Subliminal Messaging is an interesting card that does a lot of different things, and its main focus – and use in a deck – has shifted around over time.

As an economy card

The most obvious use of Subliminal Messaging is as an economy card that gives you 1 every turn the Runner doesn't run (but that doesn't work as well in multiples). This can be a pretty good rate of return, if you can set your deck up in such a way that you can penalise the Runner for running a lot. Against many decks, most Runners will run most turns anyway, so Subliminal works best in cases where they don't. The key thing to notice is that a single copy of Subliminal doesn't cost you a server, or an install click, or a rez cost – all you need to do is draw it and it'll be ready to make money right away. The fact that it gives you a 1 bonus on the turn you drew it, even if the Runner ran last turn, helps to blunt the cost of the card (one card is worth more than 1 but not by that much). It does cost a deck slot, though, which means that it normally isn't worth playing Subliminal unless it's a particularly good fit for your deck.

As such, generally speaking, Subliminal Messaging as a pure economy event works best in pure glacier decks; standard strategy against those doesn't include running every turn, so you're likely to get the free credit quite frequently. Non-glacier decks face the issue that many runners (Hoshiko, Sunny, Smoke, Freedom, and most Criminals) get enough value from the fact of having made a run that they will naturally want to run pretty much every turn, if there's anywhere they can get in (and sometimes even if there isn't) – only glacier decks are likely to be able to ICE up everything to the extent that "value runs" become worthless.

As a combo card

Despite its obvious use being as a source of economy, Subliminal Messaging also started finding its way into combo decks. This is based on the fact that it's an operation that refunds when played – these decks mostly don't care about the 1 economy, but purely about the fact that the operation refunds itself. In particular, a copy of Subliminal was standard in Accelerated Diagnostics decks, back when they were legal – if you can hit Subliminal Messaging off Accelerated Diagnostics, you just refunded the click (and credit!) cost of the Diagnostics. Accelerated Diagnostics' best friend Power Shutdown also combos somewhat with Subliminal Messaging, in that the run that turns Subliminal off turns Shutdown on.

The Power Shutdown/Accelerated Diagnostics combo is behind us, and that's probably for the best – it's banned in everything (even Eternal, a format which only has four banned cards). The "Subliminal click" lives on, though, in the form of MirrorMorph: Endless Iteration. MirrorMorph's ability gives you a bonus click as long as your first four actions are all different, but it doesn't care about actions beyond the fourth. This means that in a MirrorMorph deck, Subliminal Messaging can be used for "click laundering", counting as a "play operation" action without actually spending a click, and serving as one of the simplest ways to get a five-click turn (thus allowing you to play two duplicate actions, as nothing stops the fifth action being the same as an earlier action). An extreme example of this is when you have a Bass CH1R180G4 pre-installed; you can 1) install an agenda, 2) play Subliminal, 3) pop Bass, 4) advance the agenda, and now that you've satisfied the MirrorMorph trigger the 5th, 6th and 7th clicks of your turn can all be advances, making it possible to score a 4/2 from hand. A preinstalled Bass can normally only score 3/2s, but the Subliminal Messaging managed to smuggle an extra click past MirrorMorph's trigger.

As an amplifier for Jinteki economy cards

Subliminal Messaging, when played, gives 1. However, you don't necessarily have to play it immediately after it comes back to your hand, and this turns out to give synergy with some of the Jinteki economy cards. There are two really big synergies which mean that Subliminal Messaging can easily earn a spot in JInteki decks that run operation economies:

• Subliminal Messaging can be discarded to Hansei Review, and yet you didn't really lose a card in the process (just 1 because you discarded the Subliminal rather than playing it). This removes Hansei Review's disadvantage over Hedge Fund. Admittedly, it also removes the advantage, but hey, it isn't like Hedge Fund is a bad card – most decks that play an operation economy would be happy to play six.
• Subliminal Messaging can be revealed to Celebrity Gift, and you still get to play the Subliminal Messaging afterwards. This helps to blunt Celebrity Gift's downside; if your hand is full of Subliminal Messagings that the Runner knows is there, you can just show them to avoid having to show something more important. Especially if running multiple Subliminals, it's quite common to be able to hide a card or two from the Runner and yet still get the full value of your Gift.

Hansei Review and Celebrity Gift are probably the top two Jinteki economy cards at the moment (if building a Jinteki deck that can't use an asset economy, and most of them can't, those are the main Jinteki cards I would consider for its economy – most of the best economy cards are neutral). So Subliminal Messaging being able to combo with both of them is something that really pushes up its value, and helps to make Jinteki as a whole a more viable faction.

There are other Jinteki cards that like Subliminal Messaging, too (e.g. Genotyping and particularly Hyoubu Institute: Absolute Clarity), but they aren't as good or as commonly played. The Review and Gift synergies are easily good enough to give Subliminal a slot in the typical Jinteki deck, though.

As protection for HQ

Sabotage is one of the new abilities in Midnight Sun; it's one of the more popular deck styles in Startup, and people are experimenting with it in Standard too. If you're up against Esâ Afontov: Eco-Insurrectionist, then having a card that you can cheaply discard from HQ and bring back later is very valuable; as such, Subliminal makes for a particularly good discard to sabotages. Once you find the Subliminal, it effectively forces Esâ to run every turn, or else have half of xir deck switched off. Esâ decks are generally set up to be able to do that if necessary, but you're still cutting down the Runner's options, and slowing down their setup; Subliminal Messaging helps to fight those decks by forcing them to spend clicks running rather than giving them the option to take turns fixing their economy. (The same idea can also be used against Alice Merchant: Clan Agitator, who doesn't technically sabotage, but whose ability is very similar.)

