Phật Gioan Baotixita

♦ Phật Gioan Baotixita 1[credit]

Asset: Executive
Trash: 3

Influence: 4

When your discard phase ends, place 1 power counter on this asset.

The first time each turn an agenda is scored or stolen, you may remove up to 2 hosted power counters. Do 1 net damage plus 1 net damage for each power counter removed this way.

“I make the best company.”
Illustrated by Elliott Birt
Decklists with this card

Elevation (elev)

#51 • English
Startup Card Pool
Standard Card Pool
Standard Ban List (show history)
Printings
Rulings
  • Updated 2025-06-30

    If Phật Gioan Baotixita has no hosted power counters, can the Corp do 1 net damage the first time an agenda is scored or stolen in a turn?

    Yes. Spending power counters is not a requirement to use Phật Gioan Baotixita's ability. If no counters are spent, the Corp does 1 net damage.

  • Updated 2025-06-30

    An agenda is stolen while Phật Gioan Baotixita is rezzed. Can the Corp choose not to do net damage?

    No. The only optional part of Phật Gioan Baotixita's ability is removing power counters for additional net damage.

Reviews

PGB is “PE-as-an-Asset”.


For example, he makes Fujii Asset Retrieval into When this agenda is scored or stolen, do 3–5 net damage.. (IIUC, four if the Runner steals a Fujii immediately after you rezzed him, five if you've been charging/defending him, and three if you score an agenda when he's empty.)

In comparison, a local Daniela Jorge Inácio makes Fujii into Obokata, while PGB: does an extra point of damage, triggers offensively as well as defensively, and his ceiling is a flatline (versus "just" keeping the Runner from stealing three points).


Flavor-wise, “I make the best company.” is a pun on cloning himself into servants, as well as being a corporate executive. And in Vietnamese, his name translates as “Buddha John-the-Baptist” (CF. “Jesús Juan Bautista”).

en.wiktionary.org

vi.wikipedia.org

(Elevation era)

He plays hard to get, but I've been playing Phật Gioan Baotixita in BANGUN. It turns out that combining two ID abilities (Argus Security: Protection Guaranteed and Jinteki: Personal Evolution is pretty potent! PGB makes your installed agendas really, really painful to steal. If you surprise rez him, they Byte! with one counter, they're Obokata Protocols, and with 2 they're nearly deadly even with a full hand. Add in Angelique Garza Correa or other Jinteki imports like Daniela Jorge Inácio, or Anemone and it quickly becomes outright suicidal to try to steal. PGB also gives Bangun centrals a little teeth, as a consolation for not getting to fire your ID you get a little damage. Smacking the runner on a Greenmail that's trivial to score also feels really good - PGB is great at setting up catch-22s where the runner gets set back no matter what.

Except for Pinhole Threading. Yeah, PGB folds to Pinhole, played at least 1x in almost every runner deck at this point. Mahkota Langit Grid helps with this, but it still feels bad to see him trashed, especially since BANGUN can't really afford to have more than 2 copies.

tl;dr, oh no, he's hot, and he's down to bang -- BANGUN, that is.

(Elevation era)

Ooohh, I didn't realize he did anything without counters! That wording is pretty confusing. Now I have to try that BANGUN deck.