I'm sorry, @CactusJack, but this card is not better than Kati. It's substantially worse. In fact, I find this card to be unplayably bad.

But I don't think Kati is the right comparison anyway. Kati is persistent clicked economy--spaced out over several turns, sure, but ultimately you're trading clicks for credits at a more efficient rate. Algo Trading is more along the lines of Daily Casts: a card that pays off a set amount every turn, and eventually goes away.

And in that comparison, Algo Trading is simply untenably bad.

Let's look at Daily Casts in detail first to get a baseline. The turn you install it, you've spent a click and 3 for no gain. Valuing clicks and credits equally, that's a tempo hit of 4. Your next turn, you get 2 back; you're still in the hole, but only by half as much. Two turns after install, you break even. Then the following turns you go up to +2 and finally +4 before the card finished off, for a total economic value of 4.

We can then describe the payout structure over time as {-4,-2,0,+2,+4,+4,+4...}. I've repeated the +4 payout at the end to show that, once it's gone, it's gone and will neither cost you anything nor return you anything extra.

What does Algo Trading's payout structure looks like? Well the first three turns are pretty clear. The turn you install it, you're down a click, which is a credit, so that's -1. The next turn, you have to funnel in another 3, lowering you to a -4 payout. The turn after, you do it again, putting you to -7. So far, that's pretty dang terrible--a Daily Casts would have already broken even and you're 7 credits in the red.

"Now hold on," you might say. "You aren't technically spending these credits--how is that fair?" True, you aren't spending them, per se, but any credits hosted on Algo Trading can't be spent installing icebreakers, playing other economy cards, or spent making runs. And if you get tagged, they're toast. For all intents and purposes, you're spending them, and then regaining them when (and if) you cash in.

So when do you cash in? Well, since it will take you a click to install and a click to cash in, there's no point in doing so for a 2 net gain--that's no better than clicking for credits. Waiting one more turn (to get two 2 gains) isn't much better--you could have gotten the same benefit from playing an Easy Mark and clicking for credits without all the waiting.

Even waiting three additional turns, for a 6 gain, isn't good enough-- the pattern of returns then looks like {-1,-4,-7,-7,-7,+4}. Even though it does, eventually, hit the total net return as Daily Casts, it takes an extra turn to get there, and you're going to be strapped for cash until then. That's simply not good enough.

So you would need to wait a minimum of 4 turns beyond the initial stock-up rounds. This puts the payout structure as {-1,-4,-7,-7,-7,-7,+6}.

Now, an economic value of +6 is pretty okay. But that gain is happening so fair in the future--six turns into the future, in fact, so really you're only making 1 credit a turn. I repeat, though--this isn't the same as a steady drip of one real credit a turn (like Underworld Contact or Data Folding) because you can't spend it. You're tying up your assets in a non-liquid state. And by doing so, the corp is going to either punish you for being broke, or force you to cash in too early and take a sub-optimal payout.

Maybe it could work in Nasir.Nasir is the only runner who gets value from offshoring his money, because it gives him a higher return potential when he facechecks ice. Nasir might even want to store MORE than the startup capital of 6 on Algo Trading, just so that it's cleared away when he hits ice. And then, once all the ice is rezzed, he can take it back, plus interest. But Nasir is not, has never been, and is unlikely to ever be even remotely competitive; we're throwing two bad cards together to get a mediocre outcome.

If you're truly desperate for some clickless drip, then I would recommend Zona Sul Shipping over Algo Trading in a heartbeat. The cost to set it up is so much lower, and you can use it more than once. Yeah, it dies if you're tagged, but if you think a corp wouldn't tag you and kill an Algo Trading with 14+ credits on it, then you're wrong.

So, between this card, Rumor Mill, and the officially spoiled Preemptive Action, the FFG dev team is giving us a pretty clear message: "Jackson Howard is eventually going to rotate, prepare your butts".

See, Jackson provides a number of important functions for the corp. He provides accelerated draw, recursion, and a way to vent off agendas if you get flooded, along with an on-demand shuffle.

Special Report fills the agenda venting and on-demand shuffle aspects of Jackson, and goes a decent way towards helping you draw to find what you need, but it only affect cards in HQ. Anything in Archives will need a different card to recover.

So in that respect, Special Report is worse than Jackson. It also requires a credit to play. And it's two influence instead of one. With all that in mind, is it playable?

