(I've been meaning to write some "banned/rotated card retrospectives" for a while. This one's my first.)

Ah, Formicary. A card that started its life as a way to give the Runner a mildly annoying surprise when they ran an apparently unprotected server, and ended up as part of way too many degenerate combos. There's an entire official article about why this one card was banned, which basically summarises to "trying to ensure that newly designed cards didn't combo too degenerately with Formicary ended up being too restrictive on the card designs".

The basic idea behind most Formicary combos is that you trigger a "the Runner approaches the server" ability of another card, then after that's resolved, use a long-distance Formicary rez to cancel the approach, thus allowing the original trigger to trigger a second time once the Runner passes the Formicary. There's are quite a few possible effects you could use with this, but most of the combos weren't being actively played at the same time, so it's worth looking back at just how much chaos this one card caused:

• Formicary + Cayambe Grid. This makes the Runner pay the Cayambe Grid tax twice, and in the typical Cayambe Grid deck, the tax is enormous and trying to pump it up out of reach is one of the main things that the deck does. Cayambe Grid got banned in June 2020 with minimal explanation: the ban was apparently a targeted ban to kill one specific deck that was extremely unfun to play against, but the balance team didn't specify which. I do think the "the ban was to kill Formicary + Cayambe Grid" theory is plausible, though.
• Formicary + Manegarm Skunkworks. This was basically the same idea as with Cayambe Grid, but didn't cause as much friction, and wasn't played that commonly. Most likely this is because people preferred to combo Manegarm Skunkworks with Anoetic Void instead (although there was nothing actually stopping you from comboing all three cards together, but people preferred not to bother with that in tournaments, most likely for influence reasons).
• Formicary + Dedication Ceremony on Reconstruction Contract in Ob Superheavy Logistics. This uses up three cards and requires a specific identity, and only works in Eternal, but is effectively an automatic win (barring specific removal cards like Pinhole Threading), and is much simpler than the typical Netrunner win combo. The basic idea is that Dedication Ceremony costs 1, and most ambushes cost 0, so once the Runner is locked into breaching Dedication Ceremony's server, you can trash it to move the counters (as long as there's a legal target anywhere, e.g. you have advanceable ICE), use Ob to install an ambush from R&D in the server the Runner was accessing, and then choose the newly installed ambush as the card to put the Dedication Ceremony counters on. Many players' immediate reaction is "does that work?", and the answer is "yes, as long as you don't destroy the server mid-run by removing all the cards in and protecting it", which generally implies that there must be ICE protecting the server. The Runner might well jack out – but then you could wait until your own turn and choose a different card to search for and put the counters onto, making for a nearly automatic win because you can choose between, e.g., Project Junebug and Clearinghouse based on whether the Runner accesses or not. Ideally, you'd want 6 counters rather than just 3, using double Dedication Ceremony (because that makes both Project Junebug/Cerebral Overwriter and Clearinghouse definitively lethal against normal hand sizes), but that takes an entire turn to set up; adding Formicary to the mix therefore lets you set up the combo using only 3-click turns via allowing you to ICE the server clicklessly if the Runner decides to run it. This sort of combo isn't the only reason Ob was added to the Eternal points list (first at 1 point, then 2), e.g. Ob also combos with Estelle Moon which is one of the most broken cards in Eternal, but it can't have helped.
• Formicary + HB "derez matters" cards (e.g. Stegodon MK IV, Brasília Government Grid). One of the main drawbacks of Formicary is that its trigger typically only works once, because it needs to be derezzed to trigger but rezzes itself when it does. One of the main drawbacks of the HB cards is that you need to find ICE (sometimes even off-server ICE specifically) to derez. As such, the cards cancel out each others' drawbacks, with each giving you more uses of the other, in a self-sustaining cycle. This is what finally ended up getting Formicary banned.

Also, there's one card theoretically combos with Formicary, but where the combo wasn't really the problematic part: Formicary + Nanisivik Grid. The idea is that you can use one Nanisivik trigger to, e.g., trash a program (the Runner's killer could be a good choice, as that makes Formicary more expensive to get through), and then if the Runner runs back through, use a second Nanisivik trigger to end the run. It turns out that Nanisivik Grid was broken enough on its own, however, that the Formicary combo was overkill (you put one Nanisivik Grid on Archives and it makes it almost impossible to disable any of your Nanisivik Grids, including both itself and ones placed elsewhere).

