At first glance, Customized Secretary looks bad. You need two clicks (draw + install) to set it up and the effect is rather small. However, it is somewhat better than that. The obvious comparison is cash. Both are bad in the same way: They don't do a lot by there own. However, played with the right cards they both net you an incredible amount of money. That left aside here a few thoughts on Customized Secretary itself:
- For every program on Customized Secretary you save one click (the drawing of it). If you want to get your draw+install clicks back, you need about 40% of your deck being programs, e.g. 18 of 45 cards.
- The programs on Customized Secretary get the main advantage of being in your grip (you can install them) but can't accidentally get trashed as easily and they aren't milling your grip with cards you don't need yet.
- You can use Customized Secretary to get cards into your heap, by trashing it. Say paperclip.
- To many programs in your stack, you don't need anymore? Customized Secretary will thin them out for you.
- I like Customized Secretary from the perspective of game design: It does a lot of different things for you, non of which by itself are really strong, but together it might be playable.
How do you use this to get programs in your heap? Are you talking about trashing Customized Secretary with Aesop or w/e?
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WhyohWhy
exactly
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bvc
The programs can get trashed when the secretary is trashed though. And there are a few corp cards that can do that.
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Silv
The problem with the install and trash engine is that a large portion of your deck will be in your heap very quickly and you can only pack 3 Levi's. Compared to other options like Dhegdeers + MOpus and/or Data Folding it seems a bit weak.
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Silv
Generally programms are hard to trash, but still thx for pointing out that I wrote it wrong
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bvc
Actually I don't think you need a lot of levi's you don't actually need to draw a lot of cards, since each one gives you a lot of money. But let's compare it to MOpus + Data Folding. Using my technic, you get from installing Customized Secretary -1 (install cost) + 3 (Aesop) + 3 (Technical Writer) + 3 (Wasteland) = 8 for 2 clicks (draw + install). You might do that even more efficient by using Hayley and better drawing engine. Also I don't consider what the program itself does. Using two clicks with MOpus + Datafolding gives you only 7 credits. Of course MOpus is easier to set up, so both have their advantige over each other.
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bvc
Customized Secretary works very well in this setting, since you can use it up as you like, unlike most other programs
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bvc
Your engine requires 1 Aesop, 3 Technical Writers and 3 Wastelands in addition to the Customized Secretary. That's a lot of setup which is hard to pull off before the corp scores a win.
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Silv
Actually no. Contrary to your MO setup you don't need anything at all to get started. It gets efficient when you have set up everything but you don't need it. That means, it grows stronger during the game
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bvc