Just as it takes 3 turns to cook up, appreciation of this card comes in 3 stages:
- Stage 1: Lizzy Mills you look damn fine in that dress. TAKE MY MONEY!
- Stage 2: Alright sweet, I'm gonna combo this with like, so many cards. Free Archer? Free Corporate Town? Hell yeah! Let's glaze on some Gagarin Deep Space and Paywall Implementation for good measure, and oh! oh! oh my god...(giggles uncontrollably) I'm gonna play Encryption Protocol with it...ahahaha...
- Stage 3: I know you're amazing, Public Support, but I lose 70% of the games I play with you. It's probably some Netrunner conspiracy, and has nothing to do with you, but I'm going to have to put you back in the binder just to be safe. It's over :'(
This card just seems so good on paper, but often flops in execution. At 3 influence, we can safely assume it won't be splashed anywhere, and as an asset that doesn't help you at all for 3 turns, it's most likely to be seen in Gagarin, where the runner will have to pay a hefty 5 to it (more if you can ice it up a bit). As a "worst-case scenario", that actually seems...great, right? Tax them pretty hard, and just keep doing whatever it was you were doing.
As mentioned earlier, it can be forfeited to enable Corporate Town (asset + Gagarin = good) and Archer, both of which have historically been difficult to play in Gagarin because the best food for those has always been Hostile Takeover, and bad pub is pretty crippling to your ID ability.
Even just used for points it looks sexy. Weyland has excellent 2-pointers in Project Atlas and Oaktown Renovation, usually polished off by some NAPD Contracts and Hostile Takeovers for an easy 7th point. Having a way to cap off 6 points without having to score 2 more is always nice, and unlike Hostile Takeover, runners can't steal this for a similarly easy 7th point.
After this glowing praise, it's difficult to nail down why exactly this card just isn't that great. A lot of it comes down to deck-space issues. Why don't all Haas decks run Domestic Sleepers, if it's basically a guaranteed agenda point? Because clogging your deck with slow agendas that don't count towards your deck's minimum just usually isn't worth it when you could have more ice, more econ, or more nasty combo cards that really make you a threat like fast advance or flatline packages.
Look again at what it does. If they trash it naked:
- You spent 2 and 2 to tax them 1 and 5
- So in terms of net gain, you might think of this as an operation that costs 0 and reads "The runner loses 3."
- It's not even as good as that, though, since it's an asset, so it doesn't happen on demand. In fact, if they can afford to give you the point, then it doesn't happen at all. The runner gets to choose what's better for them.
If you decide you want it and let it cook up in your scoring remote:
- You can't score agendas for 3 turns
- You give the runner a huge time window to set up their board and generate money
- Your hand may start to clog with other cards (like agendas) that you want to install in that remote
Neither of those sounds particularly appealing. The real best-case scenario is probably somewhere in between, where you can afford to throw Public Support in an extra remote with a piece of taxing ice on it (preferably one that's already been rezzed). The problem with this is that it's not easy to play a horizontal ID and also have enough ice for not just your centrals (which are your biggest weakness) and your scoring remotes, but also your extra remotes too.
There's no single thing that makes Public Support bad, and it is by no means unplayable. But neither is it a competitive card, in my opinion, once you gather up all the little things that make it problematic. If you can pilot a deck to first place in a major tournament with this card, I'll eat my hat.