Keegan Lane

Keegan Lane

We use ice on our servers. More runners should ice their own rigs.

Be careful what you wish for, Keegan. If you're not, every Shaper (and some Criminals) might start packing Sacrificial Construct, and every Anarch deck will run the conspiracy breakers. And if that happens, you'll be completely useless and out of a job.

Our buddy Keegan has always had a bit of a rough go of things. He's free program trashing, but only on the condition that the runner has taken a tag from some piece of ICE or has decided/been forced to float tags in some other way. If the runner is floating tags, you probably have a better way of winning the game than trashing a program. If you stashed Keegan behind a Data Raven, then you're relying on the runner choosing to take the tag, and you're hoping that whatever program you trash has enough of an impact to swing the game heavily in your favor. Thoth admittedly makes this a little more likely by forcing the tag, but then you had to pay 7 to rez Thoth. All of this is assuming the runner hasn't "iced their rig" with SacCon or made it resilient to program trashing by running the conspiracy breakers/Clone Chip.

As if that wasn't enough trouble, Keegan also has to throw the runner a bone and remove a tag, saving them a click and two credits (or three, if you're SYNC). In a meta where everyone runs Criminal decks with single copies of each icebreaker and doesn't play SacCon, Keegan is probably an above average card. In most metas, he's extremely situational and, as odd as it is to say for a program-trashing effect, probably a little underpowered.

If you want to trash programs, you should probably stick with the vastly more flexible Marcus Batty.

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As I see it, putting Keegan Lane behind Data Raven is something where you want an ETR ice behind Data Raven. Then he acts as more of a temporary way to make the ETR really strong while you get your agenda scored. —
I get how he's supposed to work in theory. But playing Keegan that way makes you sit around waiting for a positional three card combo plus some agendas to score off of it, while the runner has ample time to get set up and hammer centrals. On top of that, if the ETR you're using is a barrier, their fracter is probably Paperclip, which basically makes Keegan remove one tag to cost the runner four credits. He's incredibly situational, and he slows you down by being a dead card in most realistic scenarios. On top of the stuff I mentioned, Hunting Grounds and Femme Fatale just ignore the Data Raven tag and render Keegan useless, and Inside Job gets by the Raven to trash Keegan. Every major faction has, and is likely to play, something that neuters Keegan. That's a pretty bad place to be for a card that's already situational. —
Good points... —