At first, this seems like a pretty lackluster card. You only trash one card, once a turn, you have to make a run on HQ, and the card itself is unique. Not super impressive.

But here's the thing. Assuming that, at some point, you'll be checking Archives to see what you milled, that means that every mill is essentially a free access. That means that Bhagat becomes a sort-of R&D interface on HQ: if you make a successful HQ run, you get an "access" on R&D.

Oh, but it gets better. Milling a card isn't just an access. If you mill an agenda, then yeah you're essentially just banking the steal for a later time. But if the card isn't an agenda, and it gets trashed, that means that the corp now has one less card as a buffer between them and their next agenda. That's one less operation to make them money, or one less piece of ice covering their servers, or one less asset you have to pay to trash.

Bhagat is enough of a threat that a corp absolutely needs to stop you from getting into HQ, particularly if paired with Fear the Masses. But if you combine Bhagat with, say, Keyhole, then suddenly you have some substantial pressure on both HQ and R&D. Add in a little bit of Noise action or Data Leak Reversal and you will have enough avenues to mill that you can churn through cards pretty quickly.

And you know what works nicely with this setup? Eater. Get an Eater, a Keyhole, a Bhagat, and some Fear the Masses in hand and the corp will be fighting to shore up their centrals. This is good. This means their scoring remote should be pretty easy to bust your way into. Especially if you've managed to mill away their best ice.

Bhagat is a deceptively nasty card. At four influence, there's really no reason to play it out of faction, but if your Anarch deck is short on ways to threaten HQ a one- or two-of include could definitely pay off.

So let's get this out of the way first. Yes, it is a 5/3 agenda in the faction that is lousy with powerful 3/2s, 4/2s, and 2/1s. Yes, the effect would be much, much better out of Weyland. Yes, it's hard to justify playing any 5/3 that isn't Global Food Initiative or The Future Perfect because it doesn't protect itself.

With all that taken into account, there isn't really a way to play Puppet Master at the most cut-throat, competitive level. If that's all you care about, go back to your FastroBiotics and Butchershops or whatever you people are playing.

Okay, now time to talk about the jank potential of this card.

First thing, this is EVERY run. Every. Run. Not the first run each turn, every run. On an effect that cannot be turned off or disabled. If you score this early, this could result in DOZENS of advancements over the course of the game.

Second thing, you're going to be placing advancements on the runner's turn, and only after successful runs. This means that it won't help you score faster--if they run a server with an agenda in it and succeed, there's no point in advancing it, and if they run a different server then the advancement is just saving you a click and a credit next turn.

No, this card is more useful in doing one of two things. Advancing assets like crazy, or advancing ice like crazy.

The asset play is pretty simple. You get yourself a Project Junebug or a Ghost Branch or something and pile counters on it. Then, when you're good and ready, Back Channels it for upwards of 30 credits. This also pairs nicely with Mushin No Shin, which could help you score the Puppet Master in the first place.

The ice play is also pretty simple. You pack yourself 3x Ice Wall, 3x Fire Wall, and at least a couple Commercialization, and watch as your ice tower grows to insane heights. Maybe add in some Matrix Analyzers and Builders if you want to see how many advancements you can get on a single piece of ice. You might be tempted to go with space ice like Wormhole but remember that anything after the third advancement is so much extra cardboard.

Either way, Puppet Master really needs to be the first agenda you score to be effective. Either that, or you can use Media Blitz to make sure it's up. Oh, by the way--Puppet Master stacks with itself. Generally by the time you score the second one you've already won, of course, but if you have a Puppet Master scored and a Blitz on another you've got a pretty strong deterrent. Maybe this is the framework for a Sol advanceable glacier build?

Have fun with this card, but don't take it too seriously. If it was meant to be serious, they'd have printed it green.

Now, everyone knows that 3/2s are amazing. Even after the MWL nerf, AstroScript Pilot Program still holds the title of Best Agenda In The Game. ABT is good as well, and the "Projects" (Beale, Vitruvius, Atlas and, uh, Braintrust) see regular use, even in decks that have no intention of ever over-advancing them.

There's no question that most decks would gladly run blank 3/2s, especially Jinteki and Weyland. These factions only have their Project (and Medical Breakthrough) as real fast-advance options.

And then along comes Merger. A blank, neutral 3/2 for one influence, with a catch. It's a 3/2 to you...but a three-point agenda to the runner. This makes it a reverse Global Food Initiative--it increases the density of the agenda points in your deck, meaning that the runner needs to access fewer cards to win the game.

This creates a dilemma. A strong fast-advance deck can score out a 3/2 as soon as they draw it. But if you can't draw it fast enough, or if you get Clotted, suddenly that Merger becomes a 3-point liability.

This means that you need to do one of two things. The first option is just to take that gamble, and build your deck for speed. If you cram in 2/1s and 3/2s and round out your agenda suite with some Mergers, and decide that your goal is to score 7 points before your opponent gets their breakers down, then maybe Merger works. But it's inconsistent, and any influence spent on Merger is influence not spend on cards to help you actually score.

