What's NEXT?

NEXT Bronze is the first in a suite of NEXT cards which include NEXT Design: Guarding the Net, NEXT Bronze, NEXT Silver & NEXT Gold. In a NEXT-based deck, installation & rez-ing of an instance of one of the NEXT ice buffs up all other installed & rezzed instances leading to ridiculous combos that get stronger and stronger as the game progresses.

Combos

As a NEXT subtype of ice, NEXT Bronze is a natural fit with it's only slightly more costly friend NEXT Silver. Together when both rezzed throughout your servers, each of your NEXT Bronze will have an End the run. at strength of 6 and each NEXT Silver will have 6 X End the run.'s at strength of 1.

NEXT Gold is also quite at home with the above combo, at 8 it's harder to get out, but is often the beefy ice of choice in NEXT-based decks. Theoretically, with full suite of NEXT ice installed and rezzed, each each of your NEXT Bronze will have an End the run. at strength of 9 and each NEXT Silver will have 9 X End the run.'s at strength of 1 while each NEXT Gold will feature a Do 9 net damage and a Trash 9 programs

Mother Goddess besides offering an End the run. it is kind of a stealth NEXT ice that if installed on a server with a NEXT-subtype ice, it gains that subtype as well further adding to the growing tally of NEXT ice installed. If you are keeping track that's now a total theoretical ceiling of 10 for each (since it's unique only one copy can be installed)NEXT instance throughout your servers!

NEXT Design: Guarding the Net with enough NEXT ice in your deck, this ID could help get your NEXT synergy going right from turn 1.

Because NEXT ice favors a rush style getting ice installed & rezzed quickly, The Foundry: Refining the Process can really help get that suite up and runner quickly, furthermore combined with Executive Boot Camp can give the corp an opportunity to use The Foundry: Refining the Process's ability potentially any turn and at 1 savings to boot. (Similarly cards like Aggressive Negotiation, Levy University, The Future is Now & Amazon Industrial Zone can all aid with accelerating the installation of your NEXT ice defenses.)

Accelerated Beta Test is commonly used with NEXT decks because of it's powerful ability more often than not of throwing more NEXT ice out there and giving a nice momentum boost to the runner.

Architect, Jackson Howard Project Vitruvius and other recursion methods can be a very important answer to any ice trashing mischief the runner may throw at you. (Parasite being a significant threat to NEXT-based strategies.

(Did I miss an obvious combo, I'd appreciate any comments that can help improve this review)

Pros

With it's End the run at only 2 can provide reasonable server protection early at a nominal price

In combo with other NEXT ice NEXT Bronze can provide a formidably taxing End the run all while mutually buffing all other instances of NEXT ice.

Strength grows throughout the game providing some counter-balance to the runner's growing capabilities.

Cons

Card doesn't stand on it's own very well putting pressure on the corp to persue an all-in NEXT strategy

Parasite and other ice trashing methods can throw off the NEXT synergy

Summary

At 2 influence points for both NEXT Bronze and NEXT Silver as an out of faction NEXT-based deck is likely to be rare. Still whenever there are meaningful secondary benefits to doing things you want to be doing anyway it's always a good thing. In the case of NEXT-based decks, which is truly the secondary benefit, rezzing the ice to stop/tax the runner or increasing the entire suite of NEXT ice? When you put an agenda or tempting asset in a server just hoping that the runner will allow you to rez some ice on it you'll know your answer. (One interesting combo?: stolen Mandatory Upgrades in combo with Media Blitz

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With NEXT Bronze and NEXT Silver coming back in rotation, it is now viable to use the full NEXT suite of ices.

The best cards to combo with a suite of NEXT ices are Executive Boot Camp and Surat City Grid. Those cards allow you to rez your ices early, and for cheaper. This is important, as NEXT ices are good only if you have many of them rezzed. Otherwise, when there is only 1 or 2 NEXT ices rezzed, they are pretty weak.

Because of the influence cost, it will not be useful to use NEXT ices outside of HB.

Ice destruction is the best tool against NEXT ices, since every ice destroyed make the whole bunch of them weaker.

NEXT Bronze is an auto include in any NEXT suite of ices. Having a cheap ETR that get stronger the more ices are rezzed is nice. For such an ice, I would have thought it would have the Barrier subtype, but it is a Code Gate instead. NEXT Bronze is the HB equivalent of Ice Wall.

NEXT ices, like Bioroid ices, suffer a bit from being all too often Code Gate.

The art is consistent, if not very inspiring. The quote is business like, which is a perfect match for what this ice is : a bit boring, but reliable.

Yes, I realize this is basically the same review for NEXT Bronze and for NEXT Silver. But those two are basically the same. On tax with strenght, the other tax with subs.