Owl - It is eyes just keep following you.

Suspicious apostraphes aside, let us consider the virtues of Owl for a moment. First and foremost - It's thematically excellent! Owls are known for their silent flight, and this thing glided so silently under the radar that I even forgot what cycle it was in.

Now, on to practical stuff. Adding to the stack instead of trashing seems to be an increasingly useful effect. As well as getting around things like good old Trash'o'Cube and borking fat witchy stacks, the added click and credit(s) hassle is not to be underestimated. In edge cases, it can also throw a (mini, meccano-sized) wrench into decks that have a lot of shuffle effects. Can't go tutoring stuff quite so easily when you have something valuable on the top, huh? Not to mention it's also very useful when, ah...

Honestly, I just like owls. Never mind the mechanics. Owls are cool. Owls are good. Give one a home. Put an Owl in your deck today!

Yours Twootingly,

Definitely not an Owl ((@v@))

"So, hear me out on this - what if, in this age of aggressive disappearances, Noise wasn't in fact the latest to go? What if, before all these missiles went through windows, and wigs got thrown into bins, Noise got taken out by his own clone? What if he knew his cruel fate to be used as a corpsoidal decoy. What if he saw it coming and said 'screw that'! What if this clone outsmarted and subdued the original, Dexter style. What if he tranq'd the punk, glued his hands to the wheel and sent him flying into the nearest wall? And what if, after a few years of keeping up appearances, that 'Noise' just had enough. The real Noise would never retire, but his clone, not wanting to be a slave to the original's lifestyle, has decided to do his own thing, and THAT'S why he's disappeared. I dunno man, it makes you think..."

"Would you just trash the damn card, already?"

(Game talk: It's a fun reset card. Probably not the best, but the idea of setting up some Data Foldings a Shadow Netand saying 'you'll never take him alive, suckers!', before clicking back a Levy AR Lab Access is still incredibly fun)

Scenario #1

“See, the thing is…” The NBN executive tried not to sweat behind his ever-present smile. “There’s this fellow, this one troublesome fellow hacking all our stuff. And see, the darnedest thing is we KNOW where he is, but we just can’t get to him. What do you think we should we do?”

“Hmm…” The man hummed between his touching fingertips. He pondered for a while (two clicks to be exact), and left the room. When he returned he dragged in and slammed a large black crate on the desk, leaping the careful arrangement of toys into the air. “I believe this’ll do it.” The executive laughed nervously, and fumbled the latches with a mix of excitement and nervous anticipation. His eyes widened and he quickly slammed the lid.

“Surely you don’t expect ME to use that?”

“Who else?” The consultant patted him on the back and nodded over to his blond assistant “Josh, open the window.”

Scenario #2

“See, man, the thing is…” The Weyland executive tried to not shake beneath his high-elbowed, W-shaped pose; he and his bros called it the Wey-dub. “We got all these things that go Boom(!), like, three of 'em all loaded up and ready. We just can’t find the smug bastard.”

“Hmm…” The man hummed between his touching fingertips. He pondered for a while (two clicks to be exact), and left the room. He came back and slid a small chit across the desk. “Try this. It’s a subscription to the new NBN series called ‘Through the Whizzard’s Window’.”

Scenario #3

“Hmm…” The man hummed between his touching fingertips. He pondered for a while (two clicks to be exact), and left the room. He came back holding a sniper.

“Put me down!” She frowned, then straightened her collar as she peered at the contract. Upon seeing the target, her frown deepened. “So…you want me to kill a briefcase?”

“Oh god, yes please. All the briefcases.”

Other fun things possible with CoViz include:

• Unleashing a (new and improved) murderous robo-kitty, for much the same as above.

• Getting postgraduates to sift through your bins, to recover that crucial card that got trashed the turn before.

And pretty much any edge-caseoperation you might desperately need, but can’t fit multiple copies of in your deck.

At a time when there are any number of crippling threats to ruin your day, being able to grab a timely answer can make a huge difference.

Or perhaps things are going great and you’re swimming in cash, you’ve got most of the pieces you need for that combo sundae, but you’re you’re just lacking that single cherry to finish it off.

And one of the best things about it (which I failed to realise at first) is that it won’t cost you two clicks to play doubles. Consulting Visit covers the click you’d have spent on playing it normally.

Oh, and it can’t be trashed (traditionally) either, so that’s neat!

The only thing I’d caution newer players against is the temptation to dig for economy cards with it. After the ‘finders fee’ of 2 and the additional click, the usual burst of credits will feel more like a (slow) damp fizzle.

This card is amazing though, and after only a few games of being far less beholden to chance than usual, you’ll realise why runners hate it so damned much.

