What is the worst card in the game?!

Negativity can be fun, at least it’ll be the most fun competitive players can have with some of these cards. Gun to your head, what is the worst card you can think of? If you want, categorize them by type and side, but that isn’t a requirement.

Program: Aurora

It was a toss up between gingerbread and leviathan for me, but I like those cards art enough, and little engine is out, and godforbid tracer ice gets big. Spiderweb anyone? Aurora for the lose.

Hardware: Capstone.

We have a reason to keep dead draws because of Faust, it’s really hard to justify Capstone. Window and record reconstructor are close, but window can salvage will of the wisp attacks and Mr. Li fails.

Resource: Tallie Perrault

I actually read strange flesh, so Tallie being a totally underwhelming card makes me sad. I could have given the slops to starlight or sacrificial clone, but at least those have combos with cards that don’t already make me sad when I sit across from them. (cough cough hacking phlegm cough VALENCIA cough) And that one sucks too.

Event: Exploratory Romp

I’ve been looking up the list of events to narrow down the worst card for each type. Not with events. Not when this card exists. Paper tripping is bad, but at least that might see some play soon. Maybe. This card combos with analog dreamers. Whatever game…

Asset: Net Police

It’s either this or student loans, and while both can be pretty fun if you have 3 of them on the board (and you’re facing an opponent that makes the cards worth playing with the most perfect board state ever) Net Police it’s cheaper to trash, therefore it’s worse. The flavor text is way better though.

Agenda: Helium-3 Deposit

Hands down, way worse than my runner-ups Market Research and Project Wotan. NEXT!

Upgrade: Neo tokyo grid

It was either this, Midori, or Tyr’s Hand. Midori can stop parasite stuff, and maybe you can make Faust discard an extra card in this day and age, breaking with clicks notwithstanding. Useless, narrow, Tokyo Grid.

Operation: definitely Cyberdex Trial

Another obvious quick one, it’s like noise really pissed someone off. Then he came to life, threatened the designers family, pets, and genitals with death, so they came out with this card instead. Freelancer got lucky cause I’ve heard people have actually played that card.

Disregard all this, it’s hellion alpha test.
Disregard that, it’s definitely cyberdex trial, you can use hellion, sunset, and even restoring face as a way to boost your deck, cyberdex trial just lets you maybe tech against viruses.

Ice: Zed 1.0.
A 10 strength mythic Zed would do about as much as he does right now. Done. Mic DROPPED

I’ll up your ante: what experiences have you had with the card in question? Have you designed a deck around it? I want to hear the war stories :wink:

Worst? Not sure. Really, really bad? Record Reconstructor (RR) (Record Reconstructor · NetrunnerDB).

Make a kit deck based around trying to make this card work…as much as it can be considered to “work”. RR puts a card from archives onto R&D. This “wastes” the corp’s draw, or a click for each card you place on R&D. The problem is that when the corp plays cards, they’re generally pretty awesome…that’s why they were played. So you can waste a corp click (or mandatory draw) by using one of your own clicks to run archives. And in doing so, you give them a good card. That’s not so hot.

So how can it work?

  • Get value from runs. Desperado, suckers, etc… Now your click for a run counts for more than theirs.
  • Cheap runs on archives. Kit + Yog makes archives pretty cheap (free). If you need to return multiple cards, then you start paying for the runs.
  • Prevent or delay quality corp draws. This leads us to bad card #2: Deep thought (Deep Thought · NetrunnerDB). If we know which card is on the top of R&D, we know how hard we want the corp to work to get it.

Why is it horrible?

  • It was really bad. At almost no time was it worthwhile installing and getting value out of RR.
  • The deck wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. This was mainly because deep thought is actually decent. I ended up using it much more than RR. Knowing where to apply pressure is not horrible.
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I will keep an eye here.

Expect a stream in the near future where I use every god damn card listed in this topic.

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Toshiyuki Sakai

he literally does nothing

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I’ll take that challenge, let me know, I’m on octgn, I’ll make super jank

he combos with one of the best ice in the game – hudson 1.0

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All the sarcasm is killing me. The Hudson/Toshiyuki combo is so far left field, I didn’t even consider toshiyuki in the list of bad cards. I mean, he combos with bad cards, like Alix and pretty much whatever you were trying to use him with, but hey. Hudson.

