Whee. Another card of the "run all the centrals to do something amazing" archetype. And this one probably delivers on the amazing part. 8 cards is a LOT, and you get to pick one to access. Or two, if you can contrive a way to run 3 servers, play an event, and still have a click left over!

In a lot of ways, this is a supercharged version of the old shaper staple, Indexing. It gives you a good chance of seeing an agenda, and a ton of information about their deck in the process. It allows you (effectively) a huge multiaccess, except that it completely ignores all the nasty traps and surprises that are traditionally the bane of huge multiaccesses.

Except there are some really interesting differences, between Deep Dive and Indexing. Indexing requires you to run on R&D twice (or more) to get real value, since the first run just tells you what's there, and lets you reorder it. This means that Indexing was usually either a very early game card, (great if they don't ice R&D first turn, or have only one ice that you can break cheaply), or a very late game card. (For when you're rich enough to raid a well-guarded R&D multiple times in a turn.) In contrast, Deep Dive requires you to hit all three centrals. So you're more likely to need more than one breaker type to complete your triple-run. So it's harder to Deep Dive early - it feels like more of a late-game card.

Also, Deep Dive happens all at once - the viewing and the accessing are part of the same effect. So Deep Dive is not vulnerable to instant-speed deck reshuffles that were always the bane of Indexing. It used to be that a well-timed Jackson Howard, (or his new minions, the Spin Doctors) could completely invalidate an Indexing run, but Deep Dive has no such troubles.

On the other hand, Indexing also let you have some control over what the corp was going to draw. Whether or not you managed to scoop any agendas in the process, if the corp was poor, you could move their Hedge Fund five cards down, to keep them poor a little longer. If they were having trouble drawing ice, oops, guess Eli is four or five cards down now. Deep Dive forces a reshuffle, so no such games are possible.

But enough about what Deep Dive does. What it does is amazing. Let's talk about how to best pull it off!

Like most cards that require multiple central runs, anything that gives you free runs or extra clicks is a godsend. Especially if you want a spare for that delicious second card access!

• Jak Sinclair can give you an extra run, as long as you can get into a central with no breakers. (Might be possible with the boat!)
• Beth Kilrain-Chang can give you an extra click, although waiting until the corp is rich enough to do so will almost certainly mean they can rez a lot of nasty stuff in the process.
• Running Hot gives you a bunch of clicks, although the core damage runs the risk of sniping Deep Dive out of your hand.
• Algernon also gives you a free click, but the influence cost is kind of prohibitive. At least it's a program, so shapers can include only one, and just search for it.
• Swift can get you an extra click when you play run events, but it takes up a precious console slot.
• Nyusha "Sable" Sintashta: Symphonic Prodigy gets a free click when she runs a random central server, which actually seems pretty great here - It doesn't matter which server is her target for the round, since we want all of them. She'd have to import Deep Dive though, and at 5 influence, that's a bit rough.

Really, Jak Sinclair seems like the best of these if you're playing shaper. Playing it out of criminal in a Nyusha deck seems possible also, although I'm not sure how the influence would work out. It's a pity that Out of the Ashes just rotated, because that card was perfect for this sort of thing.

Cards that let you get extra value out of runs are also probably worth looking at, as support for this card.

• Dirty Laundry, Bravado, Into the Depths, etc, can help make sure you have enough money to make it through all the servers, without having to stop and spend a click to get it.
• Leech is a classic way of making runs pay for themselves.
• Multiaccess run events like Jailbreak, Legwork and The Maker's Eye can make your HQ and R&D runs more profitable. (And if you can trash/steal cards off the top of R&D, you'll see deeper when you do your Deep Dive.)
• Cards like Inside Job or Tread Lightly, that disincentivize the corp from rezzing ice (or help mitigate it if they do) can make things a lot cheaper. Especially if they don't know what you're going for, and think you're just probing centrals hoping to get lucky!

Deep Dive seems like a pretty good card. It's a BIG card - not in credit cost, but in effect and the effort it takes to play. It can can easily end games in a hurry though, if you snipe 1-2 agendas from R&D, along with a lucky hit on Legwork. That's a lot of points in a turn. Obviously it's possible to get bad draws, but you're almost sure to get at least some points out of your Deep Dive turn.

I am guessing we will see this card in decklists going forward, as an alternate win condition for runners. It will probably need at least some portion of the deck built around supporting it, but the effect is powerful enough that I think it will be worth it.

