Adding a review as there isn't one at the time of writing.

It can be difficult to give good constructive feedback because I love this game, these cards and everything I'm about to say comes from a place of love and wanting to help the designers. This card... sucks. It's probably one of the worst cards released in Liberation and sees a proportional amount of play to that power level.

The runner can just run through this, like, without breakers... with very minimal drawbacks. If you're wondering how here are some options:

• click 1: draw, click 2: draw, click 3: run through Piranhas like wasn't even there
• click 1: use Dr. Nuka Vrolyck, click 2: run through Piranhas like it wasn't even there
• click 1: play Diesel, click 2: run through Piranhas like it wasn't even there
• click 1: play Steelskin Scarring, click 2: run through Piranhas like it wasn't even there
• click 1: use Verbal Plasticity, click 2: run through Piranhas like wasn't even there
• start of turn: Earthrise Hotel triggers, click 1: run through Piranhas like wasn't even there
• last turn: play The Class Act, click 1: run through Piranhas like wasn't even there
• better yet, have a Stoneship Chart Room installed and you can face-check this ICE and still get through it

(You can also use a Botulus or Boomerang if you don't want to take any damage and either option will get you in without any problems)

This is absolutely hilarious, this card is Diviner (which is already a very weak card), yet more than twice as expensive and somehow even less consistent at ending the run. Just to be kind, the Corp then gifts the Runner a Bad Publicity to help them run through all the rest of their ICE more efficiently because why not?

This card does less damage than an Anemone, draws the Corp a card as though that's somehow worth the cost and then sits around twiddling its thumbs as the Runner moves past it, I don't know how you could have designed a less scary version of Piranhas.

Its sister program, Valentão, at least makes some sense, it's pretty reasonable to assume that a Weyland player would have more money than the Runner (though some Shapers will give the Corp a run for it's money, no pun intended), even without the first two subroutines firing, the third has a legitimate threat of ending the run anyways. Let all the subroutines fire and Valentão triggers a 4-credit swing and bounces the runner out. This means if they want to get in, they have to break it, and that's where these two cards really shine.

• 5 for Unity even with 3 Icebreakers installed
• 5 for Buzzsaw, and that's with K2CP Turbine support
• 5 for Lobisomem
• 7/9 for Shibboleth
• 8 for Cat's Cradle
• 4 / 8 for Euler

These cards tax a lot, with the exception of the first turn Euler is played these two cards tax the runner as much if not more than the rez cost, which is amazing by most ICE standards. The only problem is that while the runner actually needs to break Valentão to get in, you'd have to mind control the Runner to convince them they're locked out by a Piranhas.

The fatal flaw of this card, of course, is to assume that credits and cards are comparable, in many ways they are for purposes of card draw or econ, but where credits can be stacked unlimitedly, cards top out at 5 (for most). This makes getting yourself more cards than Corp, substantially easier than getting more credits, the Corp simply can't generate a hand-size lead in the same way they can generate a credit lead. To achieve this in Faction you'd either have to play Superconducting Hub, which is a pretty bad 3/1 agenda on its own, or use something like Spin Doctor to trigger card draw mid-run, which, is hardly the best use for such a powerful card.

It would have made so much more sense for this card to be put in literally any other faction too, put it in Weyland and they can try and synergize it with The Outfit: Family Owned and Operated and Regulatory Capture or Roughneck Repair Squad instead of needing to pay 3 influence per copy to import it.

Put it in Haas-Bioroid and they can synergize it with Haas-Bioroid: Precision Design to make it much harder to ignore the effect, or with Thule Subsea: Safety Below, further punishing the runner for their lack of hand size and just generally making it much more likely the ETR sub will fire.

And of course, there's Jinteki, by combining this card with additional forms of damage you can more reliably keep the runner out, or you could use this card's single instance of damage that the runner doesn't want to have to break to charge up a Prāna Condenser, or soften the runner up for a trap or Fujii Asset Retrieval.

But NBN, they have almost no way to use this card, except perhaps to generate an extra credit from Your Digital Life? And pricing it at 3 Influence just makes it so much more cumbersome to import this card into any other faction who might try and do something cool with it.

The idea of Code Gates having "conditional" end-the-run effects while Barriers have "hard" end-the-run effects is cool and very thematic and I'm interested to see more cards designed in this space. But, Piranhas is just a swing and a miss that is not worth it's price, let alone the bad-publicity.

