I’ve been running the Wotan Project over here in New Old Westtown? Uh, yeah. Here’s the thing. We’ve been set up and running for about two years now, yeah. We’ve made some really good developments and our Bioroids were really tough because of it. But last night, a hacker got in and played some music, and now it seems that we own an arcology somewhere? So, uh, yeah.”
Swapping Agendas actually works in a the vast majority of the cases, strangely. For me the weird part is that if a runner can get in and take an agenda away, why on earth does the runner have to leave another behind?
How about this for a justification for Turntable: The corp you’re playing as is presumably only meant to represent one small part of the whole megacorp, like you’re a regional director or something. Turntable represents the runner hacking into a higher-up part of the corp and getting your prized project re-assigned to some other sub-division, but they have to replace it with some crummy low-level alternative project they’ve just found out about to make it look like a legitimate corporate restructuring move?
I still have no idea why a pair of fucking headphones lets you do it though.
Swapping Agendas actually works in a the vast majority of the cases, strangely.
Wait what? Can you unpack this?
Meaning that I looked at the majority of the agendas out there, and most of them aren’t ongoing things, so there’s no huge conceptual issue. You swapped a Priority Requistion for an Accelerated Beta Test? Whatever. Neither of them is an ongoing event. Things just happened. The PriReq has no real meaning in the score area anyway. You just rewrote the history of the event or some such.
To be clear, in every one of those circumstances, it requires both players to do some mental gymnastics. “Oh, no, it turns out that the facility wasn’t a mining facility, it was repurposed for XX”. It’s not like it makes good sense, but I, at least, can come up with a reasonably convincing explanation of what happened with minimal cognitive dissonance.
You just rewrote the history of the event or some such.
That doesn’t sound like minimal dissonance! I mean, this is precisely why it doesn’t work.
To be clear, in every one of those circumstances, it requires both players to do some mental gymnastics.
And we give low grades to cards that make us do this ;). This is generally a pretty big bad-flavour signpost.
Oh agreed. It’s bad. It’s just less bad than some of the other swaps. 
“We thought it was a pool of clones who brain locked a runner last week. Turns out it was actually an experiment with time travel. They look surprisingly alike I guess.”
You know, that could actually work. But in that case, there was the opportunity for some great flavour text - in two minutes of thought I came up with “Corps don’t like it when you remix them.” - and this is a case where the card sorely needed it.
I have to imagine FFG were aware that this card would be… controversial. Why it doesn’t have flavour text is beyond me.
Agreed- even just a “Wait, what?” - Akiaro Wantabe would’ve been a good idea.
Edit: I feel obligated to link Granny’s Payback.
That is a fantastic link haha - thanks for that 
Ok, so for turntable
love these reviews by the way! Ialso had strong opinions about analog dreamers!
[quote]Cee: Do we even know if the Android universe has AIs with that kind of free agency? There are the bioroids, shackled to servitude to Haas, and there are the programs on the runner side the game calls “AIs”, but I’m not sure we’ve seen AIs be anything more than useful tools in this world.
Ess: Well, bioroids at least are explicitly human brains that have been “taped”, so I’d assume it’s more that they’ve been mostly lobotomised than that they don’t have free agency. But… yeah, is Crypsis doing contract work for you, or is it just an unusually generalised breaker?
[/quote]
I believe the evidence suggest that these types of AIs are out there! I think crypsis is doing contract work (notice how if you don’t “pay” him enough virus token he uninstall himself?). Consider also the flavor text from helpful AI:[quote]
“What causes an Artifical Intellegence to turn on its master? Is it because its directives have been altered by some external source? Or, by giving them agency to adapt, have we fated them to revolt?” - Emilio Harris, Creators and the Created[/quote]
I’ve always loved that the helpful AI is a connection- he has friends just like anyone else, and you can call on him for favors when you need to! Also, he’s a resource, not a program: “Man, I knew I shouldn’t have pointed security towards the server HAI was using… now he won’t even return my calls!”
TLDR, the flavor of this card is weird and I don’t get the mechanic, but I definitely think there are AIs out there in Android.
Hear ye, hear ye! Brain cage is coming to your town any time soon!
‘Sir, we’ve discovered why we’ve lost contact with Project Beale. It seems a hacker broke in last night and has been redirecting all our internal traffic to our Licensing department. Licensing reports that they’re now ahead of schedule, but all the information on Project Beale is uh… missing sir.’
this is a big of fridge logic, but imagine Turntable as a machine that lets you patch into the corperate infrastructure, you redirect funds and efforts into the project you just accessed as a cover to digging deep into the corp and snatching something important.
A lot of the Agendas aren’t singular things, Arcology undermines it a little true but things like Restructed Datapool Access or notes on Project Wotan would all just be files and data.
Most icebreakers are inherently pretty vague, but personally I think the new crim one-shot breakers have some of the best flavor. Here’s how my thought process went: “What do spikes, crowbars (qua lock openers), and shivs have in common? Well, obviously they’re crime-themed and disposable; come to think of it, they’re also all improvised devices. Does that help? How do you improvise an icebreaker? Well, I guess you’d write a program that searches for relevant bits of code running elsewhere in your rig and–OH HEY AWESOME”