Subliminal Messaging is an untrashable operation, too, so it provides some protection even against more normal Runner playstyles; HQ accesses hit random cards, and Subliminal can be one of these cards. Admittedly, you could use almost any ICE or operation for that, but Subliminal goes into an economy slot (so it's helping to move your economy card mix more towards operations, which is a good thing in terms of HQ protection), and it partially works around the main downside of running lots of operations: operations tend to clog your hand if you can't play them immediately, but there isn't any cost to "discarding" one Subliminal per turn (by playing it) and it tends to come back on its own later on, when you might have more room in your hand.

Conclusions

Subliminal Messaging might at first seem to be an economy card, but it's also a combo card – and in Jinteki decks running an operation economy, a better economy card – and tech against sabotage – and a little bit of HQ/R&D reinforcement. That's a lot of jobs that one card can be doing, but they're all kind-of minor, and all of them get affected if you're allowing the Runner to run every turn and get most of the benefit of their click. If you can make (or if your deck naturally makes) running costly for the Runner, though, it isn't rare for a copy to pull its weight economically over the course of the game; it'd be a decent economy operation even if it returns to hand only twice over the course of the game (that would be a clickless 3, which is up there with the premium Corp economy cards). It is, however, at its best if your deck can also do something else with it; if you're running Celebrity Gift and Hansei Review, or if you have a combo that benefits from the click, or if your deck is weak to sabotage, then it really starts showing its value (often even to the point that playing multiple copies becomes worthwhile). But if you're playing the sort of deck where the Runner will want to run every turn anyway, then your Subliminal is worse than useless; it's rarely worth spending a card to gain 1, not even when you can make the trade clicklessly, and yet if you never get to bring it back, your Subliminal will never get to do anything else.

Sure Gamble and Hedge Fund, two cards that are identical apart from which player they belong to (Sure Gamble on the runner side, Hedge Fund on the corp side) hold a special status in Netrunner (to the extent that they were reprinted in System Gateway, a set that otherwise intentionally avoided reprints). They're generally considered sufficiently better than the other cards that do the same job that they're a 3-of in the vast majority of Netrunner decks; no other cards are quite that ubiquitous (even Paperclip sometimes loses out to speciality fracters which fit the deck better, and some decks don't run fracters at all, but every deck needs economy).

Unsurprisingly, Sure Gamble has collected a range of reviews, so it's surprising that Hedge Fund's review page is fairly derelict, mostly saying "this is just Sure Gamble on the corp side". That's a pity, because as the Runner and Corp are so mechanically different, the effect of Hedge Fund and Sure Gamble on the game can be quite different from each other. Let's fix that.

Starting from the start, Hedge Fund is pretty much a pure economy card – as long as you have at least 5, you can trade your Hedge Fund and a click for four credits. This is generally considered a pretty good rate of return, and if you're running a "normal" style of deck, it's hard to match this; so in any Corp deck that wants economy, and almost all decks do, Hedge Fund is normally good enough to win itself three deck slots. However, it's worth noting that Hedge Fund is notably less powerful than Sure Gamble – Sure Gamble is often the best card in the deck it's in, whereas Hedge Fund is quite frequently beaten (but still good enough that it typically gets a deck slot anyway). Let's look at some of the reasons why:

• The Corp has less ability to avoid dropping below 5 than the Runner does. In order to play Hedge Fund, you need to be able to play a 5 operation. Runners are normally able to avoid going very low on credits; it takes a specific sort of corp deck (nearly always in NBN) to intentionally drain the Runner's credits, whereas Diversion of Funds is a real threat that could come out of almost any Criminal deck (and if the Runner plays DofF, then you're almost certainly going to end up poor, whether from the effect of the card itself or the cost of rezzing ICE to stop it). There are entire deck archetypes based around dropping the Corp to near 0 and then taking advantage of their inability to rez or play anything to keep them there. (Incidentally, this is the same reason that Beanstalk Royalties is a lot better than Easy Mark.) So at the time you're most in need of economy, Hedge Fund doesn't help at all.

  It's also worth noting that a Runner deck that can't consistently stay above 8 or so is highly likely to die to Hard-Hitting News – Runner decks that can't make use of Sure Gamble are thus unplayable for reasons unrelated to Sure Gamble itself. There isn't a corresponding effect like this that affects Corps (the closest is Mining Accident which has a much smaller impact on the game), so it isn't always ridiculous to build a Corp deck that frequently can't scrape together the funds required for their hedges. (Indeed, with the release of Bladderwort, some Corps have been experimenting with the strategy of being consistently poor.)

• The Corp has less ability to cheat on Hedge Fund's 5 cost. This is a more minor point, but there are plenty of Runner cards that can discount events (e.g. Prepaid VoicePAD, Patchwork, Mystic Maemi, and most recently Ghosttongue), and because the Runner's rig is fairly hard for the Corp to disturb, they can safely be installed without any special care or protection. I can't remember whether any currently legal Corp cards discount the cost of operations, but doubt any of them are being widely played – such cards would probably be assets, and assets can be pretty hard to defend for many decks.

  This means that Sure Gamble is more playable at low credit totals than Hedge Fund is.