The second option is to play the numbers. The easiest way to do this is in Harmony Medtech. An agenda suite of 3x Braintrust, 3x Medical Breakthrough, and 3x Merger means that the extra point from Merger only matters if the runner steals two Mergers in a row to win. This could be an acceptable risk for a Medtech rush deck, particularly one using Trick of Light or Political Dealings, or which has murder as a backup plan.

The other way is somewhat counter-intuitive. If you build your deck with only three-point agendas and Mergers, you can force the runner to steal 9 points of agendas in order to win, while you can get away with only scoring 8 or 7 (depending on if you score one or two Mergers). This also takes you down to a relatively slim seven-agenda spread (five 3s, three Mergers) or a six-agenda spread (six 3s, one Merger), which would force both sides to score half the agendas in order to win. This is probably the best way to use Merger in Weyland and non-Harmony Jinteki, since they can lean on The Future Perfect or High-Risk Investment. Of course, this whole plan falls apart the second they pull off a "Freedom Through Equality"...

In summary, Merger asks a steep price for what it offers, and in general a 4/2 like Corporate Sales Team or NAPD Contract would be a better choice. But if you absolutely need the speed, and take steps to mitigate the downside, Merger might work.

A fundamental relationship in the mathematics of Netrunner is the "rez-to-break" relationship. Simply put, how much does it cost the runner to break a piece of ice once with a decent breaker, compared to the cost the corp pays to rez it?

For the vast majority of ice and breakers, it costs the corp more to rez it than it will cost the runner to break it once. For example: a Wall of Static costs 3 to rez, but only 2 to break with Corroder.

This leads to a dynamic that experienced players are well familiar with. Forcing the corp to rez ice is good for the runner; you are coming out ahead on that interaction. Once a piece of ice is rezzed, though, you don't want to break it any more times than you have to, because it's just a straight loss for you, leading to multi-access, bypass, and ice destruction tactics.

Ankusa flips that script. When Ankusa is your fracter, every barrier must be rezzed every single time that they want to protect their server. More than that, actually: they have to rez it AND reinstall it, costing clicks and probably credits if they had other ice on the server. Bonus points if it had advancement counters on it.

But at the same time, Ankusa's stats are pretty horrible, compared to Corroder. It's going to cost you at least 1 extra (against, say, a Wraparound or a Vanilla), will typically cost you 3 extra (against any single-sub barrier bigger than a Himitsu-Bako), and an Ashigaru just makes you cry. This (along with the 6 install cost) means that you are paying a substantial cost for the benefit of taxing the corp. You can reduce this strain with strength-boosters like Dinosaurus or Net-Ready Eyes, but you can't get around the 2/sub cost with e3 Feedback Implants because you have to break the subs with Ankusa, not with hardware.

So Ankusa puts enormous economic strain on both sides, and the winner of this money-fight will win the game. If the runner has money and the corp doesn't, the runner will just bounce all of the corps barriers, leaving their servers porous. Remember--if you bounce a piece of ice on click 1, that leaves you three clicks to pound that server before the corp can put it back. Medium enjoys that interaction on R&D.

On the other hand, if the runner can't manage to get enough money to push through the barriers in the first place, then the game is lost. And that leads me to the next point--Ankusa is absolutely a big-rig card. You need to have fat stacks to play this card. Fat. Stacks. Magnum Opus is a start. Aesop's Pawnshop builds might generate enough money to fuel this. Whatever it takes.

The other flaw is that Ankusa is only a fracter, not an AI. A Magnet is basically identical to Wall of Static but can't be bounced with Ankusa. You can try to patch this flaw with Paintbrush, of course. But the fact that the ice has to be rezzed means that you have to break it twice: right after they rez it, and again after you've painted it barrier. This halves the efficiency of the bounce, to say nothing of the 2 MU cost of Paintbrush (which gets problematic if you're trying to run it with Magnum Opus as well).

In summary: it's a big-ass breaker that needs a monster economy behind it, but once it gets rolling it can really give a barrier-focused corp hell. With those caveats, I think it falls solidly in the "jank" category, but it is some grade-A jank that's well worth trying out at a casual night.

For when you absolutely, positively, have had enough of asset spam.

Is your opponent sitting there looking like an asshole with three Museums of History and a Mumbad City Hall? They think you can't trash all the Museums at once, and if you trash one they'll just shuffle it back in with the other two, tutor for it with the Hall, and rez it with their three Mumba Temples, which, by the way, they also have.

Fuck that shit. You're fucking Whizzard, Master Gamer. You have a legion of Scrubbers at your beck and call. When you trash something, it doesn't come back.

Yeah, you have to pay the trash cost, so you can't Imp it, and Industrial Genomics is still a pain. And yeah, you only get one per turn per copy of Slums. And yeah, if your opponent is playing an operation economy it makes you look like an idiot.

But isn't that a small price to pay? Isn't it worth it to wipe that smug look off their face, and say "We're playing by my rules now?"

Take back the meta. #slottheslums