Trick Shot, you were some of the most fun I've had as a Shaper. I always appreciated how you let me pressure a remote and a central at the same time, making the Corp think long and hard about which ICE to rez since both servers were under attack. You helped deal with the asset spam crisis while keeping my momentum up, and you allowed my rig to bloom into a beautiful menagerie. When we made it into R&D together, you let both of us take a peek just a little deeper.

The Net was better when you were in it. I miss you already.

The Wizard's Chest is an incredibly fascinating card and I want to start by giving a big shout-out to the World Champion Richard Hall for giving us such a wild and intriguing card to theory craft with.

In a nutshell, this card combines soft-tutoring and soft econ, you get to sort through your deck with some caveats and then install one of the revealed cards, ignoring all costs. This by its very nature, makes it a combo card that is hard to evaluate. When analyzing ICE, we can test how expensively various breakers perform against it, and visa-versa with icebreakers and common ICE. With conventional econ like Sure Gamble or Telework Contract or Bravado we can compare them and see their use-cases and break even points and profit margins.

A card like this, however, is directly dependent on what you can find and install with it, and thus its power level will be highly dependent on the power level of the cards it can find. Below will be less of a strict analysis of its usefulness, and more a musing as to its potential applications, what future applications might arise and how best to utilize it.

The most expensive runner cards at the time of writing are all programs: Orca and Lobisomem, Femme Fatale and Mass-Driver. Unfortunately, programs, especially icebreakers, are suboptimal targets for The Wizard's Chest since you often need the icebreakers themselves to access all three central servers, thus making it a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Spark of Inspiration is generally better for searching and installing large programs cheaply and comparatively unconditionally.

As a rule then, this narrows our targets to Resources and Hardware. The most expensive of which, Endurance, is banned, the next most expensive Maw, is generally considered to be overpriced for what it offers and most Anarchs prefer Patchwork or Keiko, both of which are markedly cheaper. Knobkierie is also banned, and Māui and Daredevil also see very little play.

This leaves Resources, the most expensive of which is Liberated Account, by using this on LA you can save yourself 6 credits, which, since this is an economy card, you essentially get to keep as profit, however, if you are resorting to these measures for extra credits you are probably just better off including more econ cards in its place, same goes for something like Red Team or Professional Contacts.

And besides, to consistently hit your target you have to include few, if any, other cards of the same type, a hefty requirement when there are so many different and potent Resources. Meeting of Minds offers you arguably more consistent tutoring while not only allowing, but encouraging you to include a large number of Resources in your deck.

This brings us back to Hardware but with the most expensive ideal candidates being 4 cost Consoles, it's a hard sell, as most decks would prefer to just include conventional card draw and conventional econ to install their Consoles normally.

The most promising candidate in standard is perhaps Jeitinho, decks that include Jeitinho tend to be built around it by its very nature and usually need at least some way to tutor for it to soften the inherent inconsistency relying on a single card to win brings you. The Wizard's Chest helps with that, acting as the 4th, 5th and even 6th copy of Jeitinho, as you can install The Wizard's Chest, make a successful run on each central server and still then use the paid ability to go find Jeintinho and install it, Jeitinho will then still trigger at the end of your turn, bringing you closer to victory. However, of the few decks I see that include Jeintinho, most prefer Asmund Pudlat as he is more consistent and in faction for Criminals.

At this point it might be tempting to write The Wizard's Chest off to the annals of Netrunner history, a cool card that never made sense to include but I believe this card has yet to have its "Golden Age," having just been released, there are almost certainly many more sets to come before it rotates, giving us many more years to see potential combo candidates.

If I had to speculate, the ideal target it probably either going to be:

• A. A very expensive Resource, ideally one with a hefty influence cost of 4-5 making people only want to include a single copy, or perhaps even the specific restriction of only being able to include a single copy per deck. Something like DJ Fenris only somehow more powerful and more expensive or;

• B. A super pricy Console, something 8+ ideally, something on par with Endurance in pricing or even larger like the now rotated, Monolith, Blackguard or The Toolbox

TLDR: A really cool card with few practical application at the time of writing but I look forward to seeing what new combos players can cook in the coming years and Cycles!

