Wildcat Strike is probably one of the most controversial cards in System Gateway. I've heard opinions about it ranging from it being massively powerful to worthless, and debates about whether it's ever correct for the Corp to give the Runner the cards. So here's my attempt to untangle the mess and work out how the card functions.

One of the core conflicts I've seen in the opinions about this card is between "the Corp should always choose the credits option" and "surely that makes no sense, there must be times when the cards are a better choice, otherwise this would just be a better Sure Gamble". Despite these opinions being at odds with each other, it actually turns out that both opinions are pretty much correct.

Let's look at the card from the Runner's point of view first. When you play Wildcat Strike, it either gives you +4 net, or else it gives you 4 cards at the cost of 2. The value of 4 Runner credits is fairly constant in Netrunner; most of the various economic quantities in Netrunner have wildly varying values, but (apart from the first few) Runner credits tend to have a consistent value over the course of the game (primarily because they're used to power icebreakers, so the number of runs you can make is directly proportional to the number of credits you have). So if the Corp picks the credits option, you gain 4 credits. The value of 4 cards is much less constant, though; if they're worth more than 6 credits, you'll get the credits (assuming the Corp knows what they're doing), otherwise you'll get the cards. So a simplistic look at Wildcat Strike gives the following options:

• 4 cards are worth more than 6 credits: Wildcat Strike gains the Runner +4 worth of value
• 4 cards are worth less than 6 credits: Wildcat Strike gains the Runner v-2 worth of value, where v is the value in credits of 4 cards

But there's a second choice to consider, here: although the card gives the Corp a choice, it also gives the Runner a choice. Nothing forces you to play events as soon as you draw them, so the Runner has the choice to not play Wildcat Strike, even if it's in their grip. They can choose to wait for a better opportunity – one where the cards are worth more – or even to not play it at all, because the card wouldn't be worth it. The point at which an economy event becomes truly worth putting in your deck is just a little short of a 4 gain (e.g. Sure Gamble, Creative Commission, Bravado, Career Fair are each worth approximately 4 when played). The point at which you might conceivably include it in your deck if you're really desperate for economy events is 3 (Easy Mark). The point at which you'd play a card if it somehow ended up in your grip, even though you didn't want it in your deck in this matchup, is around 2 (e.g. Infiltration, when you aren't in a matchup that needs the expose). So we have more like 4 options, based on v, the value in credits of 4 Runner cards right now (and bearing in mind that Wildcat Strike costs 2 to play):

• v > 6: Wildcat Strike gains the Runner +4 worth of value (the Corp chooses the credits)
• 5 < v < 6: Wildcat Strike gains the Runner +v-2 worth of value (the Corp chooses the cards)
• 4 < v < 5: the Runner delays playing Wildcat Strike if possible, or plays it for +v-2 worth of value if they doubt they'll get a better chance
• v < 4: the Runner leaves Wildcat Strike to rot in their grip

So now we can see why it's usually correct for the Corp to choose the credits, given that the Runner is knowledgeable and chose to play Wildcat Strike: the odds that the credits are more useful to the Runner than the cards is aiming at a very narrow target, because if the credits were more than marginally more useful, the Runner would probably have delayed the Wildcat Strike until they could get more value from it. It's much more likely that 4 cards are worth more than 6 at any given point in time than it is for their value to fall into the narrow 5-6 range.

That isn't to say, though, that 4 cards are usually worth more than 6! Probably more than half the time, they aren't and you'd prefer the credits. So in order to make good use of Wildcat Strike, you need a deck that can often get into situations where the cards are particularly useful. Playing this sort of "opponent chooses" card can be very frustrating, because you need to design your deck and/or gamestate around increasing the value of one of the options, and then you don't even get that option, it's just that you had to plan for what would happen if you did. As an example, Cerebral Cast would have given you a desirable outcome – 1 brain damage – in the Jinteki decks that played it, back when it was legal. But in order to accomplish that, the decks had to run some proper tag punishment. This is despite the fact that it was nearly always wrong for the Runner to take the tag; the tag punishment was included in the deck without much hope of ever being able to use it, it was just there so that the Runner couldn't make the choice to choose the tag. Wildcat Strike is similar: you need to design your deck so that it could sometimes make really good use of a "draw 4 cards for 2" effect, even though it rarely actually gets that effect in practice; you just need to be able to realistically threaten it in order to force the Corp to give you the credits.

