#103
Anarch, 3 infl, 3 cost
Resource: Virtual
[TRASH]; The Corp cannot rez the outermost piece of Ice during a run on any server this turn.
Yowza. This makes a corp trying to recover from a Medium dig very sad. Also very nice to have one of these sitting on a Street Peddler. Seems like a powerful card–3 cost is expensive, but this functions as an Anarch Inside Job, with additional benefits. I’d say… playable!
And the trend continues of Anarch getting all the good stuff.
Curtain fail! Neat little Anarch Inside Job that is better than Inside Job. Funny how often that happens to Anarch these days.
nice! kind of expensive to install, but that’s why career fair is (secretly) a red card.
Sure makes charging up those multi-access viruses more threatening early on, when later it can turn into a pretty big dig.
Yep, I can see installing this and just having it sit there to induce a state of agita in your opponent. It’ll cause the corp to install additional ice on RD and the remote most likely. Seems like a favorable trade for the runner.
oh, and as @apreche just pointed out to me, there’s also the “Turn 1: Install resource, trash, siphon”, which pretty much wrecks your early game unless you installed something to rez in a remote or crisium/caprice in HQ on your first turn.
I guess that’s why they didn’t make the card blue. Still. Poor crims.
It’s a massive enabler for the “Run all centrals” cards, makes the rumoured one for Apex a lot more scary.
Would be supergood in kit if it was less influence.
Yeah. At 2 Inf this would go into lots of Crim decks. As it is, maybe Ken Tenma wants it? It synergizes with run events. It makes Inside Job even better-er.
Perfect card to the deck I am currently playing/testing. Its working very very well so far and I am very excited to try this card here. The synergy with Street Peddler…
Reina Roja: Freedom Fighter (Mala Tempora)
Event (15)
3x Account Siphon (Core Set) [color=#4169E1]••••• ••••• ••[/color]
3x Déjà Vu (Core Set)
3x I’ve Had Worse (Order and Chaos)
2x Inject (Up and Over)
1x Levy AR Lab Access (Creation and Control) [color=#32CD32]•••[/color]
3x Sure Gamble (Core Set)
Hardware (3)
3x Deep Red (Mala Tempora)
Resource (13)
2x Armitage Codebusting (Core Set)
3x Data Leak Reversal (Future Proof)
2x Joshua B. (Cyber Exodus)
3x Same Old Thing (Creation and Control)
3x Street Peddler (The Underway)
Icebreaker (6)
3x Faust (The Underway)
3x Knight (Mala Tempora)
Program (8)
2x Medium (Core Set)
3x Parasite (Core Set)
3x Rook (Opening Moves)
True, but by the time Apex’s card is very useful you’ll likely have double-iced a few things.
Doesn’t make this unhelpful by any means, it’s still damn good lookin’. Mediuuum dig! Nerve Agent/Wanton, too. Or, hell, there’s just so many ways a repeatable quasi-inside-job could be useful, especially with parasite. (If they have rezzed the outermost and not innermost, kill outer with parasite, jack out, then run again and they can’t rez the innermost.)
In other news, was looking at the stuff for Old Hollywood since we’ll be seeing it soon. Actually kind of liking the look of “Garbage Day”, largely for (Pyrrhic?) Argus. Makes Contract killer and the Mushin plan a bit scarier, especially in conjunction with Oz Project. Mushin and advance something. If they run it and it’s a trap, hit 'em with it. If they don’t and it’s a trap, make your money back a bit as though it were (almost) a refinery. If it’s an agenda, either score it or punitive 'em for it after they access… using contract killers to blow up Film Critics ASAP, I guess? Still probably not there if FC is as good/common as I suspect, but the option intrigues me even if it’s really not what I’d hoped for in a transaction (but then, that remains a 1-2c transaction that gives you the same credit # (or that +1) back in cost, lets you put an advancement token on an installed card, and draws you a card).
Also kinda liking the sound of the Criminal connection that lets you spend 1c to draw a card at the beginning of your turn. Criminal equivalent of Wyldside is slower, more expensive, but leaves you all your clicks. So long as your econ is high enough to make clicks worth well more than a credit (or you’ve got UWC or something for drip economy to balance out the cost a la Chronotype) I think it could be genuinely useful. Though the deck I might most want it in is Geist, who already has crazy draw anyway, as a set-up aid since he tends to not need a tonne of cash. So may not be the most useful thing there, as set-up that requires set-up, but then again, set-up is where his draw power doesn’t fire, and if the cost is optional you can just choose to stop paying at whatever point you’re ready to go.
Could also see it in the fabled “connections deck” that never really materializes, depending again on cost. Though in Geist, if you have 3 of them, 3 of UWC, 3 Street Peddler, a Helpful AI, a Kati, and… I dunno, even just a Film Critic or something if you really want, you just might be the fabled Connections deck anyhow, and get benefit from running Calling in Favors (whose main advantage when I’ve tried it, honestly, is the low cost to play it allowing me to swing credits up at the end of my turn suddenly after making a steal against Midseasons/Punitive decks, which I guess wouldn’t bother the Critic anyway).
But criminal needs draw power, now that Anarch has it, and between this and FIS they’ll be getting it.
