My, my, my, yet another strong card with no review! Whatever shall we do? hehe

A wise person once told me that if you are going to play a 3/1, it had better have a crazy strong effect. Eminent Domain has a craaaaaaaazy strong effect.

When scored, you can search your deck for a card and install and rez that card IGNORING ALL COSTS, three of the most important words in the game, up there alongside End The Run and Do X Meat Damage.

In other words, you can, as part of scoring this agenda, compress the effects of an overadvanced Off the Books, and a Send a Message. Yikes! That's a lot of value...

Historical Analysis

So let's cut to the chase and run through some of the best targets for this card because if you're going to use it, you'll probably want to be using it in a deck with at least a couple of expensive high-value cards. After all, money saved is money made from the perspective of total net expenditures, so the more valuable a card you can install and rez, the more value you get from Eminent Domain.

If we sort by cost, a few things immediately jump out at us, first off, the most expensive cards are almost exclusively big pieces of ICE, for example, the 5 most expensive corp cards in standard at the time of writing are (tied for first place at 10 credits each):

• Seraph
• Hydra
• Tyr
• NEXT Diamond
• Cloud Eater

Unfortunately, a lot of these cards are deceptively anti-synergistic, half the value of Cloud Eater is in the rez during an encounter, so rezzing it with Eminent wastes potential value. Seraph and Hydra are surprisingly weak and provide questionable value to Weyland unless you care about tags. NEXT Diamond is explicitly designed to be played with a bunch of other NEXT ICE, so importing it on its own is meh and it's kind of hard to make the Core Damage matter too. Tyr is a strong card but 5 influence is a lot to ask for, and like the Diamond, this card is strongest when synergized with other bioroid synergy cards like Hákarl 1.0, Trieste Model Bioroids or Ravana 1.0 where they can feed off of each other to maximise value.

Next on the list is Tithonium, which is banned... moving on.

Conundrum is of little value in a faction that just got Hammer but Anansi and Tollbooth are interesting considerations since they are pricey yet of high value.

Sure... you can use it to find and rez a Pharos or an Oduduwa or a Blockchain but instead of running through all of the seven costs cards and boring you to death let's get to the good stuff.

Old Agenda Sacrifice Targets

Archer, is probably the best target for this card in standard at the time of writing. To answer the question that might already be running through your head, yes, sacrificing an Agenda is treated as a "cost" that Emiment ignores. This means you can search for, install and rez an Archer, without sacrificing anything.

If you're not already familiar with Archer, this card HURTS. Even though you don't get the facecheck upside, you do get a really taxing piece of ice anyway.

• Carmen does it for an excruciating 8 credits
• Num does it for 8 too
• Ika does it 8 assuming you have to move
• Echelon with 2 other Icebreakers does it for a soul-crushing 10 credits
• Revolver does it for 4 credits and 4 power counters, which means you can never fully break it more than once
• Odore does it for a surprisingly tolerable 6 credits if you have all your companions
• Mimic just cries
• Only Orca breaks it efficiently and sustainably for 4 credits (and that says more about Orca than Archer)

One of the most brutal things I encountered was a Weyland player who used this card to find and rez an Archer, then installed another Archer and sacrificed the Eminent to rez it. With just a single 3/1 Agenda you can now efficiently rez, not one but two Archers. Runners should be afraid, I know I was, I was playing Shaper and got absolutely locked out of R&D.

Outside of ICE, there are a handful of other Weyland cards that require sacrificing an Agenda, which you might want to consider, Corporate Town is brutal if you can afford to protect it. Allowing you to trash a Runner resource each turn, no tags, clicks or credits required, which can wreck heavily resource-dependent Runners, but also just generally be disruptive like how, Arissana Rocha Nahu: Street Artist uses Urban Art Vernissage and Aesop’s Pawnshop. Or even just using it to pick off Tsakhia "Bankhar" Gantulga or Arruaceiras Crew or The Twinning or other high-value resources.

Oberth Protocol is another potent card that can serve as a kind of in-faction SanSan City Grid if you are looking for fast advance that doesn't require you to discard your entire hand, while simultaneously helping you stack your advanceable ICE sky high. Or you could just install and rez a SanSan City Grid directly, saving you the draw, install and 6 credits and allowing you to set up for any future agenda scores.