We therefore have to look at when 4 cards are valuable enough to be more than 6. Generally speaking, card draw is better earlier in a turn (so that you have more clicks to react to the cards you draw), so Wildcat Strike (despite not saying priority) is realistically best played on the first click of a turn. You also need to have a high enough credit total to be able to do something with the cards right away; playing Wildcat Strike with your last 2 remaining is generally unwise because you'll just end up stuck with a lot of cards and no credits to play them. Your deck also needs to be able to generate credits very efficiently, with basically no clicking for credits ever (otherwise, you could change some of the clicks you normally use for credits onto clicking for cards instead and get a similar effect). Your deck probably also needs to be good at emptying its grip – e.g. by being able to install things efficiently – so that you don't have to discard some of the cards you draw and reduce their value. Note that a side effect of all this is that decks where Wildcat Strike is good are typically also decks where Earthrise Hotel is good, so you should expect to see them in the same decks.

One other thing that you need to pay attention to is that Netrunner is a game of asymmetrical information – often, the Corp knows a lot more about what's going on than the Runner, and it's quite possible for the Runner to misevaluate and think they want cards when in fact the cards actually won't help them. For example, say the Runner is playing an Anarch deck full of cards that gain value from being discarded (like Paperclip and Exclusive Party), and cards like Moshing and Patchwork that can make use of spare cards. Wildcat Strike looks pretty good here, and the Runner may well fire it off while they have more cards in hand than usual (hoping to draw into Moshing if the corp chooses the draw option, and discard a bunch of conspiracy breakers and redundant cards). That's all very well, but if the Corp happens to be holding an Ark Lockdown, they'll simply just choose the option that floods the Runner with cards, and calmly negate all the gain that the Runner thought they were getting with a single operation (as a bonus, this can occasionally just win the game for the Corp on the spot by removing all the copies of a breaker at once). Wildcat Strike looked good, but it was actually terrible because the Runner didn't know what the Corp could do. I'd say that about a third of the time that a Corp player who knows what they're doing chooses to give the Runner the cards, this is the reason (the other two thirds of the time, the Runner either miscalculated, or misinterpreted "if the Runner plays the card correctly, the Corp should usually choose the credits" as "if the Corp plays the card correctly, they should usually choose the credits" and didn't realise that they couldn't handle being unexpectedly given the cards).

So is Wildcat Strike good? I think more than half of decks don't really want the effect; you need the deck to be much better at generating credits than it is at drawing cards to reliably get opportunities to use it, and also need the ability to be able to do something with lots of cards if the Corp does choose that option. That said, this isn't a massively rare combination of circumstances either; although probably most decks don't want this, there are quite a few that would. The problem, of course, is that in those decks it's just copies 4, 5, and 6 of Sure Gamble; it's a card that only goes into decks that can make masses of money and gives them more money (which it does very efficiently, but it isn't the economic quantity that they really wanted). So your deck needs to be making masses of money and still wanting more. Oddly, that still isn't all that rare a combination; it's uncommon, but if your deck is using a traditional breaker suite, it probably needs all that money to avoid running out of steam against glacier decks. So Wildcat Strike has its place, but it isn't a card that you can just blindly use without thinking about it.

(Also, a big thank you to NISEI's playtesting team for giving us all something to think about. The numbers on this card are really interesting and well-placed, and it's a testament to a well-balanced design that they can inspire so much debate!)

Guinea Pig is a very straightforward economy card, that nonetheless isn't playable in most decks.

The economy aspect of the card is easy to understand: pretty much every Netrunner player knows how powerful Sure Gamble is, and the credit effect is a substantially better Sure Gamble (instead of paying 5 to gain 9, you're paying 4 to gain 10, a strict upgrade on both halves of the card). If you can live with the downside, you can get a lot of gain from a card like this.

However, in order to play Guinea Pig and gain that sort of absurd economic boost, you need to trash the rest of your grip. So playing this card is all about building your deck to minimize the downsides. Downsides plural, because there are two of them:

1. Trashing cards means that you're losing the tempo you spent to draw the card, and in most cases losing access to the card itself. If you have critical cards in hand along with a Guinea Pig, you can't really play Guinea Pig. (A special case of this is if you have two Guinea Pigs in hand: you can only play one of them.) Losing one good but noncritical card (something like Daily Casts) isn't the end of the world; but losing two is enough of a cost to make Guinea Pig not worth it.