Some non-combos include Letheia Nisei and Mti Mwekundu: Life Improved, which are only usable once per run even if you use Formicary to interrupt the trigger.

I can see why the card got banned. In most of the combos above, at least one piece got banned (or for Eternal-based combos, pointed); the only exception is the Manegarm Skunkworks combo, and that's a card that lots of casual players surely were wishing would be banned (Skunkworks combos were part of what was the best archetype in Standard for quite a while). Perhaps the lesson here is that, when you find a degenerate combo, maybe it's both halves that are banworthy!

Let's say that, for whatever reason, you decided to make a Jinteki rush deck. (Saraswati is a good choice, due to saving a click every time you install an agenda; rush decks can sometimes live or die by their economy, and saving clicks gives you time to play the economic operations.)

In previous formats, the way to make a rush deck's economy work would be to fill your deck full of economic 4/2 agendas: Corporate Sales Team, Cyberdex Sandbox, Offworld Office, that sort of thing. (3/2s don't generally provide meaningful amounts of economy, with the exception of Luminal Transubstantiation which is not legal in Jinteki; and 5/x agendas are too hard to score for a rush deck.) Unfortunately, Corporate Sales Team has rotated, and Cyberdex Sandbox has been banned, leving a bit of a gap in the typical rush deck's agenda suite. As such, rush decks have to resort to scraping the bottom of the barrel for agenda economy somewhat, perhaps even resorting to marginal choices like Timely Public Release because "at least it saves a click installing ICE".

Trying to fill this void for a Jinteki rush deck, I decided to try out Flower Sermon, and was blown away by just how much it helps out the typical rush deck. This happens for two main reasons:

• The agenda gives a direct economic benefit, in that it allows you to clicklessly draw cards. Drawing cards by click is something that a rush deck frequently has to do (because you want to get the agendas into hand before the opponents can set up, and also need to draw into ICE and economy operations). So the agenda is effectively saving on those clicks.

  The relatively free card draw is also pretty helpful for Jinteki rush decks in particular, as it helps to support certain cards that they would likely be running anyway – Hansei Review for their economy, and Anoetic Void to delay the Runner by the last vital couple of clicks (it is far from unheard of for the Runner to find their last critical icebreaker halfway through the turn before you score the 7th point, so having a clickless way to fuel Anoetic Void can make the difference between a win and a loss).

• The agenda also gives a fairly large indirect economic benefit: it helps to protect the top of R&D, because you can use an agenda counter to put a useless card there (or even a Snare!, and you can do that once the Runner is already committed to accessing). This means that once you have scored a Flower Sermon, R&D needs less protection than it usually would, and so it effectively saves you money because you don't have to rez (or even install) as much ICE there as you normally would. This effect probably isn't quite up there with Offworld Office, but it isn't that much worse, and it's definitely better than the currently available alternatives for economic agendas.

  It's worth noting that this protection works even against the new Cataloguer (you place an untrashable card on top of R&D after the Runner rearranges it). It doesn't work against Stargate, but Cataloguer is much more popular at the moment – often replacing Stargate – and that's helping to make Flower Sermon better than it previously was.

This means that Flower Sermon is probably better-positioned for rush decks nowadays than it has been at any time since it was printed. It's no longer facing as much competition from other agendas, with most of the good economic agendas being rotated or banned. It's also facing a more friendly line-up of cards from the Runner side than in previous formats. If you decide to play a Jinteki rush deck in the current metagame, it should definitely form part of your agenda suite – it has been one of the best-performing agendas in my testing (along with the obvious Offworld Office).

The remaining question, of course, is "should I really be playing a Jinteki rush deck anyway?". I don't have a great answer to that one – other styles of Jinteki decks are more popular at the moment, and probably for good reason. But in my testing, it at least hasn't been completely hopeless; even with an untuned list, it seems to outperform most of the other casual Corp decks I've been trying out (although I suspect it won't hold up in a proper tournament), and it's a good way to get a lot of games in quickly. Still, if we ever end up in a metagame favouring rush (which looks like it might actually happen, given the popularity of somewhat clunky Shaper decks at the moment), Jinteki rush seems to be an interesting alternative to Weyland rush, and if it's viable, Flower Sermon will be a major part of the reason why.

