Right now, the only other review of this card is almost 5 years old.
In the meantime, the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh rotation happened.
Belonging to Downfall, Divested Trust is now among the oldest cards in the whole standard format.
After more than 6 years in the active cardpool this agenda has seen … not much actually.
Let's revisit Divested Trust in the light of what's basically a different game now than 6 years ago.
Let's revisit Divested Trust in the light of Elevation and, more specifically, BANGUN: When Disaster Strikes.
I wrote a silly story of me using it in the form of a decklist, but for the sake of an actual review I'll go more into the mechanics.
Scoring a 3/1 is always a pain.
You have the same effort as scoring a solid 3/2 agenda, but you only get 1 point and in the special case of this one you don't even get to keep that point, since the whole point of Divested Trust is to be forfeited.
And not in a good way (like the newest agenda that wants to be forfeited) that enables other cards. No, Divested Trust's sole purpose lies in an ability that requires forfeiting itself as a cost.
This is a lot to ask. The fact that the pace of the game generally is faster now than it was when Divested Trust was made actually makes this even more of a burden.
But it gets worse:
Divested Trust wants to be scored early, so that it can still be used when the runner steals an agenda without immediately winning the game.
This makes it hard to use in any environment where the runner can get to 4 points reasonably fast.
Bad news, that's the only environment we have. Corps can't really have a safe early game against the modern arsenal of early aggression tools on the runner side.
And there's another downside:
Divested Trust wants to be scored early, but without really doing that much to help the corp to develop.
Other 3/1s either accelerate the game instantly or continue to provide some sort of meaningful protection.
Divested Trust does both once at some future point in the game barely under your control as a corp player.
The one silver lining for this card is that it's super fun (for the corp) and swingy when it actually does "un-steal" (a very rare mechanic) 2 or 3 points the runner fought hard for, while simultaneously re-funding a corp that has spent a lot to defend these points.
These moments are the reason I like the design concept, even if the card isn't objectively good.
Conclusion
In their early days of keeping this game alive NSG erred on the side of caution with this cool and unique agenda.
It's not good.
You should play it more often.
Finally, after 3 years of waiting, Maskirovka gets a chance to shine! NSG knows this will eventually be a good ice, hence the 3 influence. :)
— DDarkray