   So in order for Guinea Pig to be viable, you're going to need a deck that never has useful cards stuck in hand. In particular, you need to run very light on situational events – and most events are situational. Cards like Sure Gamble are going to be OK because you can usually just play them first, and the Guinea Pig afterwards; but almost any other event is out. Likewise, programs/resources/hardware (other than Paperclip and its friends, who don't mind being trashed) will typically need to be installed before playing Guinea Pig, meaning that you need the clicks and credits (and MU, in the case of programs) to play them.

   As a consequence, Guinea Pig is mostly only seen in decks that are all-in on a resource economy, and run few utility programs (in particular, they avoid cards which you might need to delay the install of, like Botulus). That's a pretty rare combination, and you're probably going to have to design your deck around it.

2. Guinea Pig leaves you low on cards, and thus very vulnerable to flatline combos. This is less of a problem in today's metagame than it used to be, but even so, there are still cards like Neurospike, Clearinghouse and Ronin and some of them even get played on occasion. If you want to be on the safe side, you probably want to play damage mitigation alongside it (and the standard Anarch damage mitigation I've Had Worse doesn't work, so you'll probably need to import something). Or you could just go for the full-on Anarch attitude and play it anyway, hoping that the consequences won't be too bad.

Guinea Pig is therefore unusual in that it's one of the least synergistic cards in Netrunner. Normally in my reviews, I think about "what support does this card need to make it playable?". Given the strength of its upside half, Guinea Pig is sort-of the opposite: it doesn't need support, so much as it needs to avoid anti-synergies, and it anti-synergises with almost everything. So you aren't looking at what makes it playable, but rather at what doesn't make it unplayable. (It used to have a notable synergy with Bookmark, but Bookmark has rotated, and it wasn't a very strong combination anyway.)

My best results with Guinea Pig have been in a deck that's almost entirely resources, hardware, and conspiracy breakers, with lots of redundancy. The idea is to operate on very few cards in hand, installing everything as it's drawn except for redundant copies of cards that you don't need. A construction like this can give you a very strong economy, but at the cost of taking a while to get started.

It's also worth noting that Guinea Pig isn't the only card that anti-synergises with situational cards or cards that you'll need later but that get stuck in your hand: pretty much any other self-damaging card has the same issue. As a result, Guinea Pig works quite well alongside cards like Zer0: if you have the sort of deck which Guinea Pig is playable in, then Zer0's downside will also be smaller than usual.

In conclusion: there's obviously power in Guinea Pig, so it's initially a little surprising that it isn't played more. However, the downside really hurts it, limiting what decks it can go into. In particular, decks where Guinea Pig works tend to be slow to initially set up (because this is the main downside of resource economies); and they also tend to be slow to react to what the Corp does (because they can't hold situational cards like Inside Job in hand). Given how fast the metagame is at the moment, and how often the Corp will try to get away with scoring in a dubious scoring window (thus forcing the Runner to react), its relative unpopularity therefore shouldn't be all that surprising after all; the sort of deck that wants to play Guinea Pig will suffer from having a bad matchup against more or less everything that's popular, which is not a good place to be. That said, there's definite potential here: I can easily imagine Guinea Pig becoming a very strong card if the metagame ends up getting a bit slower and giving resource economies their time to shine.

There are two ways to look at Thunder Art Gallery: as a tech card against tags, or as part of a synergy deck based around tag removal or avoidance.

Thunder Art Gallery as a tech card

First, the uses as a tech card. One of the things that Thunder Art Gallery does is that it effectively upgrades the "remove tag" basic action, to allow an install at the same time (once per turn). It's much easier to see what it does if you think of it as upgrading the "install" action, though, making it more or less equivalent to the following hypothetical resource:

Once per turn, when you install a card with an install cost of 1 or more (not through a card ability), you may pay an additional 1 to remove a tag.

That's a pretty good effect, against some decks! Removing a tag for 1 and no clicks is much cheaper than tag removal normally would be, and most decks have quite a few cards they want to install.

There are two real problems with using this as a tech card, though. The first is the hit to install it; you're spending 3, , plus a card and a deck slot, on installing your Thunder Art Gallery. The second is the fact that it only works once per turn. Taking these two facts together, to be worth it as a tech card, you would probably need to untag yourself on four separate turns (installing something each time) to get a meaningful gain. It's certainly possible to imagine a Corp deck which likes to repeatedly land single tags on you, without directly punishing them; some SYNC: Everything, Everywhere or NBN: Reality Plus will, for example. However, only a minority of tagging decks use this sort of "tag-based grind"; more often you're going to come up against Hard-Hitting News or Public Trail or the like, and Thunder Art Gallery is the wrong tech card to use against those sorts of decks – and of course, many Corp decks don't tag at all! So in short, this is an effect that you could plausibly want in a sufficiently weird metagame, but it's unlikely that the metagame will ever reach a state in which playing this as a tech card is worth it; generally speaking, you'd prefer a more generally applicable tech card like Networking.

