Mental Health Clinic

Mental Health Clinic 0[credit]

Asset: Facility
Trash: 3
Influence: 2

Gain 1[credit] when your turn begins.

The Runner's maximum hand size is increased by 1.

The whitewashed walls dropped away and a beautiful zen garden appeared. It was all an illusion, but it was a comforting illusion.
Illustrated by Viktoria Gavrilenko
Decklists with this card

Honor and Profit (hap)

#9 • English
Startup Card Pool
Standard Card Pool
Standard Ban List (show history)
Rulings

No rulings yet for this card.

Reviews

Don't be anxious. Here, trim this tree.

Mental Health Clinic forces you to choose how you're going to make it hard for the runner to win. Are you going for a vicious Scorched Earth flatline? Or are you going to tax the runner's credits? Or something else entirely?

Runners have access to resources, and corps tax those resources to prevent the runner from dancing all up in their servers. Most commonly, those resources are credits, clicks, and cards. In terms of which corp factions are particularly good at one of these, NBN takes your money, HB makes you spend clicks, and Jinteki makes you trash cards. Weyland just burns your house to the ground laughing while swimming in piles of money.

When Honor & Profit first came out, I thought MHC was only appropriate if you weren't choosing to deal damage to the runner, as a larger hand size means a more difficult flatline. I found it difficult to tax credits in Jinteki, and so I dismissed this card as not very good. As I get more experienced with Netrunner, I'm learning that taxing cards and flatlining are different. Hand size doesn't matter if you're able to continually do small amounts of net damage. Over time, the clicks spent to draw back up are very taxing, and all those cards in the runner's heap aren't doing them a lot of good.

Mental Health Clinic is weak with:

  • Tag and Bag decks with Scorched Earth
  • Most out-of-faction decks, as most have access to drip econ options without spending the influence on MHC.

Mental Health Clinic is good with:

(Kala Ghoda era)
1067
Additional consideration: if Faust (with his buddies Wyldside and Adjusted Chronotype) are a major player in your meta, MHC loses a lot of it's appeal because it directly benefits the runner quite a bit. That said, Palana Agroplex out of Palana gets some play even with Whizzard running wild in the meta. As of this writing the MWL has just updated to version 2 (putting Faust, D4v1d, and Wyldsides on the MWL) which may bring MHC back in a big way for glacier Jinteki, potentially. Only time will tell. —