I think the answer comes down entirely to how popular Rumor Mill becomes, and how much importance people place on being able to reliably avoid agenda flood.

One scenario is that Rumor Mill becomes common--maybe not in every deck, but in enough that dumping agendas in Archives with a Jackson on the table is a liability. If this happens, I expect the meta to shift strongly away from glacier, and more towards shell-game, rush, or kill decks. This is because Glacier relied heavily on not only Jackson, but also Ash 2X3ZB9CY or Caprice Nisei (and occasionally Sandburg) to close out games, and Rumor Mill is effective against these as well.

If this happens, I expect that NBN will trade out their three Jacksons for three Special Reports and call it good. Other factions will have a trickier choice. Playing Jacksons is less expensive influence-wise, and a better card if Rumor Mill isn't in play...but relying on him too heavily is a disaster. On the other hand, a playset of 3x Special Reports is a whopping 6 influence, which is a problem. Most decks, I imagine, would drop down to two flood-management cards, either 1x Jackson Howard+1x Special Report or 2x Special Report, depending on how much influence they had.

But this might not happen. Just like Clot weakened but did not kill Fast Advance, perhaps Rumor Mill will weaken but not kill Jackson Howard. There might be ways to play around Rumor Mill that remove a lot of its bite. And Rumor Mill is two influence a copy, so most Shapers and Criminals won't run a full playset (Fisk probably would, though.) If this shakes out, and Rumor Mill doesn't become a meta-shaping force, then I expect people will just keep playing Jackson up until the last possible moment.

The only corp that would say should definitely use Special Report over Jackson is Cerebral Imaging. See, Special Report lets you throw back as many agendas as you have in your hand, compared to Jackson's three. On top of that, Jackson requires that you overdraw and discard, but being at max hand size is risky for CI; one bad Account Siphon and you might lose a lot of options. For this corp, it's Special Report or nothing.

So how good is Special Report? I guess we'll find out.

Ban this sick filth.

I mean, the card itself isn't broken, mechanically speaking. It's a way to punish runners with resources. If the runner has six credits and three installed resouces, they have to choose between going broke or sacrificing what could be a major part of the strategy. It's a meta call, depending solely upon the relative prevalence of event economy vs. resource economy vs. program economy in runner decks.

No, this card needs to die because it's soooooo sad. Chaos Theory has always been the most adorable of the runners. She has a stuffed animal as her console and they are best friends. They go on Exploratory Romps together. They audition for movies together. Even when the big meanies at Weyland get their hands on Dinosaurus, she sticks with him and fixes him because she's just such a nice person. (Note the band-aid in the card art for Financial Collapse.)

I like the world of Android Netrunner because it's exciting and dramatic and thrilling. I'm okay with blowing up entire city blocks, with political fraud, with self-murder, with martyrdom, with the systematic exploitation of both sentient AI and human clones, with violence marketed to children, with scapegoating, with conflicts of interest...all fine and good.

But I am NOT okay with this card. It is wholly and completely unacceptable to introduce her family (look how happy they are in that family photo!) and then show her crying over money issues. It's too goddamn real. All I want is for her dads to take CT in their arms and tell her that everything is going to be okay, but that can't happen because it's a lie, because some asshole runner hacked some corporation and now nothing is ever going to be okay again and oh god I'm actually tearing up.

In all seriousness, mad props to FFG and to Matt Zellinger for the emotional sucker punch of this card. Also, respect for having not just one but two stable, happy homosexual marriages with kids. For all the darkness and fear in the Android universe, there are a few moments that suggest that maybe things aren't as bleak as they seem.

Blood Money is a perplexing pack. Half the cards are meta-shifting, strategy-defining good. And the other half...are things like this.

What is this card supposed to do? Well, it lets you trash a card at no cost, even if it's not normally trashable.

This is useful for one of two reasons: either you can trash a card that you normally couldn't (like ice or an operation), or you can trash an asset or upgrade for cheaper than it normally would.

Except that the corp can stop it by paying the play or rez cost. This is a major flaw. This means that you can't effectively Credit Crash a PAD Campaign, because the corp would gladly spend 2 to keep it alive. Same thing if you hit an Exchange of Information out of HQ, only this time it's free.

And that's assuming that you even make it into the server and hit the thing you want. Most things you might want to Crash will be protected by ice. If something isn't in an iced server, then usually it either has a high trash-to-rez ratio (like a PAD Campaign) or the corp doesn't mind if you trash it. As for ice/operations, if they're held in HQ or R&D there's no guarantee you'll hit them anyway, or that the corp won't just keep alive by paying the rez/play cost.