I think @mediohxcore had a good point when he argued that there’s already a better Criminal draw resource in the form of Earthrise Hotel. Earthrise obviously has a steeper cost initially, but it’s got a better credits>cards return and it also gets you cards quicker, so if you have any kind of early economy at all Earthrise would work better than the new Crim resource, unless the resource hangs around for a very very long time.
My suspicion is that FIS is going to put my Geist deck over into the “never needing more draw” territory. Other Criminal IDs will, of course, want to have some more, but my guess is that ERH and FIS is going to go a long way to making blue cards zip by faster. Geist was a big help in that regard, though.
Sigh, another restrictive “cannot” effect. While I appreciate the power level of the card, I’m rooting for more nuanced and interesting effects in the future.
It seems surprising to me that after the arguably best big box for a faction, and more potent cards in the beginning of this cycle, they decided Anarch needed something like this. Should have been a green card if anything at all. Where the good corp cards at?
I guess it is better than printing binder fodder.
Fair enough, I don’t recall the cost of it (if any) and that’s really the only area it might win out against the Hotel, outside of the connections subtype stuff which historically matters very little (though with all the pushes I hope it becomes meaningful at some point). I think there’s a niche for it to fill, potentially, but I keep forgetting about Earthrise being neutral and influenceless for some stupid reason.
FIS is almost certainly the better card, with more draw for free, so it’s pretty great for setting things up, especially in Criminal where the Corp might want to keep a big hand to protect against Legworks. I think other Criminals might want more, but might also get relatively happy – while they have few draw cards they do have significant filtering ability, which isn’t the same but is still very relevant/useful in its own right.
Two other spoilers, that I think have already been spoiled here, but just in case:
#97 Old Hollywood Grid
Upgrade Region
5 rez, 4 trash
Agendas accessed from this server cannot be stolen unless the Runner already has a copy of that agenda in his or her score area. This applies even during the run on which the Runner trashes OHG
Another thing that folds to Film Critic but otherwise seems pretty useful. The first NBN upgrade that’d be good for a scoring server OR a central server that I could see getting played… but the lowish trash cost/losing the vanilla test might just be too much to be worth it. If NBN Glacier is ever a thing (oh, how I pray) then I could see it coming out.
If Film Critic isn’t as much of a thing as I think, it might become decent, particularly in a NEARPAD-esque NEH build with Encryption Protocols and/or Hostile Infrastructures to make trashing it on R&D more of a pain. I think it might just be overkill in Haarpsichord, though I guess it’d give the Sensies all an extra trigger the turn they trash it, which could cover the costs of rezzing it nicely, in theory.
Shame Casting Call makes the install face-up (although I get that it’s necessary), as that way you could also make them take the tags twice over, which’d be no small amount of fun on top of Explode-a-Palooza or Award Bait double-firing (even if EAP’s first shot is just used in paying for the Grid).
It’s also a neat way to promote agenda diversity, since if you only have the one copy of something sitting on an OHG that they can’t easily trash, it cannot be stolen. New IG meta? 
#95 NBN asset
Cost 0, inf 3, trash 2
When your turn begins, you may pay 1c to place one advancement token on a card that can be advanced in a server
This seems more exciting. You need two of them for Beale to care overly, but in Butchershop especially I could see it eating up some wins, letting you NA Score a BN with more clicks to trash or scorch the enemy, or otherwise just saving you time. Not a huge speedbump to trash, but free to rez and too good to let sit.
The influence is reasonable, but sad. Weyland would probably enjoy getting to have two or three of these to make their big scores easier, but it’s just too much influence, I think. In particular horizontal might enjoy being able to bluff-score a 5/3, but that takes two of 'em, like Beale, to say nothing of the Mushin>Advance>Two of these and three advances next turn scores of Government Takeover, or the (slightly) less unreasonable hope of three of them allowing you to NA Score an Oz Project. Getting bonus Atlas counters’d be nice, too… but again, Weyland really needs their influence more often than not.
HB, though, might enjoy it, particularly if they decide to go more horizontal. Gives them extra clicks after scoring an ABT if they mandatory draw into a Jackson and want to gamble, and it lets them slip extra counters onto Vitruvius, too. They also have the most corp-side recursion, which means the low trash cost is less of a concern, and it’d allow them all the 5/3 scoring benefits, too. But even there, 6-9 influence is a looot, especially when you need 3 for Jacksons.
So I have big hopes, but am pretty braced for disappointment at the same time. Kinda applies to a bunch of the pack, I guess. I think there’s a lot of potential in a lot of it, but I think most of my reads really hinge on whether or not Film Critic is good, which is hard to evaluate at the moment because no amount of armchair theorizing will make up for the collective experience. I think it’ll be a thing, between the low influence cost and high utility, but will it be a solid choice against many Corps or just utterly ruinous for several archetpyes? Bleh.
The more I see of this pack, the more I feel that if we hadn’t seen Film Critic spoiled first, we’d be freaking out that there wasn’t going to be anyway to steal agendas any more. Film Critic seems like a very reasonable (and perhaps not even adequate?) response to the ungodly amounts of agenda defense coming out in non-Jinteki builds.