Diogene notes that this can be used to kill in Jinteki: Personal Evolution. That's exactly right, and I'll go further. In PE, this is not really an agenda. It's an improved Neural EMP.

You don't play Neural when the runner has a full hand. You play it to flatline them. That means Blood in the Water never costs more than Neural. When the runner's at 0 cards, it's free, and when they're at 1 card, it's 1 and 1. You can even score two from hand to kill a runner for 1.

But the real win is that this version of Neural doesn't take a deck slot... not really. It replaces Project Yagi-Uda or whatever other useless agenda your PE deck wasn't planning to score anyway. So you've got an extra non-agenda deck slot to work with.

One downside compared to Neural: the runner can take it from you. But they would have taken the Yagi-Uda too, and you still have that extra non-agenda card.

This might be the most poorly balanced card I've ever seen. Imagine an icebreaker that isn't a program, can be installed on turn 1 or 2 for 8 credits, has the ability break any type of ice for no credit cost, can use this ability as soon as it's installed and can repeatedly replenish its own ability to break any kind of ice just for a run being successful. Oh and it gives you 2 chips as well. Sure I mean why not. The card might as well just read "The runner now has infinite credits. Have fun." I just started playing this game again and I honestly already want to quit if this is the kind of balance I can come to expect.

Jinteki is poor. At least mine. And play Karunā or Saisentan is expensive. So if you compare to the old Neural Katana maybe the strength is less but it tells the runner: "you have a nasty subroutine that you want to break unless you have your breaker/boat/boomerang on place". Anemone is the same price and is good but it's something that you want to time well when to rez it (the card that you're going to discard, how useful is going to be those 2 net damage). This is more "feel free to rez".

The extra strength on archives is cool, but think of that as an extra. Sometimes you need to ice archives and sometimes you have this ice and sometimes you need to ice something else.

This cards reminds me the good old days VS Bio Ethics Prison decks.

Back then, draw, draw, cant do anything. Concede.

And now, click for cred, click for cred, remove a tag, cant do anything. Concede.

Well yes you can still draw or remove a tag for turns again and again to find a chance against them...

But it's just still too boring.

Me, getting my vig creds: Haha fuck yeah

Me, having to advance my vig manually: wtf this sucks

This card has a very hard time seeing any real life outside of Pravdivost Consulting: Political Solutions because the only way this card is worth the click to install and credit to rez, would be getting free advancement counters. If you spend anything more than this, it's going to be real hard justifying an entire card slot for these.

It's hard to rely on this for any solid amount of econ in your deck because of the math it presents. Outside of that the other uses of this card would be to fake something dangerous like a trap, or useful like an agenda. Either way the runner is going to have to check it out once it hits 2 advancements. And if you put this behind ice then you'll have to pay to protect it, or you spent that click pretending to protect it.

Best case option is just to play it in a server while you're waiting for the real assets/agendas to show up - or just playing it naked and forcing them to go look at it and waste the money. It's a little underwhelming in power and it's hard to rely on it for any one use case.