Beyond these practical mechanics considerations, this wasn't quite what I was expecting for such an iconic cultural icon as Piranhas. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but perhaps something that did more damage the fewer cards you had in hand, like an ICE version of Blood in the Water that's used as a finisher. Or something that starts with 7 end-the-run effects and has one less for each card in hand. Or maybe some kind of ICE, where you can include 6 copies in the deck and it tutors other copies of itself out onto the board when you do net damage with it, like, the first Piranhas draws blood and then that attracts the rest. Or maybe even just a really expensive piece of ICE with like 5 "do 1 net damage" subroutines to represent lots of small fish each taking a small bite out of you and that adding up.

TLDR: A rather weak card that sees very little play in the current meta because it can be so easily circumvented and provides very little actual taxing power despite its superficially large numbers.

Adding a review as there isn't one at the time of writing.

Isaac Liberdade is a mobile Sysop, sometimes called a "nomadic" Sysop. This means that, unlike most upgrades, Isaac can move himself around, allowing the benefits of a single, unique card to potentially affect multiple servers across multiple turns. He's one of 4 such mobile Sysops released in the Liberation Cycle, one for each Corp, alongside The Holo Man, Vovô Ozetti and Adrian Seis, the collective of them bring a new mechanic to the game, something that is both refreshing and fascinating. Used correctly, protected, and moved around to where they are most needed these cards can provide incredible value.

At the end of your turn, you may move Isaac to a different server and whenever you do move him, he can place an advancement counter on an unadvanced piece of ICE, note: it does not specify that the ICE itself must be "advanceable" so even though you would gain additional value from advancing a piece of ICE which gains benefits from being advanced, you can advance other pieces of ICE, purely to allow Isaac to set himself up and give himself more targets to increase the strength of.

That being said, Isaac synergizes well with advanceable ICE, since placing an advancement counter on an advanceable piece of ICE is more valuable than placing it on a random piece of ICE and if you already have advanced ICE, Isaac can start increasing their strength immediately. Advanceable ICE is an almost uniquely Weyland mechanic (if we ignore Mestnichestvo) that has gone through multiple iterations throughout the game. Back from Lunar, we can see cards like Tyrant or Woodcutter which could be advanced and gained additional subroutines for each advancement counter, or the set of "space ICE" like Asteroid Belt or Wormhole that gets cheaper when advanced, or ICE that gained additional strength when advanced like Fire Wall or Ice Wall as well as the "7 wonders" archetype that gained special bonuses once they have at least 3 advancement counters like Hortum or Pharos. And, it's a mechanic still going strong today with two new pieces of advanceable ICE released in Liberation Tree Line and Logjam.

Pros / When to Use

Isaac is best played not only with lots of advanceable ICE but also with very large, vertical servers. The more pieces of ICE he can increase the strength of at once, the more value he can generate. In such a situation, he can be bounced back and forth between HQ and R&D or between centrals and the scoring remote, both to stack up advancement counters and to adapt in real-time to where you think you could most benefit from increasing the strength of the ICE to tax or dissuade the runner.

Cons

Unfortunately for Isaac, the metagame in the standard format does not favour glacial, the prevalence of Orca/Lobisomem Kit, K2CP Turbine/Takobi Lat and Arruaceiras Crew ICE destruction Anarchs hasn't been kind to glacial and most people seem to prefer playing assets spam R+ or kill based PE or Thule or just rushing the runner out with PD or Asa, plus whatever AgInfusion: New Miracles for a New World is doing. Building lots of big servers just isn't as actually taxing as you might think.

Beyond that he's expensive to rez and cheap to trash which is never a good combination, you have to try and keep him alive for at least a little while to get him to pay for himself, let alone turn a profit, and that can be hard when the whole point of his ability is that you want to put him on the server you think the runner is most likely to run.

Additionally, the identity you probably think you want to include him with Weyland Consortium: Built to Last, because they both like advanceable ICE, is a bit of a red herring, no pun intended because BTL likes to be the one placing the first advancement counter and so does Isaac. If you didn't already know, BTL has a weird piece of wording that essentially means you only get the credits if you advance it with the basic action, it doesn't give you credits if you "place an advancement counter" such as through Isaac, Wall to Wall or Priority Construction. This makes Isaac clunky to use in BTL at the best of times and actively anti-synergistic at the worst, where either Isaac places the first advancement counter and you miss out on the bonus credits or you place the first advancement counter and Isaac is left without anything to advance. Neither of which allows you to get the most value from Isaac or your identity. Perhaps he is better suited for some kind of glacial Nuvem SA: Law of the Land deck but most Nuvems I see are usually just trying to do some kind of kill combo with End of the Line or Punitive Counterstrike.