Lobisomem, being a program, is a Runner card. However, I think it's much more insightful to give a review of this card from the Corp's point of view (especially as, although I've played both sides of the matchup, I've spent rather more time playing against this card than playing with it).

Probably the most common way that Runners use Lobisomem is as part of a Lobisomem / Orca / Spark of Inspiration build, which is effectively a combination of cards that define the deck they appear in. Lobisomem has pretty good numbers once it comes down onto the table, which means that your barriers and code gates are being broken for fewer credits than usual. However, there's lots of counterplay available to the deck:

• Setting up Lobisomem + Orca is kind-of slow. If a deck is relying on Spark of Inspiration to get its breakers out, they effectively have to get ⅔ of the way through their deck to find their second Spark of Inspiration, which even with Shaper levels of draw power is hard to achieve in the early game, and it is often possible to race out a lot of agenda points before they get there. As such, one approach is to try to rush, forcing the opponent to take risky runs without a full set of breakers in order to slow you down. Your deck is likely to have plenty of ways to stop a Runner who has only Orca, but it can be helpful to include a way to punish a run with only Lobisomem; three of the four main factions have good ways to do this in-faction ( Saisentan (or Cloud Eater), Ballista or Stavka, Lycian Multi-Munition (or Rototurret)). NBN struggles a bit more, with Jua not helping as much as you'd like – if you are struggling with Lobisomem + Orca builds, you could either splash for a spiky out-of-faction sentry or use Owl, which is fine for this purpose.

• If playing against a Spark of Inspiration build, that really limits the Runner's opportunities to use utility and backup programs (because it increases the chance that Spark will hit the wrong program). One notable place this happens is with Ika, which means that the Runner doesn't have an alternative way to mitigate a spiky sentry early on, and helps make the rushing strategy in the previous paragraph more viable. Even more notably, it prevents them filling their deck full of Muse and Coalescence, meaning that Aesop’s Pawnshop is much harder to power; this means that their late-game economy is likely to be somewhat weaker than that of a typical Shaper – and that in turn increases their "effective break costs". For example, Lobisomem breaks Attini for 5, whereas Euler costs 7; but the Runner using Euler probably has a stronger economy and so the 7 that they're spending hurts them less than the 5 spent by the Lobisomem user. Alternatively, a Shaper who isn't using Lobisomem gets to use support programs to reduce break costs; Buzzsaw breaks Attini for 8, but spends only 2 if it's out alongside a K2CP Turbine. So in the late game, Lobisomem isn't going to be breaking more efficiently than the alternative possibilities.

• Lobisomem's break costs actually aren't very good for breaking code gates late-game compared to a more normal breaker build. One great comparison is with Unity: in a standard fracter + decoder + killer build, Unity breaks almost all code gates as or more cheaply than Lobisomem does (the only currently legal exceptions are NEXT Sapphire, Enigma and Virtual Service Agent). Its break costs are somewhat better at breaking barriers – decoders tend to be more efficient than fracters are, especially for Shapers – and Orca's break costs are also very good. But even then, ICE like Brân 1.0 are still able to tax a Lobisomem (with Brân costing 5), and it seems to be fairly viable for a glacier deck to tax Lobisomem out of making frequent runs in the late-game.

• If the Runner doesn't have some alternative way to charge Lobisomem, it is possible to entirely lock it out of barrier-breaking by depleting the counters. This is especially notable when the Runner is trying to stop a rush – if you try to rush out an agenda behind an " End the run." barrier, and the Runner manages to install Lobisomem early and use it to stop the rush, they get the agenda, but now they have no counters and cannot charge it until they break a code gate – and nothing is forcing you to rez a code gate, you can just leave yours unrezzed (other than any Afshar you may have on HQ) until they install another Lobisomem (or reinstall the same Lobisomem) to get the counter back. Against most IDs, you can also just use a strategy of ensuring that the Runner can't make a profit on counters by not installing or not rezzing code gates and (to play around Orca) ensuring that every rezzed sentry has a barrier before it. These ICE layouts are weird and often inefficient, but when the Runner has no backup breakers (and they often don't), they can lock the Runner out entirely and lead to an automatic win.