The final nail in the coffin for this card is Demolition Run. Do you remember that card? Maybe just barely. No one has played it for ages. It was only ever used for massive Medium glory runs, and only rarely then. Demo run just didn't have enough impact in enough games to justify its inclusion in most decks.

So when Credit Crash is almost a strictly worse card, I struggle to imagine a deck that would want to play it. Yeah, Credit Crash is a credit cheaper and one less influence, but even if it were free on both counts I don't see why it would be worth the card slot. Especially out of Anarch, who already have tools like Imp and Edward Kim for trashing the untrashable, and Whizzard and Scrubber for trashing the trashable.

So...yeah. Don't play this one. I appreciate the attempt to tie an effect to the flavor of the cycle, but I wish the mechanics of the card had the same level of attention.

I think it's fair to say that Netrunner has grown and changed a lot since the core set days. As the card pool has expanded, new strategies have emerged, new synergies have shown up, and the sheer variety of the game has gotten bigger.

Except for Corroder. Corroder has been essentially the only fracter worth mentioning for the entire lifespan of the game. The only people who didn't use Corroder were runners that just could not spare the influence, and so they settled for less efficient options like GS Sherman M3 or Snowball, but it seemed as though nothing would ever truly be better than the core-set fracter.

Which is why I am pleased to announce a fracter which equals (and maybe even surpasses) Corroder. That card is Paperclip.

The first thing to note is that Paperclip never has a higher break cost than Corroder. I'll leave the derivation as an exercise for the reader, but suffice to say that Paperclip has the same cost as Corroder for any barrier of strength 2 or less, or for any barrier with only a single subroutine, and in any other case you are saving 1 or more credits by doubling up your strength. Eli 1.0, for example, will only cost Paperclip 3 credits compared to Corroder's 4.

I could just stop the review there, honestly. A discount on breaking Eli 1.0s, Hives, Heimdalls, and Curtain Walls is more than enough to justify the slightly higher install cost and influence cost of Paperclip for some decks.

Which is why the other defining feature of Paperclip is so brilliant. It brings itself back from the dead, at the very instant it is needed.

Let's start with the most basic advantage of this. Instead spending to spend a click to install it, you can simply overdraw and discard it, and it will wait patiently for you to need it. This saves you a click--and most runners value a click at about 2s, so you're already breaking even with Corroder.

But a card in hand is valuable for other reasons. Faust and Null use them as fuel, you can use it to soak up stray net damage, and although I don't think this is ideal Apex can play it facedown and burn it for later recurrence. You also don't have to worry about Injecting through it--in fact, getting paid to trash it is the best of both worlds.

It also means that, even if your deck has no other recurrence, you are effectively immune to being locked out through program trashing. Oh, you used Marcus Batty on a Grim to kill my Paperclip? Oh, now I can't get through your Vanilla...oh wait, yes I can. (ETR code gates are still an issue, but that's besides the point.)

If you're the last madman still playing Exile, this card is already filling your head with insane janky combos. Don't let me stop your insane ravings.

The last benefit is a bit more theoretical, so bear with me. In the early game, the runner doesn't want to install any breaker they don't strictly need, because this is time and money that could have been spent running. However, before the ice is rezzed, you don't know what you need. This is why Self-modifying Code is so useful, as it lets you find exactly what you need, exactly when you need it. Obviously, Paperclip lacks that versatility. But it does give you that timing benefit, of being able to hold off on that investment until the last possible moment. Imagine a game where the corp couldn't find a barrier and only installed only code gates and sentries--with Corroder, you might have to install the breaker regardless, just in case that unrezzed ice on the scoring remote is a Wraparound, or else risk a wasted run. With Paperclip, you don't pay for it until and unless you need it.

Corroder still has a place, I think. Two influence versus three is not a small consideration, particularly if you're running multiple copies out of faction, and that will turn some runners off Paperclip. Others, who rely on AI breakers, Quetzal's ability, or Always Be Running, might want to avoid fracters whenever possible, and use the cheaper breaker in the few times they need it. It's much the same logic of why someone would run ZU.13 Key Master over Gordian Blade in their decoder slot.

But expect to see Paperclip around. It's going to be a force to be reckoned with.