This is usually the part where I write a thematic review but since Isaac Liberdade seems to be a fictional character who is not based on anyone in real life and since we don't really have much lore to go off of (unlike The Holo Man for example) I'm just kinda going to spitball here. We know he's a bioroid in Brazil, which means he's freed, which means he's not property... which means he's been hired by and is voluntarily working for Weyland, one of the megacorporations who are secretly trying to enslave his kind all over again... which... is honestly really fascinating, but again, without even any flavour text to work with we don't know much more than that. We can see him yelling or barking orders in his art but that doesn't really tell us all that much about his philosophical standpoint, his reasons for working with Weyland or how much he actually knows.

Beyond that I decided to track down the etymology of his name, Isaac comes from Hebrew (like many Western names, think Jonathan, Jacob, Joseph, Joshua, David, Adam, Benjamin, Daniel, Elijah, Gabriel, Micheal, Noah, Samuel and so on and so forth) and literally means "(he) will laugh" or perhaps in context "he who laughs." From the art alone this couldn't be further from the truth, but it's hard to say if this is intentional irony or if the designers just didn't know and don't care about etymology. Liberdade obviously means freedom, compare liberty, liberate, liberation or even Libertador (Mercury: Chrome Libertador) but once again, it's unclear if this is meant to have a deeper meaning or if someone just thought Liberdade sounded cool. Do all freed bioroids have the surname Liberdade, did Isaac choose his name for himself, did someone else give him this name and if so who? These are questions we may never know the answer to, but it's fun to speculate.

TLDR: One of 4 new nomadic Sysops, it has potential in glacial, advanced ICE decks but is somewhat finicky to integrate with the leading advanced ICE ID Weyland Consortium: Built to Last. Among the 4 Sysops, he's arguably on the lower end of the power spectrum, alongside Vovo and Adrian, which, is all to say that the Holo Man looks like the big brother who ate the other 3 in the womb.

Cluedrew has already added an exceptional flavour review above, so I wanted to provide a more logistical overview of what this card does and when to use it.

If you're unfamiliar, Netrunner is an expandable card game with a continuously updated ban list and regular set rotations. This does a lot of important things regarding balance, staleness, creative opportunities and accessibility but one of the smaller things it does is open up opportunities for what are commonly referred to as "near-prints." Cards that closely resemble prior cards that have been banned or rotated but with some critical details changed. This allows one to attempt to keep the best and most interesting parts of a card's identity while trying to fix its most problematic elements.

So notable examples include cards like Spin Doctor which closely resembles Jackson Howard but has a limited use card draw effect, recurs 2 instead of 3 cards and costs 2 instead of 3 to trash, limiting its strength and making it cheaper for the runner to trash it. Or Diversion of Funds which closely resembles Account Siphon with the additional cost of a click and a credit to play as well as reducing the amount gained so that it represents a 10 credit swing instead of 15 should it succeed (though it no longer gives the runner tags either).

Ashen Epilogue is a "near-print" of Levy AR Lab Access, a potent card that allowed you to recur the entirety of your heap back into your stack, essentially refreshing you back to the game start (while allowing you to keep all your installed cards, credits and agenda points of course). Since cards almost invariably get trashed, be that simply from playing events or from using trashable resourses, hardware or programs cards will end up in the heap. And, since those cards have value and uses, it can be very useful to get them all back.

And that's saying nothing about rigshooting or Net Damage, Meat Damage or Core Damage removing key cards either.

In a more abstract sense, if you were worried about running out of cards, you could simply make a larger deck, including more cards to last you longer in a more protracted game, however, due to most cards being limited to a playset of 3, this runs you into the problems of consistency and efficiency as you are forced to gradually bloat your deck with unnecessary and inferior cards to avoid running out of them. Levy Ar Access solved that problem by letting you make a tight, efficient deck with all the best cards and then just recurring them once you've gone through your whole deck. Giving you most of the potential upsides of a much larger deck, without any of the drawbacks.

Ashen Epilogue tries to preserve the potential of such a card while limiting its universal safety with one major change "remove the top 5 cards of your stack from the game." Put simply, if your goal was to try and use Ashen Epilogue as a safety blanket against key icebreakers or combo pieces getting trashed then you run the even bigger risk of accidentally removing those cards from the game, putting them even further out of reach.

A smaller change from Levy to Ashen is that Ashen is a 2 influence neutral while Levy was a 3 influence Shaper card, this change makes the card slightly more accessible for non-Shaper factions and slightly less accessible for Shapers.

