The fact, that this card is not on the MWL (currently NISEI 3.3) says a lot more about the meta than i would like. It's not enough to print good ice for the corp, because the runner economy is off the charts.

The effect is obviously incredibly strong and a lot easier to set up than Nisei MK2 or Bio vault. You can also just wait till the runner breaks all the other ICE in this server and then trigger the effect. Most decks that want to win by scoring at least consider including this piece of ICE. And thats fine, sure. There are lots of powerful cards that see extensive play in other archetypes (Looking at you HHN!).

My problem is, that the resulting gameplay can be quite frustrating for the runner. Not many reviews include a perspective on the fun that cards lend to the game or in this case (in my opinion at least) take away from the game. And I'm willing to conceit, that there are very similar cards that have similar effects, the ones mentioned above, ash and batty, etc., but for some reasons these don't annoy me as much. I think it comes down to psychological reasons. I ALREADY BROKE THE ICE! YOU CAN'T MAKE ME GO BACK!

Bottom line: Put this bad boy on the restricted list already and leave it out of your kitchen table meta. Thank you for coming to my talk.

Every card deserves a review, so here we go! Remote Enforcement has a very hard time being played simply because Project Vitruvius exists, and is a very good two point agenda. That being said, this agenda is often 2nd choice if you need more than three 2-point agendas, and may even occasionally be your first pick if you're doing something tricky with your defensive strategies (Marcus Batty kill deck?), want to throw a Surveyor into a 6-deep remote, etc. Installing exactly the ICE you need regardless of whether it is in your hand and without paying the cost can be pretty powerful. You'll usually want to find something expensive (maybe a NEXT Gold, Heimdall 2.0, or Wotan) to get maximum value and tax the runner as steeply as possible on future runs, but you should carefully consider the runner's rig and strategy, as often just choosing the correct type of ICE might provide you with an immediate scoring window on the next turn.

The one drawback in the effect of the card is that you are showing the runner what they are up against, which means if they need to dig to find a certain type of breaker, they can immediately begin to do so, or if it's just an expensive server to get through they'll be able to asses better just how costly it will be.

A 4 advancement requirement for 2 points is a tough sell because it's vastly more difficult to protect than a 3/2, unless you spend a good amount of resources trying to fast-advance it. If you're running three of these you'll usually also be running Jinja City Grid and building one or two deep servers. Some current likely IDs are Asa Group: Security Through Vigilance, The Foundry: Refining the Process, or perhaps even NEXT Design: Guarding the Net.

Ultimately, vertical corp play is fun, and this card encourages that!

Nasrul Hakim also created some damn cool art here that I'd love to get on a play mat someday, of a HB security bioroid being efficient + ruthless, as HB does best! Check out more of his work, if you'd like: www.artstation.com

I'm not here to tell you about anything the other reviewers are talking about on here. It's MWL 3.3, and certain decks of the month (https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/56560/daruma-s-wild-ride-2nd-at-gencon-undefeated-in-swiss) have been seeing some extensive play on jinteki.net lately. Well. Let me tell you a story. A story about a little criminal card that at first glance appears merely great. Stack 8 creds on this guy, cash out 7 of them, leave him on the board to chain with any type of trash ability like aesops or whatever. Blah blah. But against the above agfusion deck, it makes Labyrinthine Servers and getting hit with an Inazuma + agfusion combo into an 8 token advanced Junebug or Cerebral not only survivable, but actually mildly hilarious as the corp wastes his precious 2 Labyrinthine tokens and you, being the wise runner you are, only take a few credits off of Bank Job at a time and float it on the board to avoid his Kill Servers like the unholy plauge upon Netrunner that they are. Is it worth it to splash? I think probably not. But it is an easy include to crim decks in my mind with this nonsense running around "Standard Legal" for the moment. 11/10 amazing card for crim decks

I am absolutely the wrong person to evaluate this card on its playability. I am about as casual a player as it is possible to be; I still want to make a brain damage/click-denial HB deck with cards like Heinlein Grid and Kamali 1.0 and Mason Bellamy work. So when other people say that Whistleblower is generally not powerful enough to be playable right now, believe them. I'm not going to review this card on playability.

