The Price

The Price 1[credit]

Event
Influence: 2

Trash the top 4 cards of your stack. You may install 1 of those cards, paying 3[credit] less.

"You ask how we can even try to stop them? A simple answer: not alone."
—Sebastião Souza Pessoa
Illustrated by Phill Simpson
Decklists with this card

The Automata Initiative (tai)

#2 • English
Startup Card Pool
Standard Card Pool
Standard Ban List (show history)
Rulings
  • Updated 2023-10-01

    If the Runner plays The Price, and the top card of the stack is Steelskin Scarring, which cards from the top of the stack will be trashed, and which ones will be drawn?

    Each sentence on The Price is an instruction, and other abilities that meet their trigger conditions have the opportunity to resolve between instructions. The Price will trash the top 4 cards of the stack all at once, and then the trashed Steelskin Scarring will allow the Runner to draw the next two cards of the stack.

Reviews

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The Price will "fetch" you (draw+cast) the best installable from the top 4, and will net you $2 if the installable is costly enough (unless you milled only events and/or irrelevant/unaffordable non-events).

Synergies: Milling Strike Fund or Steelskin Scarring triggers them.

Note that if you can't afford any installations, you can't “fallback” to drawing (like, adding one to hand or keeping one on your deck, or something). Also note that you install from heap directly (you don't add to grip then install from grip, indirectly), which can trigger any “heap-matters” effects (like Exile: Streethawk, lol).


Design: In the RGB color-pie, Anarch can do card-selection, but can't do much tutoring (which is “infinite card-selection”). Compare Criminal tutoring an icebreaker program or run event, or Shaper fetching any program. While I don't want much red tutoring—maybe just for virus’es (like Djinn) or for sabotage, maybe not—I do want more “chaotic pseudo-tutoring” in red; like Frantic Coding was (“mill 25%+ to fetch a program”); or like a redshifted Spark of Inspiration would be (“cascade into a program”).


(The Automata Initiative era)