Tributary

♦ Tributary 3[credit]

Ice: Code Gate
Strength: 4
Influence: 3

The first time each turn a run begins, you may move this ice to the outermost position protecting the attacked server. (The Runner is now approaching this ice.)

[subroutine] You may draw 1 card. You may install 1 piece of ice from HQ protecting another server, ignoring all costs.

[subroutine] Each piece of ice gets +2 strength for the remainder of this run.

Illustrated by Scott Uminga
Decklists with this card

Rebellion Without Rehearsal (rwr)

#111 • English
Startup Card Pool
Standard Card Pool
Standard Ban List (show history)
Printings
Rebellion Without Rehearsal
Rulings
  • Updated 2024-05-27

    The Runner runs Archives while the corp has a rezzed copy of Front Company protected by Tributary. If the Corp moves Tributary to protect Archives, leaving Front Company not protected by ice, will the Runner take 2 net damage?

    The Corp can choose if they do 2 net damage. Both cards’ abilities become pending when the run on Archives begins, but Front Company’s “if this server is not protected by ice” requirement is not evaluated until the ability resolves. If the Corp resolves Tributary’s ability first, moving it to defend Archives, then the requirement will be met and the Corp will do 2 net damage with Front Company.

Reviews

A strange card. Netrunner used to have currents, but these were banned because they could sometimes have too great of an ongoing impact and were hard for runners to consistently turn off. In terms of ongoing impact, this feels more like a current or an identity ability than an ice. It adds like $2-3 to the cost of the first run each turn (or gives the corp an extra 2 clicks of value plus a trigger for any identity ability that relies on installs). Depending on how the identity triggers work out, this feels like it would have been too much of an impact on the board state even as a current, and maybe it's too impactful to be an identity ability either.

I don't know 100% if this will get banned, but a cheap ice which punishes any turn a run is made on any server, that's going to squeeze out a lot of decks which are fun and deserve to exist.

Two kind things for Tributary: it's a Jinteki card which doesn't suck, and in particular positive-tempo Jinteki should be encouraged. And the counters to this card are kind of vaguely reasonable.

(Rebellion Without Rehearsal era)
393

Yet another new card which should be in every deck.

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Kit players, get ready to be even more sad than we already are. This card singlehandedly blows us out so hard it isn't even funny. It's a great splash too, so we will be getting incidentally destroyed for the next long while XD.

(Rebellion Without Rehearsal era)
91

This just got banned, thank goodness. This makes early runs worthless, one of the best things about Netrunner and the foundation of the Criminal faction. Also makes Rielle “Kit” Peddler: Transhuman worthless. How did this even make it past playtesting anyway? SBL team needs to handle all the playtesting going forward imo. Or at least green-light new sets to block all the Endurances Drago Ivanovs and such.

(Rebellion Without Rehearsal era)
16

Even if I totally agree that is good that this card is banned, this kind of things happen and will happen even with piles of money and people looking at it.

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Yeah, but how dumb do you have to be to say, "Let's make an ice that protects every server?"

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Well, apart of using ableism that I think it's problematic there is a reason.

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As far as I know when you do a set is very hard to nail down the power level of cards. You don't know when a Holo-man or a Rashida or a Stargate or Banklar is going to be good, bad or too powerful. If you don't greenlight some cards that actually change stuff the result would be that the new cards are boring and nobody uses them. And you can tell from FFG times that these same mistakes were made, by people who were paid for this. It needs to happen because if you want to have a Deep Dive it's inevitable that you will commit some Endurance along the way. So, pretty please, don't insult people.

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@valerian32 Sorry mate, but this turns off a core aspect of netrunner. That is, the trade off of leaving a server unprotected. That effectively doesn't happen with this card, or swings things way over into the corps favour. Making balanced card pools is hard, and yes taking risks is important, but saying to the runner "there are no naked runs now when this ice is out" makes for frustration for runners as an auto-protect spawns in. The corp doesn't have to think, this card does that for them.

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One thing I will say is that banning cards quickly that are bad is a good thing!

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@Scoogsy, yeah I agree that it's a good thing that this was banned and it was banned really fast. My only point is that this mistakes inevitablely happen and I don't think that there is any workaround it. The better that we can aim is to reduce these situations, but not eliminate them completely.

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