When to Use

This card is ideal if your economy is particularly dependent on finite cards, event-heavy econ like Sure Gamble, Creative Commission, Dirty Laundry, or Bravado all come to mind. As well as decks that trash their own cards for money through Aesop’s Pawnshop, Spec Work or Isolation. But is markedly less useful in decks with self-sustainable econ like drip or the old Magnum Opus.

It's particularly valuable in Anarch decks where self-trashing is common Steelskin Scarring, Strike Fund, Moshing, The Price, Eye for an Eye, Audrey v2, Lago Paranoá Shelter, Friend of a Friend and many many more. It's practically a must-include for Esâ Afontov: Eco-Insurrectionist where without it she would probably mill herself out long before she mills the corp.

It also has applications in run-event heavy Criminal decks, the aforementioned Bravado, Dirty Laundry and Carpe Diem all being core to high-tempo Criminal econ. Or even in high card draw Shaper where you'll regularly see Dr. Nuka Vrolyck, Diesel, Aniccam Lat get through the entirety of his deck before the end of the game.

In terms of timing, this card is obviously best used when your deck is empty to maximise the potential number of cards recurred, but it's also best used on an empty hand if possible. Remember, spending 5 credits just to draw 5 cards is good value even if the massive recursion effect wasn't even there.

When Not to Use

As mentioned previously, if you need to recur specific, highly-valuable cards more safely and reliably, there are other better options, Harmony AR Therapy is one of the most common at the time of writing alongside Simulchip in Shaper while Anarchs have Labor Rights and Privileged Access, all of which are quite good. There are also Katorga Breakout, Rip Deal and Test Run though they see relatively little play comparative. All of these cards can more precisely and reliably recur a single card you need, allowing you to recover that one lost breaker or combo piece without risking it being removed from the game and without having to recur everything else in your Heap at the same time and sort through your deck all over again.

TLDR: A "near-print" of Levy AR Lab Access that allows you to recur almost all cards from your Heap back into your Stack, best used in self-trashing Anarch decks but not particularly safe or reliable for recurring any specific card in your Heap.

I don't normally write hate reviews because there's a lot I love about this game, and there are a lot of good, interesting and fascinating cards, so it feels like a shame to focus on the negative, but here we go.

Strength shredding has always been a staple of the Anarch roster, from cards like Wyrm, Parasite, Datasucker and Ice Carver in the original core set to modern staples like Devil Charm, Leech and this card right here.

The underlying premise is solid, instead of pumping up icebreakers to match the ICE's strength, what if we bring the ICE's strength down to match the icebreakers? Thus all strength shredding is best paired with fixed-strength breakers like Mimic, Yog.0 and the spiritual successors to fixed-strength breakers released in the System Gateway: Cleaver and Buzzsaw which can technically pump but do so with extreme inefficiency while simultaneously breaking subroutines more efficiently than your average breaker, thus incentiving not having to pump with them.

The Corp/Runner dynamic here is solid. If the runner can get set up, make smart, measured runs, manage their virus counters well, and lock centrals, then they can efficiently get into almost anywhere with Datasucker/Leech counters. Suppose they can pin the corp down with pressure. In that case, it becomes difficult to purge virus counters making not only Datasucker/Parasite valuable but also causing the Corp to lose ICE to a Parasite/Chisel giving them even more cheap and reliable access.

Alternatively however, if the Corp can get set up, use their ICE intelligently, build an econ lead and have enough tempo to reliably purge Virus counters then the runner can get locked out, unable to generate counters from central runs and either unable to break ICE due to their fixed breakers or forced to do so at a heavy tax, especially against large and powerful ICE. Thus allowing the Corp to open up scoring windows by playing around this weakness.

There's a clear push and pull here, this combination of strength-shredding and fixed-strength/soft fixed-strength breakers make a beautiful duet, an elegant set of complementary gameplay mechanics where the potential value of your fixed-strength breakers is held in check by the need for strength shredding and the potential for the Corp to tax and lock the Runner out without them.

Even the sources of strength-shredding themselves are respectable, the aforementioned Leech generates Virus counters through central runs, something the Runner already wants to do and is blocked by ICEing centrals, something the Corp already wants to do, while simultaneously playing into the theme of "defend your Archives" that Anarchs often have going on. The counters are expended when used too, which means that from the Corps perspective, even if your ICE isn't directly taxing the runner credits, it's never the less taxing them on a finite and valuable resource. It's also always vulnerable to Virus purges (and by extension Mavirus) should the corp decide it's worth it to do so.