  There are two Runner IDs that can help to avoid this problem. Padma gets a free charge on every turn she runs R&D, which makes a full lockout much harder. One possibility would be to put a spiky barrier on the outside of R&D (and Boto may have been printed this set precisely to help with that – Ivik is also a possibility but is not ideal for use in a strategy that involves intentionally not rezzing code gates!) However, glacier decks may prefer to simply try to tax Padma's credits rather than her counters (she normally isn't a particularly rich Runner). Kit is impossible to lock out from gaining the counters, and is probably the most viable ID for Lobisomem. However, given that her ID ability is in turn entirely countered by the commonly run Tributary, you effectively have a situation in which the Runner's ID ability is entirely being used on powering Lobisomem, which should give you a significant economic advantage (especially as Kit normally preferred to use a decoder that breaks more efficiently than Lobisomem does, back before Tributary was printed, and struggled even then).

All this reasoning makes me think that the build involving Spark of Inspiration and Orca is probably the wrong way to play Lobisomem. But in that case, it struggles to find a reason to exist – it doesn't fit well into a traditional breaker suite because, whilst being good (if expensive to install) as a fracter, it is not particularly good as a decoder (and yet you have to use it as your decoder in order to get the barrier breaks to work), so it only really helps break-cost-wise against Corps which are primarily running barriers rather than code gates, at which point it is at risk of running out of counters (and even then, builds like Cleaver + K2CP Turbine are cheaper).

In short, Lobisomem is a bit of a mystery – no matter how the Runner tries to build it, the Corp seems to have substantial counterplay, especially if they build their deck with the possibility of maybe having to counter a Lobisomem in mind (but even if they don't). Playing against it does require paying attention to what the Runner is doing, though, and arranging your ICE to compensate. It also leads to a weird reversal of the normal flow of Netrunner play; in most matchups the Runner has the advantage in the early and late game, and the Corp in the midgame, but Lobisomem reverses that (being strongest in the midgame and giving the Corp the advantage at the start and end of the game).

All this is probably good for the game – one complaint I've had about Netrunner for a while is that although the Runner has to pay attention to what the Corp is doing and tailor their strategy accordingly, the reverse is less true for many Corp decks, with only the now-rotated Apocalypse creating significantly different play patterns – but cards like Lobisomem and Jeitinho are helping to change that, which is a good thing. However, if you do play around the Lobisomem – and it can often be obvious when the Runner is attempting that build – it doesn't seem like it's particularly strong or difficult to play against, and may in fact just be an outright bad card.

The nice thing about economy cards like this one is that it should be possible to objectively work out how they compare to other economy cards you might be using. So here's my take on this one.

Friend of a Friend is clearly intended to be used alongside Sebastião Souza Pessoa: Activist Organizer, or "Seb" as the chat on jinteki.net has taken to calling him. So I'm going to do the math primarily on the basis that you have Seb on your side, either as your identity or via DJ Fenris. The basic problem with doing Seb math is that the economy comes in two halves: first you tag yourself, and then you untag yourself, to end up with some net gain; but the problem is that the tagging and untagging cards are usually different, so in order to work out how good a card is economically, you need to somehow split up the gain between the two cards and decide which one is responsible.

However, there's a reasonably convincing way to work this out. If you have an untagger but not a tagger, the untagger is losing a lot of value and is mostly useless (e.g. if you play Friend of a Friend and then use its untag ability whilst not actually tagged, you have spent , , 3 to gain 5, i.e. two clicks to gain two credits, and might as well have just clicked for credits instead) – as such, we can assume that the untaggers are useless except when tagged. If you have a tagger but not an untagger, then assuming you don't want to float the tag (because 1. it is dangerous and 2. doing that turns off most of Seb's support cards), you will have to remove the tag manually, spending , 2 to use the basic action. So the obvious way to work out the value of the untagging card is to see how much more it gains than the basic untagging action – any gain above that must be coming from the tagging card instead. Let's see how this reasoning applies to Friend of a Friend's two abilities.