• Many Corp decks have some specific economic synergy available that outpaces Hedge Fund. In most Runner decks, Sure Gamble is about as efficient as you can get in terms of burst credits from a single card. On the Corp side, though, there are a lot of conditional economic operations that give you huge economic boosts as long as you're running the appropriate deck or identity. Some examples:

  • Fully Operational needs just two iced assets to give a better rate of return than Hedge Fund does – any deck that's designed around icing assets will be able to reach that point pretty early in the game.
  • NGO Front is a super-powerful economy card in Weyland Consortium: Built to Last, usable from 1 and giving a 6 profit as a double or 8 as a triple – and that's just if you use it as a pure economic operation, and you can get extra use out of it as a shell game card at the same time. (Its use as an economy card, as opposed to a shell game card, is debatable in some identities, but Built to Last's extra 2 gives it favourable numbers even when you look only at the economic use.)
  • Celebrity Gift normally gives a 7 profit as a double. In Hyoubu Institute: Absolute Clarity, it gives 8. It does have a downside, but 8 as a double is such a large gain that Hyoubu decks benefit from being built to withstand the downside.
  • Too Big to Fail is worth 10 to The Outfit (and Hostile Takeover is worth 8 as a triple – not a bad rate of return for something that also gives you an agenda point!). There's an obvious downside, but if you're playing The Outfit, your deck is going to be based around living with that downside.
  • In decks that can protect economic assets on an ongoing basis, it's frequently possible to get 3 per turn, which makes Hedge Fund's 4 as a one-off look poor by comparison. The current way to do that is Daily Quest, although Commercial Bankers Group was also popular until it rotated.
  • In decks that can protect economic assets but only for a turn or two, Regolith Mining License gives a 13 profit over six clicks, giving a lot of economy for a small number of deck slots (and fitting very well into the typical glacier deck's plan – generally, the times at which the scoring server is free are the times at which they need economy, so when you need to use it, you can).
  • Mass Commercialization is banned nowadays, but before that, it was often worth 10-12 in an appropriate deck.

  This sort of economic combo is fairly common on the Corp side, meaning that if you're playing a Corp which has something like this available, the combo going to be your primary source of economy, and once it gets going, Hedge Fund will look more like an afterthought.

Despite all this, Hedge Fund normally ends up meriting three slots in most Corp decks, even though deck slot competition is really high there. Partly this is because Sure Gamble is one of the best cards in Netrunner, so "it's worse than Sure Gamble" isn't in itself a reason to reject a card; almost every Netrunner card is worse than Sure Gamble. Partly, it's because Hedge Fund is one of the best ways to make money quickly on turn 1, whilst leaving clicks over to do other things; if you want to be able to rez an Anansi on the Runner's first turn, or want to threaten being able to rez a hypothetical Anansi that you didn't draw, then Hedge Fund is the easiest way to reach the appropriate credit total whilst still leaving clicks to install ICE. As such, Hedge Fund's value in the early game is often high enough that it benefits even decks for which it's mostly outclassed later in the game.

The other big reason to run Hedge Fund, and something that isn't applicable to Sure Gamble at all, is that it does not have a trash cost. This means that Hedge Fund passively helps to save you from repeated R&D runs. Now, there are plenty of cards without trash costs in Netrunner, but most of them have fairly fixed roles in a deck – depending on the needs of your deck, you'll have some specific number of ICE, be able to afford a certain number of non-economic operations, and so on. Economic cards are more interchangable, and most of the best economic cards are assets or agendas, therefore trashable or stealable from R&D. Hedge Fund has the advantage of being an operation with pretty decent numbers, so you can run it in a slot that might otherwise have to go to an economic asset with a similar rate of return, and thus picking Hedge Fund over the asset helps make R&D just that little bit more secure. In Corp decks with a sufficiently strong economy, this will be the primary benefit to Hedge Fund late game – the 4 can become fairly irrelevant by that point, but the lack of a trash cost matters all game long.

The main consequences of all this are that Sure Gamble is in over 90% of Runner decks (it feels like over 99%, although some tournament results seem to disagree with this?), whereas Hedge Fund is a little lower; tournament results put it at 80-90%, which feels low to me (I would have estimated 95% or so), but there's definitely a consensus that nearly every Corp deck benefits from some Hedge Funds. Sure Gamble is so strong that very few Runner decks will want to cut it; in modern Netrunner, it's almost impossible for a Runner to have economy strong enough that Sure Gamble fails to make the cut (even if they can make credits more efficiently than that in the late-game, they probably want Sure Gamble credits to get their economy started). Hedge Fund is not quite as strong, so Corp decks which have a very powerful economy often consider cutting it. Still, it's sufficiently powerful that it often ends up meriting a deck slot in those decks, even if it's far from their best card.

It's also worth noting that neither Sure Gamble nor Hedge Fund is sufficient to be the backbone of a deck's economy by itself. Unless you start recycling them, which is slow and convoluted, Hedge Funds will give you at most 12 over the course of the game, and most decks spend a lot more than that (it isn't unheard of for decks to have credit expenditures in the triple digits). As such, new players should note that although a playset of Hedge Funds will improve all but the most unusual decks, your deck will also need to include a range of economy beside that, and the right way to build a Corp deck's economy can depend a lot on what the rest of the deck is doing. Hedge Fund may be a good card, but it won't carry a deck by itself.

Thimblerig is a surprisingly powerful code gate. Many Jinteki decks go for ICE like Aiki or Mind Game if they need a cheap code gate to pad their servers out with, but for me, I've settled on Thimblerig as my first choice. Here's why.

First off, as the reviews on its page mention, Quandary is a good ICE. Thimblerig is better than Quandary in every way other than its rez cost, and with a rez cost difference of only 1, it can do a passable imitation. Thus, putting a Thimblerig out early game forces the opponent to find some way to get through code gates.

In the early days of Netrunner, that would typically be a decoder. But times have changed, and runners have a wide variety of ways to get through ICE early on nowadays – if you try to use a code gate as a gear check nowadays, the Runner is probably more likely to bring out a Boomerang, Botulus, or Endurance than they are a Gordian Blade. These "pseudo-bypass" cards have the benefit that they don't care about the ICE type, and don't care about the ICE strength, so they're much better at stopping a rush early game than traditional breakers would be.

