Superconducting Hub

Superconducting Hub 3/1

Agenda: Expansion
Influence: 0

When you score this agenda, you may draw 2 cards.

You get +2 maximum hand size.

With Earth-Luna communications, saving microseconds returns megacredits.
Illustrated by Scott Uminga
Decklists with this card

System Gateway (sg)

#70 • English
Startup Card Pool
Standard Card Pool
Standard Ban List (show history)
Rulings

No rulings yet for this card.

Reviews

I noticed this is the only card in System Gateway without a review so here goes: This is a bad card.

Let’s look at all the ways this card is bad. Firstly, we know exactly how much spending a card to draw two cards is worth to the Corp - Zero. That is how much it costs to rez Spin Doctor. The ancillary benefit of having +2 maximum hand size isn’t even as useful as Spin Doctor’s ability to shuffle cards from Archives back into your deck since that can be used to recur your best cards as well as to save you from agenda flood. Superconducting Hub might save you from agenda flood if you can spend 4 and 3 on it and don’t get it or your other agendas stolen in the meantime…

Even worse for Superconducting Hub is that for the Corp drawing cards later in the turn is bad. Especially bad is putting this down one turn and scoring it the next as it potentially ups the Agenda count in your hand just before the runner’s turn. This happens to also make scoring it from hand a lot worse, which is not a great place for a 3-advancement Agenda to be in. If you can’t score it quickly, then it may as well be a 4/2 as you will be leaving it out for a turn anyway so you may as well get another point for just one more credit.

Sadly, Superconducting Hub just feels like a design miss. A neutral 3/1 shouldn’t be a strong agenda, but it should at least be a role player in some decks. An Agenda like False Lead would have been perfect as the always-available neutral. You don’t want it for most decks but when you do it plays a role nothing else can. Instead we have a card that provides at most a marginal advantage and sometimes can actively hurt you. That won’t see it played much if at all.

(Rebellion Without Rehearsal era)
15