This is definitely a combo card or a situational ice. It's definitely not a snap rez: you don't use this in a conventional way to reliably tax the runner over time. If you're thinking about value exchanges vs popular breakers, it's pretty bad.

Instead you want to leverage the "When you rez" ability for a time when its impact will be heightened because of the situation (preventing an Apocalypse run or Deep Dive, for example). Think of it like Anemone or Formicary.

At other times, it could be good depending on synergies with other impactful cards, by screwing up the click math on Manegarm Skunkworks or Mr. Hendrik or Thule Subsea: Safety Below, as Diogene notes above, or even Tempus, or robbing that important click needed to click through a Fairchild 3.0, for the few days before Flashpoint rotates.

Hard to say if it can pull its weight in a committed harmonic ice suite, but maybe consider it if you are looking for ways to tax or surprise runners for clicks, and you can afford to rez ice situationally and still advance your win conditions.

Also worth mentioning that a runner like Nyusha "Sable" Sintashta: Symphonic Prodigy, who often has plenty of clicks, is particularly well-suited to deal with this ice.

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If you wanna personally thank them, then talk to them instead of posting ice walls of text here. Also, while you're at it, tell them to get a better name.

If only we could report these spam comments...

In a meta where ice is of questionable value, dominated by Endurance and Boomerang and Botulus and other ways to sidestep costs to the runner, the corp is incentivized to pivot to a different way to tax the runner.

A clear alternative to consider is defense through upgrades. One can try to tax credits (Giordano Memorial Field) or cards (Hokusai Grid, Prisec) or both (Manegarm Skunkworks), but the new HB agenda Ontological Dependence really makes taxing the runner through inflicting core damage an effective strategy, with this card (Mr. Hendrik) and even a mostly meh card like Tempus synergizing together to compound its effects.

As Diogene mentions in the above review, Mr. Hendrik is most effective paired with itself, since the runner can only lose all their clicks once. But it also synergizes well with other cards and effects that sap the runner’s clicks like Manegarm Skunkworks and Tempus, and even Bioroid ice. Having multiple upgrades like this can create secure servers without any ice at all, or strengthen a server protected by Manegarm Skunkworks and Formicary. Multiple cards of this kind reduce the effectiveness of targeted interventions like Pinhole Threading, and an escalated response like Light the Fire! just feeds into your strategy to attack the runner.

I’ve found this works great as a support package for Sportsmetal: Go Big or Go Home, for punishing runners who aggressively check new servers and for creating fast advance opportunities with Ontological Dependence instead of Project Vitruvius.

Just remember that Mr. Hendrik and many cards that synergize with it like Tempus and (less effectively) Prisec require the corp to spend extra credits to land, so you have to keep your money at a sufficient level, sort of like making sure you have the credits to fire your Snare!.

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