The untag ability

First, let's look at the untag ability. Taking the , 3 it takes to install this card into account, using this ability means that we have spent , , 3 to gain , 2, 5 (i.e. an untag and 5 credits). That's a net trade of the card and a click for 4 credits, an economic trade that most Netrunner players are very familiar with – it's a Sure Gamble! In other words, if you play this card planning to use its first ability, you are in effect saying "I am going to temporarily go down 3, but the next time I would remove a tag, my 3 will get refunded and I will get the gain of a Sure Gamble on top of that".

How valuable is this? Well, a Sure Gamble is incredibly valuable (arguably the best economic card in the game that hasn't been banned). Going down on credits temporarily in order to get a Sure Gamble worth of value is also pretty common (if you're rich enough, the delay in gaining the credits usually ends up not mattering); Daily Casts gives one more credit but on a 4-turn delay, and while the delay means it isn't quite as good as Sure Gamble, it's still considered a staple that is run in a wide range of Runner decks. So for the untag ability to be good, basically all that is required is that your deck won't go too long without needing to remove a tag.

One caveat with this ability is that it can compete with other untagging abilities. For example, if you are using Networking as your primary way to remove tags, rather than the basic action, then the cost of a tag needs to be evaluated at , 1 rather than , 2 – that makes this ability into an Easy Mark rather than a Sure Gamble, which generally isn't worth it.

The tag ability

What about the ability to tag yourself? Well, if you don't have a way to get positive side effects from the tag, it's pretty terrible: counting the cost to untag, you're spending the card and , , , 3, 2 to gain 9, i.e. 3 clicks and a card for 4 credits, which is actually a loss rather than a gain (both cards and clicks are more valuable than credits). This is why Friend of a Friend is clearly intended to be a Seb card: Seb will trigger when the tag is gained, and that trigger provides additional value.

We can calculate the value of a Seb trigger the same way we calculated the value of an untag, by seeing how much better it is than the equivalent basic action. In this case, installing a card from grip usually costs , and Seb provides a 2 discount on the install – so as long as you have an appropriate connection in hand, the value of the Seb trigger is , 2. This happens to be the same as the value of a basic-action untag, so effectively, what's happening here is that when you have Seb's ability available, taking your first tag doesn't matter at all; the resources you would spend on installing the connection are the same as the resources you would spend on removing the tag.

This means that in the scenario where we have Seb, along with a connection that costs at least 2 and that we actually want to install, the effective trade made by the second ability is to trade the card and , , 3 for 9. Again, this is a recognisable card, Lucky Find. It's hard to gather data on just how good Lucky Find is as an economic card; it isn't widely played, most likely due to its influence cost (2 universal influence is a lot for an economy card), and thus it's hard to get an idea of just how valuable a Lucky Find is. I think most methods of counting it put it approximately on the level of Sure Gamble, though.

As a sanity check, we can compare two Friends of a Friend to the Sure Gamble + Lucky Find combination:

• If you play Sure Gamble and Lucky Find and manually install a 2 connection, you have spent ++ and 5+3+2 to gain a total of 9+9 and an install. This is a net trade of and the 2 event cards to gain 8 and an install.
• If you play two Friends of a Friend, using one to tag yourself and one to untag yourself, and installing a 2 connection with the resulting Seb trigger, you have spent +++ and 3+3 to gain 5+9 and an install. Again, this is a net trade of and the 2 resource cards to gain 8 and an install.

This produces the expected result, that the gains are equal, which has made me reasonably confident that the calculations are correct.

Comparison and conclusions

There's a nice symmetry between the two abilities on Friend of a Friend. The untag is very comparable to Sure Gamble (but useful only if you need an untag), but gets worse if you have alternative untagging methods. The tag ability is very comparable to Lucky Find (but useful only if you have Seb and a connection that you want to install), and gets better if you have alternative untagging methods (because then you get to clear the tag more cheaply). This means that which ability you end up using will depend primarily on what else is in your deck. Conceptually, using the tag ability is "better" than using the untag ability – they start out comparable even when untagging with the basic action, but the tag ability gets better as your deck gains more methods of cheaply untagging. However, Seb decks often have lots of other sources of tags, and to get value from the Seb triggers, each tag needs to be paired with a connection to install (and duplicates are useful only if the connection is useful in duplicates) – in practice, it's fairly common to not have enough usefully installable connections to make the tag ability worth it (even in decks that are running 20+ connections). As such, this card normally seems to be used for the untag rather than the tag in practice (although because you don't have to choose which ability to use until you actually use it, if you do end up with a glut of connections you would like to install, then it's definitely correct to use the tagging side of this card to help you get value from installing them). It's not like there's a "right" or "wrong" side of the card – it's more that the correct side varies with the circumstances, and either will give you similar amounts of value when the appropriate situation comes up, but one situation is more likely to come up than the other.

