I'm going to review this card since no one else has, I guess. This card is absolutely terrible and has virtually no deck that it will make stronger in any way other than reducing its total agenda count in some weird all-in deck that does not intend to score out, and even that should not be done without first playing all the 5/3 agendas with better tempo or defensive abilities that have not yet rotated, e.g. Ikawah Project and Send a Message.

First of all, this card only has text if you score it while you have less than four agenda points. That's a pretty bad start for a 5/3, as almost all of the actually played 5/3s for the majority of the game's lifespan have had some way to protect them from randomly being ripped out of a central server for a massive swing. Furthermore, the effect having the line "whenever you score an agenda" is incredibly ill-fitting for a 5/3. since that event will generally happen zero to one more times before a victor is declared. No clause for Runner steals to be found, no defensive abilities for this agenda or future ones.

Second, this card simply deals one core damage when scored. That means the runner loses probably 0-3 credits of value most of the time (unless it's Esâ Afontov, who thanks you for the tempo) and the runner is slightly inconvenienced for the rest of the game by a smaller handsize. It turns out that one core damage can generally just be shrugged off, except maybe for Lat. Meanwhile you, the corp, get absolutely no benefit. In fact, you are often left penniless from the cost of spending two turns advancing this card five times and protecting it. Which makes the promise of more core damage when you score your next agenda (that you are now in an absolutely terrible position to score) a bit hollow. Even if you do land two core damage in a game... so what? That's not exactly game-winning levels of tempo. It does allow a kill with End of the Line, should you also land a tag, but kill decks that start with "First, score a 5/3 and a second agenda" kind of have the idea of "multiple win conditions" all wrong.

But what about setting up Ontological Dependence? Sure, this is relevant, but the cost is honestly much too great. Using Salvo Testing to score your core damage still only gets you halfway to making Ontological Dependence a worthwhile card in your deck, unless you score a second agenda afterwards. Meanwhile, playing a 5/3 without forward tempo is going to make it very hard for those juicy potential 2/2 payoffs to not just get ripped out of centrals. Still, this at least resembles a game plan, albeit a clunky, poor one, and this is certainly the closest thing to a valid use case for the card right now. You're better off using either access traps or Djupstad Grid to get your work done; as money-hungry as Djupstad Grid is, it at least won't actively lose you the game as often as Salvo Testing will.

If you think the concept of this card is fun, go ahead, make a jank deck that tries to build around it, play it ten or fifteen times until you actually make this card do literally anything, and get it out of your system. Hopefully you can land three core damage with it somehow and feel like you had a good time. Solidly binder fodder otherwise, though.

A year has passed, here are some new points relevant to this agenda.

First, the analysis done in 2023 is mainly correct. This is not a defensive agenda. But it is a combo agenda.

What does it combo well with?

1. With Snare! and End of the Line. Core damage means the hand size is lowered. Giving a lower defense against traps and kills combo. In ID like Thule Subsea: Safety Below, you are very likely to have done a second core damage, pushing the hand size down to 3. At which point, Distributed Tracing or Public Trail can give the tag that will enable End of the Line. Some deck rely on this strategy, even without the uses of Salvo Testing.

2. Ontological Dependence, of course. This is the main combo piece. One core damage and it is a 2-3 agenda. 2 core and it becomes a 2-2 agenda. A combo heavy deck can then use things like SanSan City Grid and/or Arella Salvatore to quickly score out.

3. Djupstad Grid and Cerebral Overwriter, to finish the runner by core damages. While this is an unlikely thing to happen (you need to do 6 core damages), multiple core damage reduce the options available to the runner. Once the runner has 4 core damages (unless they have Marrow), they will need to draw up their hand to protect themselves to make a run, thus taxing the runner. Generally, this strategy is too slow to work out.

So, is this agenda worth using. I'm in the opinion that it can be successfully used in a combo deck, if you need card slots, but it is kind of weak. Usually, using Hypoxia and Djupstad Grid will be a more reliable way to do core damage. When a plan is to "step one, score a 3-5 agenda", it is rather unreliable. This is a "janky" agenda that makes deck building really fun.

The art is well done and in line with the name of the agenda, which is kind of related to nuclear testing (even if it not said specifically). We can even imagine it is a sci-fi weapon testing, like a proton torpedo. But to me, this would have been a Weyland agenda (for the name and lore). Haas-Bioroid doing hi tech weapon is possible, but I'm unsure about why they would make city busting weapons. Good art, nice agenda, uncertain lore.