The genius of Thimblerig is that it's at least somewhat resistant to this sort of trick. Normally a scoring server will have multiple pieces of ICE on it; glaciers make giant scoring servers, and even rush decks usually stack multiple pieces of ICE of different types so that the runner has to find multiple breakers to get in. A common scenario is that you've rushed out an early agenda behind a gear-check barrier (say a Palisade or Ice Wall), but the Runner face-checked it and knows what ICE is there, and has their fracter out already. So you install your Thimblerig onto the same server, install and advance your second agenda, and the Runner puts a Boomerang on the unrezzed Thimblerig and runs in.

With almost any other code gate, the Runner would get in at this point, despite not having found their decoder yet. With Thimblerig, though, they get locked out; after they Boomerang their way through Thimblerig, you just swap it backwards in the same server, and now they have to get through it again – but Boomerang is single-use and they can't break the Thimblerig twice. This ability is well worth paying the extra 1 for – it comes up very frequently, and has won me a number of games. This isn't even necessarily limited to the early game; some Runners will run a nontraditional breaker suite, or have been pressed for economy the entire game and could never afford to install a permanent decoder, or don't have the MU for all the programs they want and are leaving out their decoder as the last important part, and I've even had a Thimblerig chain save the critical final agenda that would have put either of us up to seven points.

It's also worth noting that pseudo-bypass cards like Boomerang and Endurance, due to not caring about subtypes or strength, are equally good at breaking the vast majority of ICE. So a Thimblerig is doing pretty well in terms of "effort for you to rez vs. effort for them to break"; you could have spent twice or three times as much and had just as much impact on the Runner (or indeed less – most ICE can't force the Runner to encounter it a second time in the same run).

The other great advantage of Thimblerig is that it's a gear check that isn't dead even once the Runner has their decoder up and running. Apart from its usefulness in forcing a decoder install, it can do a separate job, tending to your servers and ensuring that all the ICE is in the optimal places. Often the best short-term placement for ICE is different from the best long-term placement, and Thimblerig bridges that gap, allowing you to (gradually, over time) fix placement decisions that were necessary at the time but suboptimal for the ongoing game.

Finally, Thimblerig has the strange property, unusual for gear checks, that (depending on what deck the opponent is running) it is actually occasionally taxing. The best you can normally hope for with a "cheap" piece of ICE (2 to rez) is that you're taxing the Runner 3 per run. For example, IP Block, which specialises in taxing centrals runs and is one of the best cheap pieces of ICE for the purpose, typically takes 3 to run through (less if the Runner has link) – and yet it is very bad as a gear check, being passable with no breakers at all. Thimblerig is 1 to break with many breakers, as you'd expect from a gear check, but Black Orchestra, one of the most commonly used decoders in Anarch decks, requires 3 to break a Thimblerig. This occasionally makes it possible to make Anarchs' centrals runs very taxing even when you don't have much money to rez ICE with: a Thimblerig plus two pieces of unrezzed ICE cost a total of 5 (2 in rez costs + 3 in install costs) and will tax an Anarch who relies on Black Orchestra 9 per run, which is an incredibly good ratio between the server setup cost and the break cost.

The main drawback of Thimblerig is that it has competition from gear checks that are designed to stop different sorts of shenanigans from those that Thimblerig prevents – in particular, a Thimblerig chain will force a Botulus to take a break every now and then in order to run its server repeatedly, but a Magnet will prevent the Botulus getting in at all. Magnet is also much more resistant to Aumakua. This means that if you're really trying to force a decoder install using cheap ICE, you probably want to be mixing Thimblerigs and Magnets. (At least they're only one influence each.) However, Thimblerig is still decently good at forcing the Runner's decoder to come out, which is something that will benefit almost any Corp deck due to the way in which it slows the Runner's deck down; you're making them find their decoder and pay to install it, and even if that's all the Thimblerig ever does, it has probably paid for itself. If it subsequently helps you put your ICE into improved positions, or maybe fixes damage done by Tāo, it has definitely more paid for itself. After all, it only cost 2 in the first place!

Unlike the other review, I have been fairly impressed with this card. The key to using Stoneship Chart Room effectively isn't in its upside – the card's abilities are marginal at best. Rather, unusually for Netrunner cards, Stoneship Chart Room has an almost complete lack of downsides (assuming that you're playing Shaper already – if you're considering importing this, consider Build Script or Deuces Wild instead, or maybe Blueberry!™ Diesel if in Criminal).

One thing to note is that the second ability here is really marginal, but it isn't what the card is really about. Netrunner decks often get into situations where they're very slightly short of something they need in order to win the game, so the second ability does have its uses – if you're one Endurance or Propeller or Revolver counter short of being able to steal the critical agenda, then sure, you'd use it and go do your run. But this has very little impact on the card's strength, which is nearly all in the primary ability, so the rest of the review is going to focus on that.

There are two cards I want to look at as almost direct comparisons for Stoneship Chart Room (when you're planning to use its first ability): Diesel and Build Script. Each of these is "one basic action" better than Stoneship Chart Room is (with Diesel drawing an extra card and Build Script giving you an extra credit). They both have issues of their own, though.