A "pre-emptive replacement" is a somewhat strange thing. Normally, you delay replacing something until the old one has stopped working to avoid overlap. Yet, Living Mural is perhaps best thought of as a pre-emptive replacement for a card the designers knew would rotate very soon: Ika. The problem with pre-emptive replacements is that they can look strange when first released, as they might not see any play for some time while the old options remain.

In the spirit of prescience, I'd like to make some predictions and speculations about what might happen when Ika does rotate, and Living Mural is forced to step up to the plate as the premier Trojan Killer.

The Differences:

• Higher install cost 3 vs 0

• Breaks less efficiently 1 credit per subroutine vs 1 credit for 2 subroutines

• Pumps marginally more efficiently 1 credit for 2 strength vs 2 credits for 3 strength

• Lower base strength 1 vs 2

• Threat 4 text makes it 4 strength for a single turn

• Different Interface requirements (see below)

From a pure numbers standpoint, it's looking weaker, except for ICE which has exactly 3 strength or ICE with 6 or more strength, Ika can interface more efficiently. ICE with 6 or more strength constitutes a painfully short list, whether it's been released by NSG (Trebuchet, Cloud Eater, Tyr and Colossus (who I consider an honourary member)), or whether it's an old FFG card that will be rotating with Ika (SYNC BRE, NEXT Diamond, Hydra, Archer and Surveyor). Even against 3 and 6+ strength ICE, Living Mural often doesn't break them as efficiently due to its lower subroutine cost-to-ratio. And even then that's without factoring in the higher install cost.

At Threat 4, this becomes somewhat more favourable, as you can now break anything with 4 or less strength without pumping and break almost everything with minimal pumping. If you can continually bounce this card with UAV, an argument can be made that it is always a 4-strength Icebreaker once Threat 4 is achieved. The problem is that Threat 4 tends to be deceptively late into the game, especially compared to Threat 3, and having to continually bounce and pay for Living Mural to stretch the benefits means this is meagre compensation for all the other sacrifices this card makes during the rest of the game.

Not only that but since it already pumps rather efficiently, 3 extra starting strength actually saves you fewer credits than you might think (usually only 1 or 2 fewer credits per ICE, and that's assuming it's a large ICE, which tends to have more subroutines anyway), which makes it hard to justify bouncing and paying the reinstall cost. Furthermore, it doesn't compensate for the fact that it still breaks subroutines 1 for 1, which is one of the major downsides this card has compared to Ika, especially against Sentries which frequently have multiple subroutines.

The last and perhaps most interesting distinction is its mobility, where Ika could be used to break any ICE anywhere, for the additional movement cost, Living Mural can break anything in the same server, but cannot be moved. This is somewhat reminiscent of the old Cyber-Cypher in its high efficiency compared to conventional breakers, limited by only being able to affect a single server. Here Living Mural can eke out some efficiency against tall Glacial servers that include multiple Sentries that Ika would otherwise have to continually bounce between. However, if you want to break sentries on multiple different servers in the same turn (such as for Deep Dive which Arissana often uses), you will either need to have multiple Living Mural's installed or use Spree to move it mid-turn.

On the whole, the comparison is not looking great, maybe this card is better against breaking multiple high-strength sentries stacked on top of the same server once Threat 4 is reached but who are we kidding, there's a very good reason that every Arissana deck I've seen runs Ika and not Living Mural. Perhaps the real question is if Arissana will use Living Mural at all, once Ika rotates or fall back on conventional breakers like Echelon or even import a breaker like Revolver or Carmen?

Well, let's compare it to Carmen, the bread-and-butter Killer from System Gateway.

From a strength perspective, Carmen is eerily reminiscent of Ika, with 2 base strength and pumps 2 for 3, which means that like with Ika, Living Mural is cheaper at pumping when it comes to 3 strength and 6 or higher strength ICE. However, as they both break 1 for 1, it can actually retain the added value and is better against 3-strength ICE while being competitive against 4 and 5-strength ICE too, unlike with Ika. And if you can reliably get the Threat 4 ability online, you can break substantially more efficiently than Carmen, while having comparable install costs (you can usually install Carmen for 3). Once again, however, the server limitation is its downfall, as Ika could move anywhere for a cost, and Carmen, like most conventional icebreakers can break any sentry anywhere without problems. Living Mural's one server limitation becomes crippling and I struggle to see how Living Mural could coexist with Deep Dive decks unless you add Spree, or include multiple copies of Living Mural, ultimately just adding to the setup and expenditure, and driving down its value proposition in the process.