There is one other reason to run this card in Seb – although the fact hasn't been mentioned so far this review, Friend of a Friend is itself a connection that costs at least 2. One real problem with Seb decks is getting enough installable connections to be able to keep getting value from the Seb triggers (and in turn, effectively removing the downside from your abilities that tag yourself). Something of a threat to that style of deck is that either you don't play enough connections to make the tagging abilities usable, or else you have to resort to mediocre connections like Scrubber, that probably wouldn't be in your deck otherwise, in order to give the ability something to install (and doing that makes all your tagging cards worse because the Seb trigger is no longer providing its full value). If your deck is trying to take substantial advantage of Seb triggers, then Friend of a Friend should be very strongly considered as a 3-of because it goes into an "economy slot" but, unlike the economic cards you would likely be using instead, also helps increase your density of usefully installable connections and thus reduces the chance that you might end up gaining a tag whilst having nothing to install with it.

What if you aren't using Seb? In that case, the tag ability is basically worthless, and the untag ability useful only if 1. you got enough value when self-inflicting a tag to compensate even without the Seb trigger, or 2. you were tagged unwillingly/unexpectedly and now need to clear it. The former situation would be weird (although it could happen if you were running Thunder Art Gallery and Rogue Trading in a non-Seb deck). The latter situation probably depends on what the Corp is doing, and thus it would mean this would be a tech card – but you don't generally want your tech card against tags to clear exactly one tag, because you generally get tagged more than that in a game, and dedicating many slots to cards that aren't useful in all matchups is typically a losing strategy.

So the overall conclusion: if you aren't using a strategy based around tagging yourself for a benefit and then clearing the tags, this card isn't appropriate for your deck. However, if you're using Seb, it's pretty much an auto-include; depending on which half of your deck you're drawing, it will fill in the other half as either a Sure Gamble or Lucky Find, whilst also providing a usefully installable connection to help make sure that the Seb triggers aren't wasted. I would strongly suggest including three even if you're using Seb out of faction (via DJ Fenris) – it's only one dot of influence each, and a card that solves this many problems for the deck is probably going to be better than the economy event or resource you would have included instead.

So after over a decade of being one of the worst standalone icebreakers in the game, and widely ridiculed as a terrible card, Wyrm ended up being seriously used in a tournament-winning Eternal deck.

Wyrm's primary downside is that it is incredibly, incredibly expensive to use it to accomplish anything. However, this turns out to be its only significant downside; if you truly have enough credits to afford anything, then Wyrm turns out to be one of the best available options to spend them on. As such, it turns out that if you can set up an infinite credit combo (not just large, but infinite) – so that money truly is no concern at all – then Wyrm becomes the best icebreaker in the game (being able to break almost all ICE with no resources spent other than credits – the only exceptions are anti-AI ICE like Swordsman and anti-strength-reduction ICE like Lotus Field).

The conditions in which Wyrm is good are thus incredibly obscure; until recently, the known infinite-Runner-credits combos involved heavy use of efficient and generic icebreakers anyway, so it made sense to use those to do your icebreaking post-combo rather than using a separate payoff card. However, the deck that won the Eternal portion of Crown of Servers was using a different and newly discovered infinite credit combo (which subsequently got banned due to being far too powerful and consistent), and the icebreakers it was "naturally" running weren't very good at actually getting through ICE even with infinite credits, so Wyrm it was.

With the combo banned, Wyrm is likely to drop back into obscurity for a while. But the next time an infinite-credit combo slips past the playtesters, it'll be there, waiting, ready to help you with the payoff.