Ice Carver is strong and universal but it's expensive to install and unique, limiting it's efficacy to only shredding a single strength, it takes your fixed strength breakers from effectively 3 to 4 strength tbut doesn't do anything against 5 or 6+ strength ICE and even for Cleaver and Buzzsaw, it helps, but super large pieces of ICE retain their ability to heavily tax the runner.

Devil Charm is incredibly strong but so emphatically "single-use" that it removes itself from the game, saving the runner in a pinch, but making it clear to the Corp that, Devil Charms are a finite resource in and of themselves.

Meanwhile, Chisel, the only other ICE destruction tool, is limited by time and setup, only being able to threaten a single piece of ICE at a time, and offering the Corp a window of opportunity to purge virus counters should they decide their ICE is important enough to save. Not only that but the runner must encounter the ICE regularly to shred and destroy it, requiring further investment of time and resources to break the ICE conventionally, repeatedly, before it can be destroyed (which arguably makes it more balanced than Parasite by comparison too). It's also vulnerable to cards like Magnet for example.

Even Arruaceiras Crew's strength shredding effect is relatively tame on its own, only reducing an ICE by 2 strength and only for a single turn is useful but limited and taking a tag is a hefty investment, though it also synergies with the whole Tag Me Anarch thing going on in the Liberation Cycle too. It can also only be used once per turn which further limits its applications and helps keep it in check.

The problem is the sheer ease with which Arrauceiras Crew can destroy ICE (especially in conjunction with Devil Charm) and perhaps more specifically, the lack of counterplay open to the Corp. They cannot purge it, they cannot Magnet it and super large pieces of ICE like Bran, Tyr, Cloud Eater, Seraph and Anansi go from being exactly the kind of high-strength ICE which should terrify fixed-strength breakers to a liability for the Corp.

The bigger the ICE, the more value trashing it provides and in conjunction with Devil Charm, even 10-cost ICE can be permanently destroyed for 5 credits, which is a disgusting proposition. Even with heavy recursion from a faction like HB (Corporate Hospitality, Haas-Bioroid: Precision Design, Ansel 1.0, Drafter) or even with extra recursion tools like (Simulation Reset or Spin Doctor) the sheer loss of credits from the install and rez cost, not to mention the tempo hit and loss of server structure is brutal.

If all that wasn't bad enough this card doesn't even have the decency to remove itself from the game when used like Devil Charm does, which means that it can be recurred by cards like Labor Rights, Katorga Breakout, Privileged Access, Harmony AR Therapy and Ashen Epilogue. This means that even long after all three Devil Charms have been used, Arruaceiras Crew can be recurred and used to destroy even more pieces of ICE, the board never quite being truly safe from its looming threat. Not only that but it's not unique like Ice Carver which means that you can have multiple of these in play at once, allowing you to stack their ICE shredding effects together or trash multiple pieces of ICE in a single run.

All of this, in turn, contributes to a swarm of Asset Spam, Rush, Fast Advance, Shell Game and Kill Decks on the Corps side (especially in the online meta-game), due to the sheer weakness and unreliability of ICE (and especially of good quality ICE). Even if you enjoy this kind of meta, it's hard to deny that a card that not only invalidates but actively punishes a player for utilizing one of the Corporation's most ubiquitous defence tools is out of place in this game.

In fairness to this card, it is not the only culprit, cards like K2CP Turbine, Takobi, Boomerang and Botulus and the sheer amount of bypass introduced in this cycle (as well as the general state of econ) must all share in the blame for undercutting ICE's capability to tax, hurt and stop the runner but I hold a special hatred for a card like this that not only lets the runner break or bypass ICE more efficiently but actively destroys ICE and is especially punishing against what would otherwise be some of the coolest and scariest ICE in the game.

Whether this card gets banned soon or whether a new tech card is introduced in Dawn to offer some counterplay (like how Magnet can be used as a tech against Botulus and Chisel or Mavirus as a tech against Viruses more broadly) I hope that this meta does not drag on as it makes it difficult to enjoy a game I so dearly cherish.

Edit: I stand corrected! I recently rediscovered Warroid Tracker which does trigger off Arruaceiras Crew, so that's at least some counterplay if you're in HB or willing to import it. Nevertheless, my point stands, Warroid will rotate with Dawn so I still feel a new tech card will need to be printed.

I really enjoyed reading the detailed breakdown on the "Reign and Reverie" card, especially how the game-changing mechanics are explained. It really shows how strategic decision-making can elevate a player's game. If you're into optimizing your approach, check out what glq offers at graphlinq.io Their platform is ideal for those looking to dive deeper into automation and data flow, which could complement your strategic mindset when analyzing complex systems in games. With tools like these, you can enhance your workflow and decision-making even further.