Expend

The "Expend" effect is a little bit more niche, in fact, it's one of only two expendable Agendas released ever, alongside Slash and Burn Agriculture, and one of only 5 total Expendable cards, including Tree Line, Descent and Angelique Garza Correa. The five of which are themselves a new mechanic released in the Liberation cycle. Definitely an interesting econ card, assuming you have something that'll cost 5 or more credits to install and rez you save yourself a net of 4 credits, as well as the click-compression on the install, which is respectable value. The real challenge of course is then getting it back out of Archives, as you'll probably only ever want to use this effect so long as you have a Descent in hand or a Spin Doctor on standby. Anecdotally, most of the time I see this agenda it is just getting scored out and rarely expended, but that's not to say that you can't use it's expend effect, just that you'll need to build around it.

Abstract Analyis

On a more abstract level, I want to applaud the design of Eminent Domain, for a long time Weyland has lived in the realms of jank and annoyance. A surprising bulk of Weyland agendas are about rigshooting, SDS Drone Deployment, Kimberlite Field, Above the Law. A couple more are incredibly niche, Transport Monopoly, Regulatory Capture and several had an almost Jinteki level of obsession with damage, (the now rotated) Broad Daylight, Armed Intimidation, City Works Project and (the more modern) Azef Protocol. But very few Weyland agendas actually pushed themselves forward in a meaning way, it was, put simply, unincentivezed for Weyland to score out conventionally and this led to either playing The Outfit: Family Owned and Operated remote-less fast advance or turning away from Agendas altogether and using either meat damage combo kill or Clearinghouse hyper-glacial to try and close games out.

Eminent Domain is the first such agenda released in a very long time, that actually develops your boardstate as you score it. And not only that, it does it in a uniquely Weyland manner, tutoring has often been a part of the Weyland color pie, seen through old cards like Project Atlas and Consulting Visit to the more modern Off the Books and Pivot. Eminent Domain takes this interest in tutoring, pairs it with the ability to grab high-value ice for free and thus creates a thouroughly Weyland themed, yet powerful, agenda that builds board-state and reinforces your servers as you score it.

Alongside Tucana, I credit this card with the rise of more "reg" scoring Weyland decks, seen in particular at the end of the Rebellion Without Rehersal meta-game, such as those played out of Ob Superheavy Logistics: Extract. Export. Excel. I would definetly be interested to see more Weyland cards "in this vein," perhaps a tempo-positive 4/2 or something along those lines that actually encourages you to score out agendas in a remote sever and push us away from a Weyland exculsively interested in fast-advance, rigshooting and killing the runner.

Theming

But it's the theme of this card that is what takes it from good to perfect for me. The discarded Oliveira Family Farm sign lying off to the side, as it's stepped over. The massive floating banner descending from the sky, what almost looks like armed guards in the distance, as large machinery is trucked in. "Young Gael Oliveira agreed to stay on and manage the farm, for a fee", so simple and yet so ominous, quintessential Weyland, they'll shake your hand and tell you they're doing you a favour as they milk you dry. They'll claim to be the small businesses, the wholesome family-run shop but at the end of the day, it's all just Weyland.

Elevation Meta Game

It's pretty early in the Elevation Meta, so take everything written here with a pinch of salt but I figured I owed it to the good people of Netrunnerdb to update this review now that rotation has hit. Gone are the old staples like Archer, alongside some of the other aforementioned cards like Corporate Town or Oberth Protocol. But in their place, two new and powerful options have been given to us greedy Weyland executives. Biawak fills much the same role as Archer, it's a massive, high-strength, multi-sub rigshooting monstrosity and if you find yourself needing to reinforce your servers, then this is absolutely the new go to. Alternatively we have Plutus, much like the previous examples, you can ignore the special rez cost on Plutus if you tutor it with Eminent Domain, giving you cheap and easy access to a VERY powerful asset. You can check out the Plutus reviews for more details but the short version is that as long as you can already protect it, Plutus will let you rake in clickless credits by double dipping the value of all your best Transations while setting up fast advance lines using special transactions like Greasing the Palm, Red Level Clearance, Peer Review or Petty Cash. Rejoice, executives! For Eminent Domain is still very much alive and well...