First off, Diesel. This is a widely played card, but it isn't an auto-include, and the reason is that it's somewhat clunky. When you play it, it draws you three cards, which is great; but now your hand is three cards larger, and if it was already fairly large, you're going to need to play some of those cards right away to avoid having to discard some to hand size (and lose most of the benefit of playing Diesel in the first place). So Diesel is a card that functions best in decks which can dump their hand onto the board easily and need help refilling it. That's only a minority of decks, though – it's rare for decks to be full of cheap cards, so installing things to get them out of your hand comes at a credit cost, and it's hard to get enough credits early to clear things from your hand at enough of a rate to use Diesel at full efficiency. Additionally, many decks want to play situational events, which have to be held in hand until they're ready – you can't just install them, they're going to count against the hand size limit no matter what, and should six of them end up in hand at once, you're going to have to discard some. Diesel also has timing issues to some extent; if you're holding back critical cards, you have to play it early in a turn because you can't keep both your critical cards, and the draws off Diesel, in hand simultaneously during the Corp turn.

Diesel is also useful for digging through your deck in a hurry to find some specific card (e.g. to set up a combo), but at the cost of having to uselessly discard some of your deck (and VRcation would be better if this were your main reason to play the card). Many decks can't afford to be throwing cards away.

Meanwhile, Build Script draws only two cards rather than three, which is much easier to deal with in terms of hand size issues; normally, you can just leave a Build Script in your hand until the next time you would click to draw a card, and then play the Build Script to, effectively, replace the Build Script with a random card at the same time as you draw, with a 1 bonus thrown in. In other words, it's as though the Build Script isn't in your deck at all (and you gained 1 out of nowhere), because it turns itself into another card in your deck; so this effectively lets you cheat on the minimum deck sizes, making your deck just that little bit more efficient.

There's still a bit of hand size pressure when doing this, though (the Build Script itself is a situational event, which needs to be held in your grip alongside the other situational cards which might be in your deck), but that downside isn't huge, and Build Script goes a long way towards, effectively, making your deck 3 cards smaller and thus a lot more efficient. Its real downside, and the reason that it isn't played much, is that dot of universal influence; paying a point of influence normally isn't worth it for a gain this marginal.

In Shaper, Stoneship Chart Room is like a Build Script that gives up 1 to avoid spending the influence dot, or a Diesel that gives up a card in exchange for completely avoiding the hand size issues. Either of those on their own would be enough to, in effect, play a 42 (or 37) card deck. You also don't face any problems with timing, nor with holding enough cards in your hand at once; being a resource, Stoneship Chart Room can be played equally viably on any of the four clicks of your turn, and will peacefully wait in your rig until the correct moment to use it. So unlike Diesel or Build Script, Stoneship Chart Room isn't even counting towards your maximum hand size.

Another key advantage of Stoneship Chart Room is that the value of Runner clicks varies a lot over short timescales. It's fairly common to be in a situation where a click is mostly useless. Say you've come to the last click of your turn, already have a full hand, and need to avoid playing something because they're situational cards that don't make sense in this situation, or would put your credit count dangerously low. Depending on what Corp deck you're up against, running last click may be a very bad idea, and so you may be forced into clicking for a credit, which is mostly a waste of a click. Stoneship Chart Room has a fairly even value regardless of when you play it, so its install cost is effectively slightly lower than normal; the card costs but it isn't any , it's specifically the that would otherwise be least useful (which in most decks, is effectively 1). So although the card looks entirely economically neutral, there is in practice a little economy being gained from playing it; you're spending 1 card, plus an unusually useless click, to gain 2 cards, which is about equal in value to clicklessly and cardlessly trading 1 for 1 card. That's a very small gain, but it's a positive gain (e.g. the ability to do that repeatedly is the primary reason why people play Hoshiko, who is frequently one of the strongest runners), and you've effectively given up nothing at all to do that (other than shrinking your deck very slightly).

Stoneship Chart Room does have one disadvantage, but it's pretty small, and the reduction in effective deck size is probably worth more: prior to the point at which you'd do your first click-for-draw of the game, it's taking up space which could have been a more impactful card. Most decks will click to draw very early (usually on turn 1), so this doesn't matter much, but it does have an impact on your mulligan decision; if there's a Stoneship Chart Room in your first potential opening hand, it's kind-of like having one card hidden when you're deciding whether to mulligan that hand or not.

(Another marginal disadvantage – if Stoneship Chart Room is the second-last card in your deck, it'll costing you an extra click or card draw ability to get at the last card, without the Chart Room itself being usable. The odds of the cards ending up in that specific order are fairly low, though, and the situation only matters if you end up going through your entire deck, so this downside will hardly ever come up. Note that having a Stoneship Chart Room as the last card in your deck is not a problem, as that gives you the effective reduction in deck size via another mechanism, and even gives you a blank card at the end to act as a hitpoint, so it's position 44 specifically that causes issues.)

So far, this review has been considering Stoneship Chart Room from the point of view of "this card has only a slight upside, but the downside is basically nonexistent (even taking into account the deck slots you're using to play it), so if you're in Shaper, you may as well play it". But we're in Shaper, the faction of complex card interactions and weird jank combos, so unsurprisingly, there are going to be situations where the card suddenly starts pulling well above its weight in terms of the amount of upside it gives you.

The first combo I want to highlight, because it's the first one I noticed, is with Lat: Ethical Freelancer. Lat a) is most commonly used with weird combo decks that require holding lots of specific cards in hand until you unleash them all on the same turn, thus normally can't play Diesel effectively, and b) has an ability that cares a lot about the exact number of cards in your hand at the moment your turn ends. Stoneship Chart Room lets you cheat on Lat's trigger timing, because you have a choice about when to use its trash ability: if having a low number of cards in hand would be beneficial that turn, you can let your turn end and then pop the Chart Room; but if having a high number of cards would be beneficial, you can pop the Chart Room before ending your turn. So it's basically giving you two chances to hit Lat's magic card count in a single turn. Successfully triggering Lat is worth a card, so if it helps you out with Lat's trigger, your Stoneship Chart Room is basically worth three cards rather than two, making it into a true Diesel, but without any of the downsides.