Thunder Art Gallery as a synergy card

So if you can't rely on the Corp deck to tag you often enough to make your Thunder Art Gallery worthwhile, what about placing the tags yourself? Thunder Art Gallery is obviously no good in a "tag-me" deck (which relies on floating a lot of tags), so the main form of Runner self-tagging is out. However, there's also a less popular Runner strategy involving tags: using a combination of cards which tag yourself in exchange for a benefit, and cards that clear the resulting tags more cheaply than basic actions would (thus giving you a larger benefit than the tagging card would give you naturally). Thunder Art Gallery is, in effect, a support card for this strategy, giving you cheap clickless installs while your deck does what your deck does (and this sort of deck really likes clickless installs because it's spending so many clicks tagging itself). A discount of 1, on installs once per turn is obviously crazy (imagine if you could play as Hayley and Kate simultaneously and with no card type restriction!), but as the tradeoff to obtain that, you're going to need to design your entire deck around tagging and untagging itself (or avoiding the tags) as often as possible.

In order to make a self-untagging deck work, we need two main components: the cards that tag yourself, and the cards that cheaply remove or avoid the tags.

First, the self-tagging cards. Based on the name, and the set it came out in, Thunder Art Gallery was probably designed with Liza Talking Thunder in mind, but she has been banned; and the most popular card which tags yourself in exchange for a benefit is Account Siphon, but that has rotated. So nowadays, we typically need to rely on cards that don't see much play outside this sort of deck. By far the best is Rogue Trading, which is likely to be an automatic 3-of in any Thunder Art Gallery deck; it's an economic card with a lot of longevity, but a value that scales based on how cheaply you can remove a tag (and the whole point of this sort of deck is to cheaply remove tags, so Rogue Trading is likely to be quite good). There's also Hot Pursuit, which has the issue that you need to be able to make successful runs on HQ, but which gives a decent amount of economy in return for a tag when you do. (I've also had decent success with Credit Kiting in a deck that's designed around it, but that's a lot more niche.)

Second, the self-untagging cards. My first thought (and many others' first thoughts) will likely be Jesminder Sareen, who is able to avoid tags as her ID ability. This synergises well with Hot Pursuit (which is normally an automatic 3-of for her despite being out of faction). The problem is, it doesn't really synergise well with anything else nowadays (you would have to resort to obscure cards like "Baklan" Bochkin to do more self-tagging during a run). The other problem is, Jesminder is a Shaper, but Thunder Art Gallery is a Criminal card, as is almost every self-tagging card. So Jesminder will end up running out of influence very quickly when trying to make a deck like this, and will have to play very suboptimal cards to do it. I don't think that sort of deck can work; Jesminder loves her Hot Pursuits, but can't go further enough along the path of self-tagging to make Thunder Art Gallery worthwhile on top of that.

Even though the main untagging identity is a Shaper, though, there are still good self-untagging cards floating around in neutral and Criminal. Networking, for example, saves you 1 whenever you remove a tag and does not require installing; that might be enough of a benefit to make this sort of deck work, but probably isn't enough by itself. However, there's also Citadel Sanctuary, which is close to a perfect fit for this sort of deck; it allows you to untag yourself once per turn with a trace[1] (in addition to acting as tech against Punitive Counterstrike, Clearinghouse and City Works Project). One drawback of Citadel Sanctuary is that you need to be fairly rich to avoid disaster, as you'll have no chance to react if the Corp pumps the trace. Another is that you will need link to keep the expenses down (in particular, it works much better as a 1 runner than it does as a 0 runner). However, unlike the drawbacks of the various other possible combinations, these drawbacks are managable (especially because Rogue Trading itself will help you get out of the economic danger range).

Conclusions

Given the current list of banned and rotated cards, I think that (at least in Standard) Thunder Art Gallery works in exactly one deck: a Criminal deck that is based around tagging and subsequently untagging itself most turns, using at minimum a combination of Rogue Trading, Citadel Sanctuary, and link. (You won't play against appropriate Corp decks often enough to make it a viable tech card, and it doesn't have enough synergy to be playable unless you're playing those two cards specifically.) You'll also need a lot of things to install (meaning, most likely, you'll be running a resource economy), making the deck it goes into even more specific. So this card is likely doomed to be niche forever; you can't put it into just any deck, you'll have to be designing your entire deck around it.

