This card is amazing. I've been comboing it with News Hound in my Titan deck for some brutal rushes.

At 0 influence how can you say no to this card? Put three in your deck and throw it down asap to ruin the runner's day. For most runners playing against this is like being thrown into a tar pit, but if you're playing a really resource heavy runner then you may as well flip the table over and walk away sobbing. Nothing is more deliciously evil than playing this on turn 1 and watching the runner panic if they can't get rid of it.

The coolest thing about this card is that even if the Runner has 0 tags you can still trash a 0 cost card.

That said, this is kind of a hard sell. If you've got the Runner tagged hard enough to trash anything significant with this you might as well be sending a missile through their window.

Hey, if you want to save yourself some influence as a Criminal, this is your best Fracter option. It's less efficient than Corroder or Paperclip but not by all that much, and those are the top of the line Fracters. Saker is decent, definitely usable. You probably won't ever use the derez ability though, unless you come across a Bulwark or Wotan or something.

In comparison to Corroder, Saker will cost you 2 credits more to install and to break ice will cost you 2 credits more against even-strength barriers and 1 credit more against odd-strength barriers. That's really not a huge efficiency loss if you value the influence more than saving 2 credits on the install and 1-2 credits to break Ice.

I think this makes for a serviceable replacement to stacking HQ Interface and will be much more relevant once HQI cycles out.

You get the average access power of about 2 HQIs for only 5 credits and a single card. Plus 2 memory on a Criminal console is very nice.

Another noteworthy advantage of its card is its rock-bottom 1 influence cost, so is very easy to splash.

The biggest downside to the card is that it competes with many other great cards for the console slot. I think this card is great, but its another question entirely whether its worth having over other consoles.

Another consideration to make with this card is that it doesn't work with Gang Sign.

Overall I think The Gauntlet is a great card, if you can rationalise it over other consoles. It gives you a very simple method of multi-accessing HQ. Because your bypasses and derezzes in Criminal hurt your multi-access with this card I actually think it might be best played out of faction, maybe in a Shaper deck to supplement a focus on R&D pressure.

I agree with Gerrark's review, but wanted to add some notes on the obvious comparison with Mr. Li.

This card is awesome! I basically see it as Mr. Li on steroids. It's 2 credits cheaper to install, and draws more at the cost of an extra click. You can loosely summarise it as a dirt-cheap Mr. Li that you have to use twice.

The biggest advantage over Mr. Li is that the card you throw back into your deck doesn't have to be one of the drawn cards. With Mr. Li it really sucks pulling two perfect cards and having to condemn one of them to the bottom of your deck. Blockade Runner lets you choose anything from your entire grip, making it much more forgiving.

However, if you compare the digging power of them per click, Mr. Li pulls 4 cards from your deck for two clicks, while Blockade Runner pulls only 3. So if you really want to steamroll through your deck to find that one perfect card, Mr. Li is probably superior, whereas Blockade Runner makes for a more flexible draw engine.