Even if you aren't playing Lat, though, Stoneship Chart Room has another ability: it lets you be above your maximum hand size during the Corp's turn, in much the same way that Sports Hopper used to. Most decks have a maximum hand size of 5; ending your turn with 5 cards in hand, then popping Stoneship Chart Room, can get that up to 7. And 7 cards in hand is a very critical number in today's metagame, because it lets you survive BOOM!. If you fear you're up against a BOOM! deck, you can use your Chart Room as a tech card, rather than a deck-thinner; just install it, and leave it in place until you get tagged on the Corp turn, and pop it at that point. Although you'll probably end up getting BOOM!ed and losing 7 cards, at least you didn't lose the game, and you'll have some chance to recover (depending on how much the Corp invested into their combo, you may be able to recover faster than they can). There are better tech cards against BOOM! (e.g. Jarogniew Mercs – you can install it and immediately clear the tag), but they're mostly dead in the majority of matchups. Stoneship Chart Room has the advantage of being a tech card in the matchup that needs it, whilst still being (marginally) beneficial in matchups where flatline combos are completely irrelevant.

Along similar lines, you can use Stoneship Chart Room to have extra cards in your hand during your own turn, e.g. to steal a City Works Project or Obokata Protocol. It also often allows digging for a combo to happen one turn sooner (this is technically a side effect of the way it replaces "your most useless click" with a card draw on a future turn, but this implication is non-obvious and thus worth pointing out).

Finally, nothing's forcing you to use the abilities on Stoneship Chart Room; you can treat it as a blank 0-cost resource if you'd prefer. This is a side benefit of the card, but it's still relevant if your deck is running, e.g., Dummy Box or Aesop's Pawnshop (or in older formats, Hayley Kaplan: Universal Scholar).

Conclusions: this card is not worth spending even one influence dot on, but it should quite possibly be an auto-include if you're playing Shaper; unlike almost every other card in the game (where you're paying something if you put it in your deck), with this card you are in effect paying nothing at all to include it, and thus it doesn't matter how small the (fairly small) upside is. The primary upside is that you're playing with an effectively smaller deck size, meaning that the best cards in your deck are more likely to come up over the course of the game (and yet if you're up against a grinder deck, you can choose to play it like a blank 0-cost resource instead, so you can even dodge the main downside of shrinking your deck). It helps smooth your economy slightly by allowing you to postpone a card-drawn-by-click to a later turn, meaning that you get a bit more use out of otherwise low-value clicks; this is pretty minor but can speed up combo decks by a turn sometimes. It'll also serve as a tech card in some matchups, whilst not costing anything in others; and you can use it as part of combos, especially when playing Lat (or just sell it to Aesop if 3 are more important than 2 cards and you have nothing else to sell). There are some very slight downsides, but they're much smaller than the downsides of other comparable cards, so there's very little reason not to run this.

The main reason you wouldn't run this in Shaper would be if your deck never or rarely spends one click to draw one card (e.g. you're running Professional Contacts or Verbal Plasticity, thus your card-drawing clicks have useful side effects). That can certainly happen, but it's likely to be only a minority of Shaper decks.

To me, Regenesis is a build-around card. There's a huge amount of potential upside here, but with the downside that if you don't set everything up perfectly, it's just a blank 3/1.

The best case of Regenesis

First, let's look at what happens if everything goes ideally (later, I'll look at what's required to make that happen). If scored correctly, Regenesis is a 3/4 agenda; that's 3 advancements and 4 points, the best advancements-to-points ratio Netrunner has ever seen. (Contrast Vulnerability Audit, a fringe-playable agenda which has similar but slightly less onerous restrictions on how to score it, and is a 4/3; one advancement harder to score, and one point less.) It is possible to score Regenesis very early in the game; if the runner misguesses, you can never-advance it on turn 2, and even have some ICE for protection; and you can score it on turn 3 without the need for any bluffing, with ICE blocking all the servers the Runner might have run to disrupt your perfect score (and thus requiring them to find appropriate breakers or some other way to stop the combo, which is hard to do that early in the game).

There's also very little stopping you scoring out a Regenesis combo twice in quick succession – with only basic actions and agendas (and preferably some ICE, which you'll have spare clicks to play), it's theoretically possible to win on turn 4, and a Regenesis deck can credibly threaten this (although it's unlikely). Turn 6 is entirely reasonable, and if my Regenesis deck gets a fast start, that's about when I'd often be winning. This is much faster than "score 7" decks typically go in Netrunner; even typical rush decks are slower than that (a while ago I made a rush deck focused on Ashes Startup, with a set plan for its actions on every turn to make it go as fast as possible, and even that couldn't win until turn 7). By turn 6, many Runner decks haven't even started trying to interact yet, and are still trying to get their economy in order.

As such, Regenesis gives the potential for very explosive starts, to what could otherwise be a fairly slow deck (for reasons explained below, I think the best place to play this is in glacier decks). You also aren't giving up much to run a playset – a common agenda mix for glacier decks is to play mostly 5/3s, with a few 3/1s as the seventh point, so the only actual cost to running a playset of Regenesis is the opportunity cost of not playing House of Knives instead. (You don't have to score Regenesis "correctly" – you can just score it as a normal 3/1 if you prefer.)

A correct Regenesis score is also possible later in the game (it's common for Regenesis decks to score out with 8 points using two Regeneses), but more difficult, as the Runner's clicks normally become less valuable as the game goes on and they're more likely to be able to get into the servers in question.