"Niche" doesn't necessarily mean "bad", though; a card that only goes in one deck can nonetheless be playable if it's a sufficiently good deck. And based on my testing recently, I think it is indeed a sufficiently good deck. (This shouldn't be all that surprising, given that the Rogue Trading + Citadel Sanctuary combo is strong enough to have seen play even without additional support cards beyond a 1 identity.) I've been winning above 50% with it in practice games, which is much better than I normally do as Runner, especially given how Corp-friendly today's metagame is; the Thunder Art Gallery deck is probably the strongest Runner deck I've ever built (although I'm much better at building Corp decks in general, so being a good Runner deck by my standards probably doesn't mean that you'll be winning tournaments with it).

So I think this is a well-designed card; its inflexibility means that it won't be dominating the tournament scene or anything like that, because it isn't going to fit into the goodstuff/"regular" decks that Criminals often end up playing, and is even less likely to work out of faction (with the possible but unlikely exception of Sunny); but it has the right sort of power level to make the one deck it does go into playable, and help make the world of viable Runner decks a little broader.

Let's talk about shell games.

The Corp installs a card face down in a server! What could it be? We have four main options:

1. It could be an ambush, directly hurting the Runner who runs into it. Something like Urtica Cipher or Snare!.
2. It could be an agenda! This is what the Runner is looking for, typically (with a few weird exceptions like the now-rotated Haarpsichord Studios and Game Changer decks).
3. It could be a "must-trash" card; something like Ronin, SanSan City Grid, or Commercial Bankers Group. These are comparable to agendas in their shell game uses, with the exception that running on them doesn't help the Runner actually win; it merely helps them not lose.
4. It could be a complete waste of the runner's time and money getting into the server; NGO Front is the most famous member of this category, but there are also things like Spin Doctor, things like PAD Campaign which aren't normally high trashing priorities, and even tech cards that happen to be near-useless in the current matchup.

"Traditional" shell game decks rely on their ambushes (category 1) to protect everything else, meaning that they're typically light on ICE (due to all the deck space you need for the ambushes). This isn't an inherently horrible strategy, but it also hasn't seen all that much success recently; a typical 45-card Runner deck can often deal with it without tech cards simply by playing cautiously and accessing only a random subset of cards (in the hope that some of the Cerebral Overwriters get stranded).

There's another way to do shell games, though: if you're playing a more traditional style of deck (maybe not full-on glacier, but at least using servers that are expensive to get into repeatedly), you don't really need an ambush to play shell game. There are plenty of cards in categories 3 and 4 that will drain the Runner's resources trying to reach them, either because they have to (categories 3) or because they think they might have to (category 4, masquerading as 2 or 3). Build yourself a moderately taxing server or two, keep installing things in it/them, and eventually you'll build up a large economic advantage and be able to win the game more or less however you want.

This sort of "taxing shell game" deck is generally better than the traditional variety because it can save a lot of deck slots. That NGO Front might be useless to the Runner, for example, but it isn't useless to the Corp; even if you IAA it and they don't run, you basically spent 2, for 8, which is not a horrible rate of return, and so you can fit it into one of your economy slots rather than having to remove ICE for it. The same goes for many of the other cards in that sort of deck; they're serving a useful function of their own, and just happen to be usable for shell games as well.

As such, the usual Runner-side counterplay for this sort of deck is to exploit a structural weakness: the shell game doesn't really work if the Corp has to leave their agendas advanced overnight and thus reveal them as advanceable cards (really cutting down the number of options for what they could be). This gives the ambush-less shell game decks their more usual name: "never advance". And if you're never leaving a card advanced during the Runner's turn, you're normally stuck with just 3 clicks for scoring it; that means 3/2s, or when you run out of those, 3/1s. Winning with only those is really inefficient; you're spending both more clicks and more credits to score out than you would be scoring 5/3s, and that gives the Runner time to build up a lot of multiaccess and hammer R&D, or a rig that's efficient enough to negate your ICE and make running your useless assets cheap enough that it isn't a tempo hit any more, or do whatever else their rig is meant to do.

