One of the most annoying cards to be released in awhile, News Team is NBN's new in-faction ambush, very often played as a passive central defense like Snare! or Shi.Kyū.

As an non-advanceable asset trap that doesn't need to be installed, this can be shuffled into your deck to discourage digging, held in your hand to punish Legworks and Gang Signs, or installed on the board to bait an aggressive runner into it. Perhaps most alarmingly, this ambush will fire in Archives, meaning that if they access and trash it, they've just inadvertently turned Archives into a pit of nastiness.

The comparison to other ambushes is important, especially with Snare!, which is the gold standard:

• (+) Doesn't cost any to fire (Snare costs 4 )
• (+) Can fire in archives, which is incredibly powerful for an ambush
• (-) Allows the runner to choose their punishment (similar to Shi.Kyū, Cerebral Cast, or An Offer You Can't Refuse)

I feel this last point really needs to be stressed. You'll notice those other "choice" cards are ones that rarely see play, and there's a good reason for that. Allowing the runner to pick the least harmful punishment is a massive downside to any card. While it's easy to dream up contrived situations where both choices are terrible for the runner, in the vast majority of cases you're playing one of these cards because you specifically want one effect and not the other, and your opponent knows this as well.

So should you play News Team? To answer that, you need to understand what it actually does realistically, and then decide if that's actually advancing your deck's strategy or not. The runner's choices are:

They take 2 tags

• Opens them up to generally game-ending tag punishment like Scorched Earth, Traffic Accident, The All-Seeing I, or Closed Accounts
• If they choose to clear them, they're immediately losing 2 and 4 for a trap that the corp fired for free
• Doesn't get rid of the trap. If they don't trash it, it stays where it was. If they do trash it, it now goes into archives where they can run into it again

They add News Team to their score area as an agenda worth -1 agenda point

• If they were already winning or controlling the board, this may slightly delay their win (if they were at 6 points and their game-winning steal is a 2 pointer, it won't matter)
• Permanently removes the trap from the board
• Makes the game longer, but doesn't cost them tempo (unlike Snare! which always tags them and wipes out a huge chunk of their hand)

So clearly in most cases, the runner is just going to take the -1 agenda point and keep going. If they're Medium slamming R&D, then they're just going to eat this and....keep Medium slamming. If they've got a Clot down and are checking every remote as you drop it, they're going to eat this and...keep checking and trashing/stealing your remotes.

If you're losing, News Team will delay your loss slightly (hopefully). If you're winning, News Team will make you win more (sort of).

News Team really shines when the runner does NOT control the board, but is nonetheless racing you for agendas (with burst multi-access, for example, like The Maker's Eye). If you've got a reliable fast-advance strategy that can't really afford a strong central server defense, News Team might be exactly what you're looking for. But if you're looking for a new devilish way to tag the runner for your Scorch package or to tax them with SYNC, look elsewhere. If you can spare the and influence, Snare is almost always better.

Silly Interactions:

• Works great with Haarpsichord Studios when you're intentionally dumping all your agendas in archives
• Can be sold to Data Dealer to make you cry
• Score out an early Philotic Entanglement, and then play 24/7 News Cycle once the runner has eaten 3 News Teams, 3 Shi.Kyūs, and a few agendas for 8+ net damage

This is hands down my favorite ambush in Netrunner. It is either good (-1 agenda point) or it's great (2 tags) and it costs you no money. In addition to always being good it works from anywhere.

That having been said, this card is a great example of the developer's skill at balancing and integrating with other cards.

This card seems overpowered until you realize that it can be fed to Data Dealer for an absurd profit. In addition if you have the ability to go tag me the power of this card is reduced. so if you aren't packing significant tag punishment as the corp, news team becomes much worse.

Also it synergizes well with SYNC: Everything, Everywhere and also Quantum Predictive Model.

All in all it's a great ambush that like #snare will only win you a game outright if the runner makes a mistake but slows the game down to help you leverage your game plan.

This is for a Jinteki PE point of view:

Now that we have the 20.06 Banlist and they took out Breached Dome and Shock! has rotated, there are fewer options to spice the archives.

One of them is Cyberdex Virus Suite that it's kind of useful because Aumakua is a card that its widely played. But not all decks use virus to work

So maybe it's the time to this card to shine again and use it in combination with Kakurenbo to toss it to the archives.

As other reviews said, when the runner has the option to choose their punishement it's not optimal. But 2 tags are cool and a -1 agenda point it's also cool. Specially when you have Philotic Entanglement.

So maybe this card will have more use in these days.

Negative agenda point! Poison archive! What a card!

In the Q2 2023 meta, there is News Team, Nightmare Archive, Meridian and Hangeki that can give negative agenda points. Only Nightmare Archive can also poison the archive (meaning it can trigger when the runner sees it in archive).

At two influences, it is cheap to import in any faction. Depending on your corp strategy, it could have the same value as Snare!.

For NBN, it is very good, especially (again) for NBN: Reality Plus. NBN: Reality Plus has a lower agenda count, because it is a 40 cards corp. If you put in negative agenda, it makes it more difficult for the runner to score out, thus giving you more time to win the game. If the runner takes the tags, you get tempo (2 or draw 2 cards) and the runner has to clear tags. As always, it is still good in many other archetype, especially asset spam corp archetype (usually Near-Earth Hub: Broadcast Center or NBN: Controlling the Message), as you can bluff cards on the board that are ambushes.

Of course, this will have no effect against a tag-me strategy or if you do not have tag punishment that can allow you to win if the runner float tags.

Evocative art and I would love to see a quote on this card (like the quote on Lily Lockwell). But with the wall of text, there was no space. Well done.