The requirements to make Regenesis work

It's probably about time that we look at the list of requirements needed for a correct score, to get some idea of the difficulty of setting it up:

1. An x/3 (typically 5/3) agenda was in Archives at the start of your turn. That means that either you went a whole turn cycle without the Runner checking Archives and stealing it, or you discarded it during the Runner's turn somehow.
2. The x/3 agenda was face-down in Archives. Even if it's an Obokata Protocol that the Runner couldn't afford to steal, checking Archives would have turned it face up. So the runner can't have checked Archives at all since you put it there.
3. On the turn you score it, Regenesis has to be advanced to 3 counters without the help of any operations (unless they remove themself from the game). This rules out most fast-advance shenanigans; neither Biotic Labor-alikes nor Trick of Light-alikes can be used to save a click on the score turn, so most likely you need to have had Regenesis in play already.
4. On the turn you score it, Regenesis has to be advanced to 3 counters without the help of any trash abilities. This rules out nearly all the fast-advance shenanigans that weren't ruled out by the previous point.
5. The Runner can stop a Regenesis combo by somehow forcing you to trash a card in the middle of it. This is possible (e.g. as mentioned in the comments of the other review, Gachapon can install a virus and trigger Avgustina Ivanovskaya), but it rarely seems to be a problem in practice (most Runner decks don't have any combination of cards that can produce this effect).
6. You can accidentally mess up the combo by trashing a card for an unrelated reason. As such, you should probably avoid putting cards like Nico Campaign into the same deck as Regenesis.

The "normal" way to meet the requirements on the Regenesis half of things, and my preferred method, is a "basic action score" of the Regenesis: install it one turn, then on the next turn, triple-advance it with an entire turn's worth of basic actions and score. This naturally meets requirements 3 and 4, and 5 isn't normally a problem. Meeting 1 and 2 is more interesting; you have to get a (presumably) 5/3 agenda into Archives face down, without the Runner just running over there and stealing it. There are a few possible approaches to this problem:

• Overdraw – if you draw more cards than your hand size, the excess get discarded face down. If you do this by clicking for a lot of cards for no obvious reason and then discarding, runners will get suspicious, so it helps if your deck can naturally get itself into situations where it goes beyond the maximum hand size. Some examples of cards I've found helpful here are Rashida Jaheem and Gatekeeper, which draw lots of cards with semi-awkward timings and where it usually makes sense to draw as many cards as possible and discard the extras. (If you install a Rashida then draw up to 5, the next turn you'll be saddled with a 9-card hand, and discarding from that doesn't look at all suspicious even if you actually had a way to use up four cards in three clicks.)

  Another way to stop an overdraw looking suspicious is to use all your clicks scoring an agenda, when you had a 5-card hand at the end of the turn before. Your mandatory draw will put your hand over the size limit, and you won't use up any cards that turn because you're busy scoring an agenda, so the discard will seem natural. The main drawback of this approach is that it's hard to score agendas two turns in a row, so your 5/3 will probably be sitting vulnerable in Archives for two turns rather than one.

• Discarding as a cost, in advance – Hansei Review is the most obvious card here, and probably an automatic 3-of in any Regenesis deck; a Hansei Review discard doesn't look nearly as suspicious as an overdraw discard does, and you can do it without having to waste lots of clicks drawing cards (and you get some pretty decent economy in the process!). Anoetic Void also works, as long as you can get the runner to run its server. (The meanest version of this is to install a Regenesis "dry", bait the Runner into its server, then stop the run with Anoetic Void and discard a 5/3 in the process – this requires very good judgement of where the Runner is likely to run and how far into the server they think they can get, and is comparable in difficulty to getting someone to hit an Urtica Cipher in your scoring server.)

• Mill – the Runner may be kind enough to trash cards from R&D for you, but if not, there are Jinteki cards that trash cards directly from R&D. Genotyping is a good choice, because its main effect allows you to retrieve Obokata Protocols that are stuck in Archives face up.

• Kakurenbo – I haven't tested this, and suspect it isn't good enough (and it's very suspicious if you trash two cards with it and install only one). Even though it does everything that's required to set up the combo on its own, it's at the cost of telegraphing that something is definitely up (because otherwise you might have just IAAed the card you're installing manually). If you decide to try it, feel free to let me know in the comments (or in a separate review) how it went!

• Discarding as a cost, immediately before your turn starts – in practice this means Moon Pool, which seems to have been designed specifically to combo with Regenesis. This saves you from leaving agendas vulnerable in Archives at all (rather, you have to keep the Moon Pool safe for a turn, but you're losing an asset rather than an agenda if you fail).

In all these cases, the Regenesis and the 5/3 agenda are each sitting somewhere the Runner could access for a turn (Regenesis in its remote, and the 5/3 typically in Archives; it's in HQ with the Moon Pool method). So pulling off the combo requires that the Runner doesn't interfere. Let's look at how that might happen next.

How the Runner might interfere, and how you can stop them

Unlike most agenda scores, where you're only trying to guard one card (the agenda you're scoring), a correctly scored Regenesis requires guarding two agendas: the Regenesis itself, and the 5/3, which are in different servers. Normally, these will be in a remote and Archives respectively. The Runner can mess up your attempt to score four points by successfully running either server, which is a big difference from something like Vulnerability Audit. In order to keep them safe, there are two main approaches, which are each fringe-viable individually and much stronger when mixed.

One of these approaches is the "never advance" approach. To set up a Regenesis score, you're installing a card in a remote and dumping a card face-down in Archives (often on the same turn, although they can be done separately if you're OK with giving the Runner extra time to interfere). The idea behind this approach is to make those actions things that you do frequently over the course of the game. That card installed in the scoring remote might be a Regenesis, but it might also be a Rashida Jaheem, or a Regolith Mining License, or a defensive upgrade. That card paid to Hansei Review might be an Obokata Protocol, but it might also be a redundant piece of ICE, or a spare economy card, or a Mavirus. That card discarded to overdraw might be a Bacterial Programming, or it might be a mid-value card for which there wasn't enough room in HQ. The idea here is that the Runner has no idea when interfering will stop an agenda score; everything you do looks like it might be an attempt to set up Regenesis, so most of them aren't. If the Runner checked every time, they'd never get anything else done.