Alternatively, however, cutting Deep Dive and adding more conventional multi-access such as Conduit and “Pretty” Mary da Silva (or importing a strong card like The Twinning), or even utilizing some Flux Capacitor + Cataloguer combo, while putting a Living Mural on R&D and regularly running R&D to lock the Corp could be a viable strategy. Or you could place one of these on the scoring remote to lock the Corp out of scoring and force agendas to accumulate in HQ before going in for a Spree + Cupellation run to win the game.

Ultimately, it's a very different icebreaker compared to Ika, with very different strengths, weaknesses and limitations. While it is almost certainly weaker and more limiting than Ika on the whole, it will be interesting to see what becomes of Arissana decks once Ika rotates. Will her playstyle change to fall in line with Living Mural's as she focuses on a single server or will she stop using Killers altogether and rely more heavily on Slap Vandal + Poison Vial combos, or turn to Botulus and Physarum Entangler or will she prefer to use more conventional non-Trojan Icebreakers like Carmen or Echelon to be the backbone of her deck while using Trojans like Pichação and Hush as more of an extra flourish? No one knows for sure, but it will be interesting to see.

Thematically Living Mural pretty much sells itself, the server is an alleyway and the Mural is a painted-on, living weapon that can attack anything in its path, but cannot move itself. It's very in theme with Arissana's identity as a street artist and Urban Art Connoisseur and fits perfectly with her whole character design. As for the actual text on the walls; "Mente" literally translates to mind or maybe in context mental? Perhaps calling NBN mental or mad? The text on the other side of the wall seems to read "viva livre brega" which roughly translates as live, free, strange (or quirky perhaps). I'm not really sure what that's supposed to mean and I think I either read it wrong or translated it wrong, corrections would be much appreciated! Similarly, the word in the top corner of the left wall seems to read "fora" if you squint, which means outside, what that means in context and the accuracy of my reading is questionable, to say the least, and I'd love to see a full size, high-quality copy of this art just to understand the little references and world-building details better. Lastly, including an Archer walking past and getting tongue-slapped is just a really nice touch to tie the whole card together, a true weapon, worthy of the Killer name! (yet so cute!)

TLDR: A weaker replacement for Ika in Trojan-based Arissana decks, doesn't see much play at the time of writing but if you are reading this after Dawn that may well have changed dramatically.

My, my, my, yet another strong card with no review! Whatever shall we do? hehe

A wise person once told me that if you are going to play a 3/1, it had better have a crazy strong effect. Eminent Domain has a craaaaaaaazy strong effect.

When scored, you can search your deck for a card and install and rez that card IGNORING ALL COSTS, three of the most important words in the game, up there alongside End The Run and Do X Meat Damage.

In other words, you can, as part of scoring this agenda, compress the effects of an overadvanced Project Atlas, a weaker Timely Public Release and Send a Message. Yikes! That's a lot of value.

So let's cut to the chase and run through some of the best targets for this card because if you're going to use it, you'll probably want to be using it in a deck with at least a couple of expensive high-value cards. After all, money saved is money made from the perspective of total net expenditures, so the more valuable a card you can install and rez, the more value you get from Eminent Domain.

If we sort by cost a few things immediately jump out at us, first off, the most expensive cards are almost exclusively big pieces of ICE, for example, the 5 most expensive corp cards in standard at the time of writing are (tied for first place at 10 credits each):

• Seraph
• Hydra
• Tyr
• NEXT Diamond
• Cloud Eater

Unfortunately, a lot of these cards are deceptively anti-synergistic, half the value of Cloud Eater is in the rez during an encounter so rezzing it with Eminent wastes potential value. Seraph and Hydra are surprisingly weak, even within NBN and provide questionable value to Weyland. NEXT Diamond is explicitly designed to be played with a bunch of other NEXT ICE so importing it on its own is meh. Tyr is a strong card but 5 influence is a lot to ask for, and like the Diamond, this card is strongest when synergized with other bioroid cards like Hákarl 1.0, Trieste Model Bioroids or Ravana 1.0 where they can feed off of each other to maximise value and try to guarantee the core damage.