What I will review Whistleblower on, however, is its design, because I think Whistleblower opens design space in a way that gets missed when we only talk about whether or not it's worth a deck slot.

Whistleblower owes its lineage, of course, to Film Critic. Film Critic is a Runner tool for getting around nasty, hard-to-steal agendas like Obokata Protocol. It's also been Restricted since the beginning of the Banned/Restricted list, particularly because it's so damn good at what it does. At one influence and 1 to install, Film Critic is the gold standard tool for getting around defensive agendas. Want to have an easier time stealing Obokatas or Degree Mills? Slot Film Critic. Want to shut down SSL Endorsement? Slot Critic.

Film Critic, in other words, has the Jackson Howard problem: it's head and shoulders above anything else in its field. It's a first-order optimal card. While there may be niche cases when you pick something else before it (cases artificially made more common by Restricting the card), it's generally going to be an optimal pick. And that's boring and stifling from a design perspective.

Whistleblower is assuredly not a first-order optimal card. If more seasoned players are to be believed, it's actually pretty lousy. But weirdly, I find this encouraging. Jackson Howard, after all, wasn't supplanted by a single newly optimal card, because then everyone would have simply replaced Jackson Howard 1.0 with Jackson Howard 2.0. Instead, FFG recognized that Jackson's ability to sneak agendas out of Archives and back into R&D was critical enough to be available to all factions, and provided a number of powered-down options so players had choices based on the decks they were making. Attitude Adjustment, Gatekeeper, Genotyping, and Drudge Work all brought faction-specific Jackson effects on a variety of different card types. Preemptive Action and Distract the Masses were neutral options, both with their own costs or drawbacks. Breaking down Jackson's functions and divvying them up among multiple suboptimal cards opened up design space.

I think Whistleblower, underpowered though it may be, shows that NISEI recognizes that there's value in protection against defensive agendas and is interested in making that more accessible and varied. Maybe the next piece of protection against defensive agendas will come in the form of three faction-specific answers. Maybe it will be a neutral run event similar to Direct Access that ignores the abilities of any agendas accessed. Whatever it is, I have hope that future cards continue to explore this design space, so that the answer to defensive agendas becomes more interesting than "just slot Critic", and for that reason, I applaud the design behind Whistleblower.

As mentioned in valerian32's review, this card is likely to replace Scavenge if that card rotates along with Creation & Control (as is allegedly going to happen at the end of 2019).

Rejig is interesting because it allows you to achieve a couple of niche effects. Two that seem most useful are re-installing programs that come into play with counters (Pelangi, Imp, Cerberus "Lady" H1, D4v1d) as well as allowing Kabonesa Wu: Netspace Thrillseeker to keep cards she tutors in play. Unfortunately, Rejig has yet to see much use in serious decks. The modern praxis is that it is typically easier to sacrifice spent cards to Aesop's Pawnshop or even Spec Work, and then recur them as necessary with Clone Chip (or simply install a new copy). Wu typically uses Self-modifying Code or Scavenge to get around the downside of her identity ability. Clone Chip and Scavenge simply have greater versatility compared to Rejig, and as such see much more play, even in Anarch (and sometimes Criminal).

While Rejig hasn't been seen in top-tier play, beneath the surface, in the seedy Netrunner underbelly of the jank-pits, Rejig does enable one trick: re-hosting icebreakers.

In decks that attempt to build a mega-breaker with Dinosaurus or Baba Yaga, drawing your icebreakers before the cards they should be hosted on is not ideal. However, Rejig essentially functions as copies 4, 5, and 6 of Scavenge, and allows you to easily uninstall your breaker, then place it on your newly installed dinosaur friend or spooky AI. This allows these decks to be on track to steal their first agenda by turn 14.

In casual play, it allows you to move Savant from Dhegdheer to Dinosaurus, a move that instills fear in the heart of any Corp, granted they have not already scored 5 points by now.

TL;DR This card is worse than Scavenge, but is neutral, so there you go.