So hey, what would happen if there was a card that completely negated the main drawbacks of these decks? The problems with never-advance decks basically boil down to "we don't have enough 3-advancement agendas without resorting to those with major downsides, like 'being only worth 1 point' or 'being Merger', and even the good ones like Project Atlas don't do anything if scored as a 3/2 and are a bit of an economic hit". The effects that help keep your economy going don't go on the 3/2 agendas; they go on the 4/2 agendas. There's a lot more redundancy there, too; my review of Corporate Sales Team lists a lot of options, and you can fill out most of your agenda point requirement with economic 4/2s nowadays (if you're going all in, 3 each of Corporate Sales Team + Cyberdex Sandbox + Offworld Office is 18 agenda points on its own). So being able to consistently never-advance 4/2s as though they were 3/2s can launch the runners' attitudes towards never-advance decks away from "the opponent is doing weird stuff, let's just play normal Netrunner and blow up R&D" and more towards "this deck can't be beaten without adapting to its strategy, I need specific tech cards to beat it".

If I'd written the review up to this point at this time last year, everyone would have assumed I was talking about Jeeves Model Bioroids. Jeeves is a better card than Seamless Launch in most respects; he/it's reusable, and gives you benefit in all sorts of ways beyond never-advancing agendas. Jeeves has proven his/its worth time and time again (a simple way to see this is that it's a 3-of in both the 1^st and 2^nd place decks in last years' Worlds). (Incidentally, another card that fits the description is La Costa Grid, which is often playable in the same decks as Seamless Launch but seems to be a little worse in practice; however, the decks often play both. La Costa Grid also has other uses, although most of them combos, rather than Jeeves' general-purpose benefits.)

How does Seamless Launch compare to Jeeves? It's only better in 5 specific circumstances:

1. You can't get Jeeves to stick; the Runner keeps trashing him/it as soon as it's installed. Trashing Jeeves is very expensive (5) and you can add ICE on top of that (and if you're in HB, you have recursion to help even more), but there are Runner decks that are teched to do it; and except in weird situations (e.g. Full Immersion RecStudio). you won't be able to use your scoring server to protect him/it.
2. Your deck can't afford even 1 click to install Jeeves, on a turn before never-advancing an agenda. This is possible in sufficiently fast decks, but unlikely.
3. Your deck can't afford the 3 extra it costs to never-advance a single agenda with Jeeves, compared to Seamless Launch (1 on play/install costs, 2 on advance costs). Note that the difference reduces to 1 for any subsequent agendas you advance with the same Jeeves.
4. Your deck can't afford the influence for Jeeves. This mostly happens when you don't have a reason to import many HB cards from out of faction, although there are many good options like Magnet and Marilyn Campaign which bring the influence cost down to an affordable level. Jeeves costs only one dot more, though, even when you don't have the alliance turned on.
5. You want to use two cards to never-advance a 5/3, and sadly aren't allowed to do it using two copies of a unique asset. This is probably jank, but might be towards the more playable end of jank? (People are apparently running decks with both Seamless Launch and Obokata Protocol at the moment, and sometimes have this as a plan B, but I don't know how well it's working.)

This means that Seamless Launch is only really playable in two sorts of decks: very fast decks that run incredibly tight on time or economy, and one-remote glaciers that have reasons not to want to create any runnable servers or that are unable to effectively bluff anything in a second remote. Pretty much anything else would be better off running Jeeves instead. That said, the sorts of decks that do prefer Seamless Launch are really good, and ended up being one of the main factors in Violet Level Clearance getting banned again. (One of the primary decks that inspired the ban was a super-fast rush deck based around Seamless Launch and Precision Design, with Precision Design allowing you to use the same Seamless multiple times, and Seamless Launch allowing it to run an agenda economy, together with way too much card draw to keep the economy going and fuel defensive upgrades like Anoetic Void. It's almost certainly still good, and may need further bans to bring it down to a beatable power level.)

The result is a card that's quite hard to evaluate. Seamless Launch is basically only usable for never-advancing agendas and/or assets/upgrades; you can't use it to fast advance agendas because it can't be used on cards installed that turn (and using it on ICE, or the Runner's cards, seems kind-of pointless). You can't win the game with it without some sort of recursion, because each copy of Seamless Launch can naturally only never-advance one agenda. Your deck has to have some reason to want to never-advance 4/2s (or 4-advancement assets) in particular. Its only real advantages over Jeeves Model Bioroids are "not being an asset" and "not being unique", with everything that that entails. But, when you do have a deck where it fits perfectly – when you're running an agenda economy but need to never-advance your agendas, and can't spare anywhere to put assets, and have some way to cope with not drawing it or having spent it already – it makes the deck much, much stronger. As such, I expect to see it in only a minority of deck archetypes over the next few years. However, it may well make those archetypes may strong enough that they end up being played a lot relative to other decks, with Seamless Launch ending up all over the place anyway.