In order to make this approach work better, you have to design your deck to find other purposes for putting cards into Archives and into its remote servers. The latter isn't very difficult in most decks; lots of cards go into the roots of remote servers. Finding reasons to put cards into Archives is harder; Hansei Review is the most obvious one. Using an ID that cares about face-down cards in Archives can also help with this; with the current card pool, that's Jinteki: Restoring Humanity, which generally complements a Regenesis deck pretty well. (Spin Doctor also gives you a reason to put agendas into Archives – the problem is that it gives you a reason to put agendas into Archives, rather than other card types, so this won't do much to discourage a runner from running it!)

The other approach is to just keep the Runner out of the server. Glacier decks are used to keeping the runner out of HQ and R&D and the remote (and will normally put a bit of a tax on Archives, too). If you're building your deck around Regenesis, you can just put extra effort into keeping the runner out of Archives. My Regenesis decks are serious about this, and will frequently guard Archives with an Anansi plus extra ICE on top of that – if the Runner wants to get in, it's going to really cost them. One advantage of this approach is that if you're putting enough protection on Archives to prevent the Runner getting in, you can use it as your main location for storing unwanted agendas, meaning that you no longer really have to protect HQ (in effect, giving Archives HQ-level protection means that you can afford to give HQ only Archives-level protection). This technique is a little dangerous, because HQ needs multi-access to hit reliably and Archives doesn't; but if the Runner is running lots HQ multi-access, there's no real downside. (Whether it's better to store the spare agendas in Archives or HQ can thus somewhat depend on what the Runner's deck is like.) Running Obokata Protocol helps to manage the risk here, because if the Runner manages to make their way into an Archives packed with agendas, it'll still limit how many of them can be scored at once.

When you combine these approaches, you end up with a deck which, in effect, is threatening Regenesis scores pretty much every turn, but defending Archives and the scoring remote to the extent that it's expensive to check. If the Runner checks and is wrong, they've wasted a lot of credits and/or single-use effects getting into a server with nothing valuable in it, often opening a scoring window. If the Runner doesn't check and is wrong, you score four points very cheaply. This ends up playing quite similarly to other never-advance decks, but you're guarding two servers rather than one, and scoring four points at a time rather than two.

The Runner can also interfere by trashing a Corp card in the middle of your scoring turn, if they have some way to do that. If Regenesis ever really catches on, that may well be the tech that becomes standard to counter it.

Conclusions

Regenesis needs a lot of support to work optimally. You need a deck that can keep the Runner out of at least two servers (or at least put a large tax on them), and that runs a lot of 5/3s; in other words, this is probably a glacier deck. The effort you'll put into guarding Archives means that your deck probably wants other reasons to keep Archives safe (such as being Jinteki: Restoring Humanity). It'll also dictate some of the card choices you make in the rest of your deck – you'll generally prefer cards that could be placed in a scoring remote unadvanced, and cards that have a tendency to cause you overdraw issues, because those help to make it hard to guess when the Regenesis is coming (whereas cards that trash themselves on a schedule can make it harder to land). You'll almost certainly want a playset of Hansei Review.

However, within those constraints you have a lot of freedom with the general deck style. Pretty much all the cards you're playing to make Regenesis work are cards that wouldn't look out of place in a glacier deck; "lots of ICE, defensive upgrades, asset-based burst economy, and an agenda suite of mostly 5/3s with a few 3/1s" is pretty much a description of a glacier deck as it is, so you can just use the spare slots to actually build the glacier deck. The big difference from normal glacier decks, though, is that it can realistically threaten scoring four points out of nowhere, including in (especially in!) the very early game. It's a strange feeling to have a deck that would look like a perfectly ordinary glacier deck if you changed three card slots (Regenesis for House of Knives), and yet can frequently win games before they've even really got started (faster than even rush decks could typically manage).

As such, the normal Runner counterplay to glacier, of sitting back and building up a huge attack on R&D, doesn't really work; the Regenesis combo forces the Runner to constantly try to interact in order to avoid getting blown out, and that makes the deck works better as a glacier. (I almost said "the glacier half of the deck", but it doesn't work like that – although you are in effect combining two strategies in one deck, the Regenesis combo and the glacier approach, the two strategies almost completely overlap in the cards they use and do similar things with them once the game begins, so it's more like you have one deck that can win two different ways from the same cards and board state, and can choose between them based on what the Runner does.) This is especially powerful because, up until you score a Regenesis or the Runner steals one, the deck doesn't look any different from a regular glacier deck, as hardly any slots are different.

My testing of a Regenesis-based deck is showing pretty good results so far; even though I haven't finished tuning it yet, it's running over an 80% win rate (although I haven't played enough games with it to be confident that that's a "true" win rate rather than a statistical anomaly – Midnight Sun has only just been released). I suspect the win rate will go down if the deck becomes more dominant and Runners adapt to it (in particular, the turn 1 play of "Hansei Review, install card in remote and ice it" can at present frequently lead to four points scored on turn 2, but Runners are likely to get wise to this over time). However, it wouldn't surprise me if it nonetheless ends up as one of the better decks despite that. (That said, there are some pretty degenerate Corp decks going around at the moment, so it's quite possible that they end up dominating instead and the Regenesis deck gets temporarily forgotten until they get banned or Runners work out how to deal with them.)