So, caveat: I haven't had a chance to pop this guy into a deck and play with him yet. But just at first blush, this card looks really interesting, and I want to talk a little about why I think that. And wow, as I proofread before posting, apparently I had a lot to talk about! Sorry in advance for the wall of text. Let's dig in to Drago, and some of his implications!

So first - the big one: Drago makes a whole lot of tag-punishment cards a whole lot more playable. Normally, if the runner plays carefully, they can be safe. Tag punishment is often more about the threat - the punishment never actually lands, but the danger forces the runner to play more slowly and carefully, which gives the corp more time and breathing room. It's usually pretty binary - as long as the runner avoids ending their turn with tags, they are safe. And if they ever DO end their turn with tags, it's usually ruinous enough to end the game. So it's almost more of a tax - the runner just has to be extra super careful once they know the corp has tags, and make sure they have enough cash around to beat Hard-Hitting News, or keep a Misdirection on hand, etc.

Not so when Drago is in da house! It used to be that tags only happened during runs, or sometimes from corp events that could only be played after runs. Runners who stayed home and worked on their econ or rig were safe! But not any more. Now, the corp can just force tags into the game, whenever they like!

Obviously the dream is getting enough advancement to give the runner two tags, and BOOM! to end the game. Possible, but challenging. Since BOOM! requires to play, you need to start your turn with at least 3 advancement tokens on Drago for this to work. (So you can advance, apply tags, and then BOOM.) Tempting, but probably not practical. But without the big killshot, the other possibilities are impressive.

Unlike BOOM!, there are a lot of punishment cards that only require one tag. They didn't used to see much play, because again, runners are usually pretty good at clearing tags, and it wasn't worth putting in cards that required difficult conditions and didn't win the game outright.

But now, as corp, if you can start a turn with Drago installed, you can spend two clicks advancing him, give the runner a tag, and then play something nasty. Some potential options:

• The All-Seeing I
• Trust Operation
• Self-Growth Program
• Retribution
• Special mention to Subcontract, which just rotated out and is no longer legal, but might have actually been useful (finally) in a Drago/tag-punishment deck!

Retribution in particular seems especially promising, since it gives you the option to snipe some key pieces from the runner's rig, potentially blocking them from getting in to trash Drago next turn. (Which they'll probably want to, now that he's rezzed and threatening them with more unavoidable tags+punishment.) Simulchip means that program trashing may not be as devastating as we'd like, but trashing an expensive console can be almost as good, especially if it runs them out of memory. And it would probably make the runner very sad, for example, if something unexpected happened to their nice shiny new boat...

I started out thinking this card was amazing-good, but the more I think about it, the more I like the design. The fact that he takes two advancement tokens per tag makes a lot of the math work out nicely. You can't install, tag the runner, and play tag punishment in one turn, since you have to spend loading him up. So he has to spend at least one turn on the board. On the other hand, if he survives a turn on the board, you can advance him enough to play tag punishment in one turn. (and play it) And, of course, NBN has been getting some nice ways to advance things without spending clicks lately, like Pravdivost Consulting: Political Solutions, or Vasilisa. (Yes I know she's just a reprinted Matrix Analyzer, but she's a slightly upgraded Matrix Analyzer that no longer requires a trace!)

The biggest downside of Drago is, of course, his influence. (Or alternately, that a lot of the good tag-punishment cards are in Weyland, and also have high influence.) The more I look through cards, the more I think he might do better there. In addition to good tag-punishment options, they have some of the best ways to load up a card with advancement tokens quickly. We just lost Dedication Ceremony to rotation, (which would have obviously been amazing (read: broken) on Drago) but we still have our good janky friend Jemison Astronautics, if we want to chase that seductive dream of a surprise BOOM! out of nowhere...

One last thing. Can anyone tell me what's going on with the art in this card? Are those like, holographic images, while he goes over peoples' psychographic profiles? Are those his coworkers? Or does he just decorate his office/work environment with live people trapped in mad-science tubes?

Enquiring minds want to know!

I love a lot of things about this card. I love the theme. I love that Laramy Fisk, the Savvy Investor is on the TV, having apparently lost a lot of money. I love that the flavor text references the famous Line Goes Up video about cryptocurrencies.

I love all those things about this card. I just don't love the actual card's effect.

4/2 agendas are awkward. They just are. I know that in the current environment, 3/2 agendas are a lot rarer now, and 4/2s are kind of the default, but even so, it's difficult to pick and choose when you are going to score a 4/2. You have to telegraph them at least somewhat by advancing them once, while 3/2s can at least potentially survive on the board for a turn or two, if you're feeling gutsy. But that's a lot harder with 4/2s, because runners are just too curious about anything in a server with advancement tokens on it. (and rightly so - especially in a faction that doesn't have as many traps.)