Out of all the cards in System Gateway, it's Regolith Mining License that has impressed me the most. It feels unbeatable when I play with it, and (from the Runner side) unbeatable when I play against it. It doesn't go into every deck, but it makes the decks that it does go into a lot stronger.

There are three main things that can happen to a Regolith Mining License. Let's look at them in turn.

Case 1: The Runner doesn't trash it

First, let's look at what happens when it doesn't get trashed – in this case, the numbers look absolutely amazing. You end up spending six clicks (one install, five paid ability) to gain a profit of 13. That's slightly better than 2 per click, if compared naively. When comparing different economy cards, I like to add in the cost of drawing the card (for most non-HB Corp decks, a card is worth about 1 click), so the actual rate is slightly worse than 2 per click, the way I compare things. Either way, though, this is a ridiculous rate of economy, and blows most other Corp economy cards out of the water (2 per click is a premium economy rate for Runner credit economy, which is better over large timescales).

If we're looking for comparisons, we're looking at the Hedge Fund (4 over 1 card + 1 click = 2/click) level of quality to see what might compete with this card, in a deck that can protect it. But this card has much more impact per card slot on your economy than Hedge Fund does. The thing is, Corps are typically incredibly tight on deck slots; if you run three copies of Hedge Fund, you're only going to get 12 of revenue from them (over 3 cards + 3 clicks), so your super-efficient economy won't get you that far and you need to find other cards to supplement them. If you run one copy of Regolith Mining License, however, you're going to get 13 of revenue from it (over 1 card + 6 clicks), a very similar amount – and that's just one copy! So with multiple copies of the License, your economy can have huge longevity, in that when you come to a quiet moment where you want to spend clicks gathering credits, you can make use of all those clicks to gain credits efficiently rather than having to spend some of them using the least efficient basic action in the game.

Case 2: The Runner runs it while it's installed in its server

So things look pretty good so far: if the Runner doesn't interfere, the numbers on this card are favourable to just about anything else. But what if the Runner does interfere? The gain you get from that is going to be somewhat dependent on your deck (which is why you can't play this card just anywhere). The thing is, you can put assets into any remote server that happens to be empty; and if your top priority as the Corp right now is fixing your economy (say you just scored an agenda, or rezzed a large piece of ICE, and are trying to recover from the economic hit), you probably aren't going to be busy trying to score an agenda while you're doing that. So Regolith Mining License is, in practice, a card that you put into your scoring server for a couple of turns – that means that contesting an installed License is, in practice, going to have a similar difficulty to contesting a scoring server. Runners have a lot of ways into scoring servers, but they tend to be very expensive or limited in use: as the Corp, you generally love it if a Runner spends a lot of effort getting into your scoring server and doesn't even gain any agenda points as a consequence (and even has to pay an additional 3 to trash the asset when they're done). So if you get as far as installing the License, you're generally going to profit regardless.

A good comparison in this situation is NGO Front, which is generally regarded as a very good card (and widely played). NGO Front is basically a bait card (that can be used to trick the Runner into running an expensive server), that also gives you some moderately efficient economy in the process (and thus means that if the Runner doesn't take the bait, you still benefit). Regolith Mining License is bait in a different form: if you rez it to take the credits, the Runner will know it's there, but given how much economy you'll get if they don't run it, they may end up deciding it's better to run it anyway. So as long as you have an appropriate scoring server for the stage of the game you're at (which could be anything from a Vanilla on turn 2 that makes the runner spend an Inside Job or Boomerang, to a fully rezzed glacier on turn 20 that eats up much of the Runner's economy), your License will be giving you huge benefits if the Runner does decide to run over and trash it, too.

Another good comparison is Daily Quest, which I reviewed last year, and concluded that the best use of a Daily Quest was as something to put in your scoring server for a few turns while you weren't using it for anything else. Regolith Mining License serves a very similar role, but is much burstier; if you only have a couple of turns free, it'll give you a much larger profit. Daily Quest can be better, because it's clickless, and thus it'll give you a larger gain if you had some better use for those clicks. But Regolith Mining License is powerful because its click-intensive play pattern is pretty much exactly what most decks are looking for when they're low on credits; you can't do very much when you're poor (e.g. as the Corp, clicking to draw cards rather than to gain credits is generally only going to make matters worse), so you would want to be spending as many clicks as possible getting your economy back up to a workable state anyway.