With core and the genesis cycle I designed 39 decks. Between them I used at least 1 copy of every card from those sets, even if I had to shoehorn them in, except for two: Salvage and Disrupter. But Disrupter is slightly less terrible now that sunny’s console exists (I assume that works right?)

So my vote for worst card is Salvage. Let me explain what conditions you need for it to do anything at all:
Find a way to rez it so that you are able to advance it.
Advance it.
Hope the runner does not have Yog.
Have a way to win traces (hope the runner doesn’t have 2 link).
Have a way to punish the runner for taking tags.
Then, the runner might actually have to break its subroutines (or destroy it instantly with parasite since it has 0 strength).

Well I’m not going to say salvage is an underrated card, but I’d say these are all meta issues. Yog isn’t everywhere like it was before, not all runners have 2 link, and if you’re running salvage without tag punishment, you are the worst netrunner player in the world, and should have a permanent drool bucket attached to your face.

All of what you said is totally true though, in most cases.

@bahram, you better get ready for the force of nature to crush your puny salvage

smh

Force of nature and aurora are fine. They’re still the best (only) all purpose icebreakers of their type and faction. It’s just that the way the influence system works means you have no reason to put up with your in faction breakers.

If you’re running salvage as your main source of tags, you’re better off not using tag punishment. No point having two dead cards instead of one.

While looking for bad operations (I didn’t think cyberdex trial was that bad) I didn’t really find many, but there are some cool obscure ones. I’d like to see someone turn a zero cost ice into a Janus using Mutate.

This strikes at the heart. All best or worst evaluations are meta-dependent because the cards only exist in a game of netrunner. If we had no other fracters (or AI’s) Aurora would be much better.

The worst cards are the ones people actually have the urge to play that ALSO don’t do anything. The cards no one plays are all equally as bad as one another.

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I’m pretty sure Zed 1.0 is worse than Salvage - if you’re playing a non-tag me/0-link criminal with only Rex as decoder, you could have a good chance of flooding the runner. Zed is just basically useless.

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Only disagreement is cyberdex trial. It’s actually pretty reasonable for purging clot in a psycho/Beale deck like flash in yellow. Better than cvs since they can’t trash it from your hand and psycho/Beale only takes two clicks.

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My Eater MaxX ran a single Force of Nature to deal with stupid Turing.

If you want REAL uselessness, there’s always Gingerbread. Or Disrupter!

My dark horse Corp card pick for total suckage is Levy University. It’s pretty bad! Or Hellion Alpha Test.

I successfully used mushin onto toshiyuki and swapped it for a plan B when the runner ran it, then they accessed the plan B so I scored my braintrust from hand.

technically it can do something, also it was totally worth it.

Edit: also lemuria codecracker (spelling?) is my vote for worst why would you in the game, with how many straight upgrades to expose they have done over the cycles.

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I agree with this. I just made a Gabe Doppelganger + Career Fair + Hard At Work deck that I will spend the next week convincing myself is playable, and then unsleeving. But boy am I having fun with it now! 2 credits a turn! Every turn! how could it not be good?!

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Program: Disrupter, Aurora at least takes the strength away from wraparound, arguably not even the worst fracter (Hi Sage)

Hardware: Ekomind, Capstone leaves you down 2 credits, Ekomind leaves you down 2 credits, playing a shit deck packed to the brim with blank cardboard and possibly about to lose every program you have, including your inefficient breakers that you had to build around to get to function. Mem only cards already suck, mem only that you have to build around with a drawback is easily the worst. Ekomind also prevents you from playing other, good cards, like desperado. Capstone and Desperado get along just fine

Event: Shoutout to Push Your Luck, once romp rotates you’ll have your day

Resource: Raymond Flint is leaps and bounds worse than tallie. Tallie doesn’t do much, but raymond literally does nothing. Shoutouts to Angel Arena, Borrowed Satellite, Grifter, Hard at Work, Inside Man, Motivation, Paige Piper, Rachel Beckman, Rolodex, Synthetic Blood and Tyson Observatory. Lots of horribly awful cards for this category

Asset: Docklands Crackdown, Levy University, Student Loans, Test Ground and Toshi all stand out as worse than net police. Net police is at least cheap to rez

Operation: Trial is actually decent in psychographics decks (top 4 US nats), was worth considering before the release of the full suite, Witness Tampering is way worse.

ID: Professor, it only gets worse with time.

Professional contacts.

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