So why does this matter?

Because the effect of this agenda - a 7 loss from the runner - is highly timing dependent. If you score this when the runner has zero money, (because, say, they just blew it all trying and failing to get into your remote, or because you correctly identified a scoring window because they needed to spend a turn rig-building) then you don't get much benefit out of this card, beyond the points.

And the sad truth is that that's going to happen more often than not. Because if the runner had 7 at the end of their turn, they probably could have gotten into your remote if they wanted to. I guess you might luck out and hit someone who spent their whole turn gaining credits, but I think it's going to be far more common to cost the runner 3-5 than the full 7.

I don't know. Maybe other people have had different experiences with their runners than I have had. I just feel like if I wanted an agenda that would cause a big credit swing, I'd play something more reliable, like...

• SSL Endorsement
• Bellona
• Offworld Office

But hey, maybe you just want to see that smug Laramy jerk cry because his collection of ugly monkey pictures is now worthless! And you know, I wouldn't fault you for that at all.

Well this card is cute! It's a good old-fashioned "run and get stuff" event, except in typical shaper fashion, it's all complicated and weird. That said though, I absolutely love the theming on this card, and how it actively rewards you for digging in to the deepest, most protected recesses of the corp's board.

First off, it only really works if the corp has ice. Which, to be fair, most corps do these days. But still worth keeping in mind. (Although important to remember that it doesn't say rezzed ice! So if the corp is too poor to bring it online, you can get some freebies. Pity that at 3 influence, it's not likely to be imported into criminal decks...)

Second - you're probably not going to get to use all three effects very often. Even ignoring the fact that you need a server with 3 ice, only one of the effects (gain 4) is useful at all points in the game. Charge is only useful once you have something with power counters, and by late-game, you probably don't have any programs that you want to search for and install.

It's interesting to compare it with Dirty Laundry. They both are run events that net you 3. Dirty Laundry is a bit more flexible, since you can target un-iced servers with it. But Into the Depths has some interesting features - It's also 1 cheaper than Dirty Laundry to start. And it can potentially give you a lot of value beyond just the 3, depending on how deep the server you ran was.

It's also an interesting parallel to Bravado. They are both 3-influence run events that scale based on the amount of ice passed, and do things that their factions are known for. (i. e. "get money" and "weird nonsense") Into the Depths is a bit less focused than Bravado, but it's also more flexible - You can use it for different things based on where you are in the game and what you need at that moment.

I'm not sure how valuable a power counter is in general yet, but boat counters are obviously super-important, and this card is obviously designed to be used alongside Endurance. Endurance also has the nice synergy here, since it's a reliable way to break through ice even if you don't have your breakers out yet. So you can sail right on past some ice, and then use the search/install effect on Into the Depths to go find the appropriate breaker for next time!

It's worth pointing out that the search/install effect is really strong in terms of tempo, as long as you have a program you want to install. Even if you trigger no other effects (i. e. you ran a 1-iced server) you get a run, a card search, a card draw and an install, (three clicks worth of value, plus whatever the search is worth) for the price of a 1 event. Not bad at all!

Anyway. A weird shaper card. But a flexible one, with a fantastic theme, and obvious synergies with one of the most interesting cards of the set.

All aboard the boat!

Oh look, it's an upgraded version of Modded!

Except, Modded wasn't seeing a huge amount of play (presumably why they upgraded it), and the upgrade is ... questionable? To be a good target for Rigging Up, you need something that costs 3 or more, and that can make use of power counters, and starts with a power counter. (Because "charge" only works with things that already have counters on them.) That list is surprisingly small.

Most of the programs that use power counters are already cheap, and many of them don't start with power counters. Here is the list of programs that have power counters, but of those, only Atman and Hyperbaric (a new reprint of Study Guide) actually start with tokens and can be charged.

The list of hardware is even shorter. Mind's Eye would work, but again, it doesn't actually start with counters. Which basically just leaves the boat, which is probably one of the main intended use-cases. Clocking in at an eye-watering 8, and with some of the most valuable power counters I've ever seen, I feel like Rigging Up is basically intended for getting the boat on the board and getting her ready to roll.

Which is great, but... Endurance is a console. Once you it's out, what are you going to use the rest of your Rigging Ups on?

I may be proven wrong on this, but at the moment, I feel like it's hard to justify this, even in a boat deck. There just aren't enough programs or hardware that I want to Rigging Up!

Edit Thanks to Toper for pointing out that the Rigging Up list is even smaller than I thought!