One other point to mention is the click timing for installing and using your License. There are two main ways to use it: either you install it click 1, rez it, then click it for credits twice; or else you install it, leave it unrezzed overnight, and click it three times the next turn. The former pattern gives you 4 for immediately (the same amount as a basic Cyberdex Sandbox turn, which is something that Corps are frequently willing to use in practice when low on credits); you have to spend a card, but the Runner then has to spend , 3 when they run over to trash the card (plus whatever resources it costs them to get into the server, which may be a lot more). So this is the safest option when you're critically low on credits. I actually prefer the "leave installed overnight" play, though; generally speaking it's better to use this one when baiting the Runner into running the unrezzed asset is your preferred option (i.e. if you wouldn't lose much if the License gets trashed), because it gives less information to the Runner (and if the Runner chooses not to run it, it will become even less worthwhile running the next turn when you take more than half the credits).

So if the Runner doesn't trash the License, it's great all around. If you install it and the Runner decides to go trash it, the benefits depend on the sort of deck you're playing; they won't be worth it in a shell game deck, or in a rush deck that uses an agenda economy (and wants to keep its scoring server consistently occupied), but if you have a traditional sort of scoring server this case can be even more beneficial than the previous case. (Bear in mind that even if your deck normally has a decent scoring server, it may not do so if it stumbles in the early stages of the game, e.g. if you don't draw enough ICE or are agenda flooded. But this isn't really a mark against Regolith Mining License because there's very little a purely economic card can do to help in this situation anyway.)

In short: if we have the right sort of deck, both these cases are amazing. What does the fail case look like?

Case 3: The Runner randomly accesses it in HQ or R&D

This is the worst of the three cases, but it really isn't all that bad. If the Runner was spending a click (and probably icebreaker costs too) looking for agendas, and found a Regolith Mining License instead, it's usually in their interest to pay the 3 extra to trash it (because they've already incurred a significant sunk cost). This case is shared with several other economy cards; Mumba Temple is a good example to look at. Mumba Temple is good enough to have been MWL'd for ages, and a significant part of its strength is the fact that the "it gets trashed for 3" fail case really isn't that bad. An unexpected 3 payment is just large enough to be annoying, and the only hit to the Corp is that it makes it harder for them to draw into economy cards because some of them have been trashed from the deck, and that the Runner gets to see a different card if they run the same central again.

So this is a situation where the card is notably worse than a Hedge Fund: you're making R&D more porous and giving the Runner the option to interfere with your economy. (One feature of Hedge Fund that's hardly ever mentioned is that it blocks repeated R&D runs by being untrashable, but this is actually a significant factor in what makes it such a good card; frequently the fact that it's untrashable has a larger impact on the game than the 4.) But again, whether this is a major drawback or an irrelevant nuisance will depend on your deck. If you're playing glacier, you probably won't be facing many random single accesses on R&D or HQ (Runners will prefer to use big multi-accesses against glacier if they have them available), so the drawback doesn't come up very often. However, some rush decks can easily go the whole game without ICE on R&D, and Regolith Mining License is not going to be a good basis for the economy there.

Conclusions

Regolith Mining License is a really, really powerful economy card in the right deck. Like most assets, it gives the Runner options (trash it, or leave it?), and giving your opponent options is something that tends to make a card weaker; but the benefit if the Runner chooses to leave it is really large, and if your deck uses a scoring server to score its agendas, the benefit if the Runner chooses to trash it can easily be even larger. It does have a downside (including it in your deck makes R&D a bit more porous), but if you have the sort of deck that naturally wants to protects the centrals in addition to a scoring server, it's not much of a downside. The card will, however, fall flat if you're playing a deck which has no real scoring server (e.g. if you're scoring from hand with Biotic Labor), if your deck relies on "winning quickly" as its primary form of central defence, or if your deck is designed to chain agendas with no downtime between them (in such a situation you should probably be running an agenda economy instead). Even in today's lightning-fast metagame, though, there are still decks around that either can afford to, or else sometimes need to, take a break from the scoring for a couple of turns to get their economy back in order.

The real reason it's so powerful, though, is when it comes to deck construction. In an appropriate deck, Regolith Mining License gives you a huge amount of benefit for a very small number of card slots, meaning that you have that much more room to pack your deck full of cards that do whatever it is your deck is doing rather than needing to dedicate slots for economy. (Note that it won't handle all your economic needs entirely by itself; this is mostly because with only 3 copies playable, there's no guarantee that you'll draw one at an appropriate time. But it'll help reduce the number of deck slots you need to spend on creating a functional economy.) It even has an influence cost of 0!