Next on the list is Tithonium, which is banned... moving on.

Conundrum is of little value in a faction that just got Hammer but Anansi and Tollbooth are interesting considerations since they are pricey yet of high value.

It's also worth noting that all of the 8 cost cards, as well the banned 9 cost Tithonium as well as Hydra and NEXT Diamond will rotate with Dawn. So it will be very interesting to see what new high-end, pricey cards enter standard to fill this niche, perhaps Weyland will get their own large monstrosity but for now, the targets are somewhat unremarkable.

Sure... you can use it to find and rez a Pharos or an Oduduwa or a Blockchain but instead of running through all of the seven costs cards and boring you to death let's get to the good stuff.

Archer, is probably the best target for this card. To answer the question that might already be running through your head, yes, sacrificing an Agenda is treated as a "cost" that Emiment ignores. This means you can search for, install and rez an Archer, without sacrificing anything.

If you're not already familiar with Archer, this card HURTS.

• Carmen does it for an excruciating 8 credits
• Num does it for 8 too
• Ika does it 8 assuming you have to move
• Echelon with 2 other Icebreakers does it for a soul-crushing 10 credits
• Revolver does it for 4 credits and 4 power counters, which means you can never fully break it more than once
• Odore does it for a surprisingly tolerable 6 credits if you have all your companions
• Mimic just cries
• Only Orca breaks it relatively efficiently for 4 credits (and that says more about Orca than Archer)

One of the most brutal things I encountered was a Weyland player who used this card to find and rez an Archer, then installed another Archer and sacrificed the Eminent to rez it. With just a single 3/1 Agenda you can now efficiently rez, not one but two Archers. Runners should be afraid, I know I was, I was playing shaper and got absolutely locked out of R&D :(.

Outside of ICE, there are a handful of other Weyland cards that require sacrificing an Agenda which you might want to consider, Corporate Town is top-tier if you can afford to protect it. Allowing you to trash a Runner resource each turn, no tags, clicks or credits required, which can wreck resource-dependent Runners cough cough Hoshiko Shiro: Untold Protagonist, but also just like Arissana Rocha Nahu: Street Artist because of Urban Art Vernissage and Aesop’s Pawnshop. Or even just picking off Tsakhia "Bankhar" Gantulga or Arruaceiras Crew or The Twinning or other high-value resources.

Oberth Protocol is another potent card that can serve as a kind of in-faction SanSan City Grid if you are looking for fast advance that doesn't require you to discard your entire hand, while simultaneously helping you stack your advanceable ICE sky high.

The "Expend" effect is a little bit more niche, in fact, it's one of only two expendable Agendas released ever, alongside Slash and Burn Agriculture, and one of only 5 total Expendable cards, including Tree Line, Descent and Angelique Garza Correa. The five of which are themselves a new mechanic released in the Liberation cycle. Definitely an interesting econ card, assuming you have something that'll cost 5 or more to install and rez you save yourself a net of 4 credits, aswell as the click-compression on the install, which is respectable. The real challenge of course is then getting it back out of Archives, as you'll only ever really want to use this effect so long as you have a Descent in hand or a Spin Doctor on standby.

But it's the theme of this card that is what takes it from good to perfect for me. The discarded Oliveira Family Farm sign lying off to the side, as it's stepped over. The massive floating banner descending from the sky, what almost looks like armed guards in the distance as large machinery is trucked in. "Young Gael Oliveira agreed to stay on and manage the farm, for a fee" so simple and yet so ominous, quintessential Weyland, they'll shake your hand and tell you they're doing you a favour as they milk you dry. They'll claim to be the small businesses, the wholesome family-run shop but at the end of the day, it's all just Weyland.

Adding a review as there isn't one at the time of writing.