There once was a Sec chief called Slee,

Who smashed careless runners with glee,

Instead of protein,

She ate subroutines,

And sometimes huffed Helium 3

Some (possibly) true facts about Chief Slee:

• Chief Slee's punch hits 25% harder than a bomb in your house, and is around 71.5% as strong as a guided missile.

• Chief Slee's grin is made up of equal parts delight and disgust at the frailty of the human body.

• Chief Slee laughs at your 'armour', regarding it as a merely a girdle for your inadequacies.

• Someone once tried to kill Chief Slee with an unregistered pistol. She would have been insulted, were she not so amused.

• Chief Slee never saves face, she only wrecks it.

• Jinteki tried to recruit her once. It is said her laughter still haunts the recruiter to this day.

• In the language of the ancient English, Slee means 'sly', 'sagacious', and 'cunning'. She enjoys the irony.

• Chief Slee feeds on your failures, especially the ones you think you got away with. With that in mind, some of Chief Slee's favourite runner sayings include, "I'll just take the tag.", "But it doesn't end the run, right?", and "Ha! All that money on a Data Ward and I'm not even tagged!".

• Speaking of tags, Chief Slee has, to use her words, "no time for that", and works just fine without them. She considers them yellow, in both the literal and Texan colloquial sense.

• Chief Slee doesn't forget. You can clear all those tags. You can beat all those traces. You can distract her with as many pink kitties as you like. She's not gone until she's gone.

Of course, she wouldn't be a Weyland card without being unwieldy. Her damage can be mitigated if you wear enough layers, and her low trash cost requires that you spend more effort than you might like to protect her. However, even if you don't use her for a killshot(punch), her presense will clamp down on a lot of shifty runner bullsh*t, and make them play something closer to the game you're putting in front of them, which in some cases can really slow the runner down. She is cheap to rez. She affects all servers, and she has no additional triggers beyond the runner messing up five times and the Corp having a click to spare.

Lastly, while she can indeed benefit from snorting the odd moon rock, she isn't part of an elaborate combo. She is more like an additional condition on the runner, one that says to them through a delighted/disgusted grin,

"Oh, you'd better be ready when you run buddy, because if you hit something and don't have the nouse to break it good and proper, you'll remember the words 'Inside Job' not as the time you made a sneaky fast steal, but as the time when my bosses rezzed a Hive and I played Bop-It with your lungs."

(Core Set Perspective(Mostly!))

Some IDs are good, so good in fact that they become the standard for almost every deck you might consider in that faction. This isn't one of those.

There are also the IDs that are...unfortunate. The kind that people look at and think, "Man, I never realised I could feel sorry for a glowing 'W'". This isn't one of those either.

Making News sits, in my opinion, squarely in the "Good if you want to [X]" category of IDs, with a more limited scope than some, but with definite use to be found. Its focus is also not so narrow that it largely dictates how to build your deck. Tracing is one of the more major mechanics in the game and so there is some flexibility in deciding how to make the most of that 2. While there are more efficient IDs for putting tags on someone (I hear some people are playing Controlling the Message from time to time), Making News increases the pressure from trace-based shenanigans in general, giving you the choice of when to make an effect more likely to stick or hit harder.

Sadly in the Core Set you don't have many ways to take advantage of this. In fact most of the ways you can use your 2 are in aid of landing tags, which aremostly used for kicking off urban bonfires.

Some of the most obvious cards Making News helps are:

• SEA Source (and whatever nastiness follows it), forcing the runner to either run less or work harder to stay ahead on money. While in recent months bathing in cash hasn't exactly been hard for runners, if it's just you, a new Netrunner friend and their starter box, money can be pretty tight.

• Data Raven is often regarded as being pretty solid blocking ICE until the runner finds a breaker for it. Few people want to take the mandatory tag in the first place, but practically no-one wants to give the Corp the ability to tag them on their turn. The fact that it's Trace 3 is the only real 'weakness', and the 2 extra from Making News can make even a wealthy runner think twice about wading through it early on.

• Hunter's trace going up to 5 will often ensure that the runner takes the tag then clears it if they facecheck it. Same (to an extent) with Matrix Analyser.

Essentially what Making News often boils down to is giving you a form of control on how you want to tax the runner early game, with them paying money to not get tagged or spending clicks to stay ahead on money. Flipping your 2 on a trace can usually lead them into choosing the one you prefer at that time. Of course, this doesn't ALWAYS work, and the value players place on time vs money varies from person to person. And sometimes you'll be playing against Kate, 3 Rabbit Holes and Access to Globalsec (just because there aren't a whole lot of alternatives), so this can keep your traces somewhat meaningful.

Truth be told Making News is quite underwhelming in the Core Set, but it's by no means terrible, and should you start to include cards from later packs like the dreaded Midseason Replacements, Manhunt, Aryabhata Tech and so on, you'll find yourself with far more toys to give a little, sometimes decisive boost in increasingly interesting ways.