First off, I am absolutely shocked there is no review for this card, it is an incredibly powerful, archetype-defining and all but an essential auto-include in every Arissana Rocha Nahu: Street Artist deck you build. And, I assume it will only become even more important with Dawn as Ika rotates, and Living Mural is forced to take its place.

Once per turn, you can bounce a non-virus trojan back to the grip (so no Chisel, Botulus, Tranquilizer or Physarum Entangler) and gain 2 hosted credits on the UAV, which can then be spent on installing cards. Usually in Arissana decks, you will be continually installing cards from the start of the game to its end and since we can save up credits unlimited with impunity (unlike the companion Paladin Poemu) we can potentially spend multiple turns saving up and then make one big install. The lack of limitation on how these credits are spent makes me comfortable treating this as just functionally generating 2 credits per bounce.

In this way, UAV offers you the ability to do two things simultaneously:

1. Generate 2 credits per turn (2 drip)

2. Bounce an installed Trojan back to hand for repositioning (or to carefully manage MU)

2 drip, with no frills, is incredibly powerful, and the fact that this card can stack (once again unlike Paladin Poemu) means you can potentially drip up to 6 credits per turn.

Here is a list of all non-virus trojans in standard:

0 credits to install:

• Ika
• Kyuban
• Flux Capacitor

1 credit to install

• Hush
• Saci
• Pichação
• Slap Vandal

2 credits to install

• Egret
• Monkeywrench

The only 3 cost card:

• Living Mural

Almost a third of these net you the full 2 credits in profit, another 4 net you 1 credit, 2 more pay for themselves and only Living Mural will actually cost you money to continually bounce. Combine these with other effects like DZMZ Optimizer and you can pretty consistently profit that 2 credits drip per turn. On its own, 2 credits drip per turn is already extremely powerful and if you have 0 cost Trojans installed you probably want to be trying to bounce them every turn to maximise the possible profit.

Add to this the fact that Arissana can install a Trojan mid-run at no cost and you don't even have to spend a click installing a program to be able to bounce them back all over again. Add to this the fact that LilyPAD lets you draw a card the first time you install a program each turn and you realise that once per turn you can install a program at no cost, not even a click, draw a card for free and then bounce it back for the full 2 credits profit with impunity.

However, the real creative tool is bouncing the Trojans themselves, to allow you to regularly reposition them as needed, only Ika and Hush move themselves, everything else needs Spree or UAV to reposition them, and you will need to reposition them, as locking all of your Trojans into a single configurations cripples the creative adaptability that defines Arissana's playstyle.

Combined, Urban Art Vernissage is both a potent econ tool and an essential flexibility tool to allow you to constantly reposition your collection of Trojans where they are most needed.

The reason why I think this card will only be more important soon is that while most current Arissana decks utilize Ika as their Killer of choice, Ika will rotate with Dawn and unless a new Trojan Killer is released in Dawn, Living Mural will probably become the breaker of choice. Living Mural, unlike Ika, cannot reposition itself, making it all the more dependent on UAV to pick it up and reposition it, plus the Threat 4 text makes it stronger whenever it's installed, further rewarding you for constantly bouncing and reinstalling it.

Thematically this card is probably just a reference to the fact that Arissana is a street artist who likely has a day job managing an Urban Art Vernissage. A vernissage is just a French word for a specific type of art exhibition. As for the quote... I tried to search for what Gemeosianism is, let alone meta neo-Gemeosianism but my search results came up empty which leads me to believe it may just be a fictional term invented by the card designers/narrative team.

The first two adjectives/prefixes are pretty straightforward and commonly used in art parlance, neo- just means new and meta means with or after or sometimes beyond, it's from the Greek of course, in otherwise words with or after neo-Gemeosianism, sometimes beyond neo-Gemeosianism (I really hope that someone gets this joke lol!). It's entirely possible that Gemeosianism is a nonsense word used to make a light joke out of artistic jargon but if it is more than that and anyone can drop a comment below referencing what Gemeosiansism is meant to refer to in-universe that would be much appreciated!

TLDR: a really strong and incredibly valuable card that is the lynchpin in Arissana's Trojan-based strategy, if you are playing Arissana without this card and wondering why your deck feels clunky and difficult to use, please add this card, it will make your life so much easier.