This doesn't have any reviews yet?? Okay, I'll do one!

I don't know how to do these really, so I won't link to anything else or say anything insightful, but this agenda is one of my favourites in the game. Public agendas occupy a weird place in Netrunner, and it's one I love. Some are fantastic, like Oaktown or Hollywood Renovations. And some are just annoying, like New Construction or Underway Renovation (even though I secretly quite like Underway...) In my view, City Works absolutely fits in to the former group!

Outside of Oaktown, City Works is the easiest public agenda to take advantage of. Meat damage is Weyland's thing, and one of the big pushes for Kitara seemed to be trying to make meat damage work in a way not dependent on tags as it frequently was in Scorched times, but rather on interaction - or lack of. City Works does damage on access, whereas Urban Renewal, also in Kitara, did damage after several turns if it wasn't trashed. I think this card achieves this aim really well!!! And is certainly a more positive play experience than Urban Renewal.

City Works is strong. It does 2 meat damage, plus 1 extra for each advancement, so it's frequently costing the runner 4-5 cards to steal. Follow this up with Punitive, or even just the threat of Punitive, and you can really put the runner is a bad place! (Death. Death is that bad place!) It can also be combined with cards like Dedication or the new Argus Crackdown lockdown to increase counters on City Works or do extra damage. Even with no Punitive to follow up, costing the runner 4-5 cards is a fairly strong effect compared to other 3-pointers.

The main criticisms of this card are: it folds to Film Critic, which sure, and it doesn't do anything if accessed from a central. The card would of course be stronger if it did 2 damage regardless, but it is certainly not a deal-breaker. This card is good!

Where this card really becomes one of the best agendas in Netrunner is with a certain identity. The best identity. A Kitara identity that was released alongside City Works in the same data pack. Coincidentally, my FIRST data pack I ever bought! (It also had Rashida in... eh, they can't all be perfect) SSO works off of face up agendas! It uses the agenda points on installed face up agendas to place advancement counters, and, in SSO, City Works becomes a behemoth! If they run and steal, they take damage and you have the threat of Punitive. If the runner sits back, you charge up your huge servers and slowly score it!

City Works is such a fantastic card in the right gameplan. Still, it's not an agenda that should be thrown in a Weyland deck that just needs a few more points. Without a strategy, it can just be easy points for your opponent.

Play SSO! It's great. I should do a review of that card next... And Hollywood Renovation... And Mass Commercialisation...

What a out of control card! 1 credit per turn drip for a 1 credit buy-in? Who doesn't want that? I don't know, but I can sure think of a few runners who would.

And you don't have to be one of those aforementioned runners to like this card. The influence cost may make Poemu a bit difficult to justify for anyone who isn't installing a lot (unless you've got a lot), but there's almost no reason not to run the little gal if you're an Anarch, and if Taka can be justified as a 1 off in several non-orange decks, you better believe this will be too.

To cap it off, like every member of Hoshiko's raid party, Paladin Poemu's downside is a joke. There's just too many good targets, so many I cannot possibly name them all--in other words, if you're putting this furry friend in your deck, it's because you've got stuff to install, and if you've gone three turns without installing something, losing your party's tank is almost certainly the least of your worries.

So is our newest little companion too strong? I don't know, but I know for sure you're going to be seeing a lot of her in the future. Because as every seasoned raider knows, a good party needs a good tank, and Paladin Poemu is one of the best I've seen.

With D4v1d rotating, Anarch’s answer to big ice seems to be gone. But now comes this little box. Whilst it cannot be recurred, a single use drops the strength low enough to break fairly cheaply (for the remainder of the run, if you end up getting somehow bounced back to it with Ganked!). This means you can quite freely run with Aumakua and not mind if you hit an Anansi, or use fewer counters from Yusuf or even one of Giest’s bin breakers if you import it. Hippo, Chisel and Prey seem to work well with it too.

It’s not much use against low strength, taxing ice, such as Gold Farmer or Endless EULA and it doesn’t do much to help Black Orchestra or MKUltra on plus-2 sub ice, but I think this little box has a lot of potential.

Note: It’s a Chip, which means it dies to Scapenet! But it’s also a hardware, which means it triggers Masterwork (v37) and can be installed on the fly by the console as well as Prognostic Q-Loop.

To address the elephant in the room, as others have aptly noted, this keeps MaxX afloat. But in a slow the bleeding to a trickle sort of way rather than unleashing the torrent anew when the Levy breaks. Dam, that one slipped out sorry.

This is a strong utility card that I’m happy to see as a neutral for one influence. Everyone pays to play, very splashable, but not thoughtlessly so. There are a lot of really strong contenders for that 1 influence splash across all the factions with PAD Tap, Hunting Grounds, Rezeki, and the economic juggernaut that is Stimhack only scratching the surface.

On its own, it’s a decent silver bullet against 1000 cuts style decks trying to grind you into oblivion, Weyland Consortium: Builder of Nations, Black Tree and their buddy Kakugo. It even lets you decide which card to save against Breached Dome.

But kudos to the designers, it by no means completely turns the threat off.

And, you at least keep one of the cards in your deck when you need to faceplant an Obo, City Works Project, or good old fashioned trap.

But wait there’s more! If none of that floats your boat, simply use it as copy 4-6 of any card of any type! Or copies 2 and 3 of that huge influence spend…

Notable Interactions

Patchwork: Completes the circle nicely. Notice that Patchwork can trigger on the Corp turn as well? Buffer Drive has got you covered, and there are more ways than ever to make this happen.

For extra spice, play this in Wu. Patchwork any program, Buffer Drive it to the bottom, then summon it back at your leisure. With 2 Chameleons in hand (a more attractive option than ever when you’re chilling with Talut at the Café), you can Patchwork the first to install the second free, then Wu the first one back for 1 cred. 2 clicks and only a single credit is not bad to refresh your subtype and cyber up. With even 1 Technical Writer installed, the whole operation is credit positive.

NRE: Need to get that 5 strength lizard up to a 6? Buffer Drive will mitigate the risk of installing Net-Ready Eyes.

Reclaim: Now only 2 clicks rather than the unplayably bad 2 clicks and a card.

Dummy Box: What if the first time each round, I didn’t actually trash the card I pitched to Dummy Box? Yeah…

Stimhack: Doesn’t it suck when you brain your damage and lose your stash? Only users lose drugs! This allows you to bounce that to the bottom instead of losing that card.

Emergent Creativity: Adam can place the card (or one of the multiple) on the bottom of the deck rather than the trash for the same economic value. Alas, Monolith is rotating…

Null: Whistleblower: Once per turn, when you encounter a piece of ice, you may save 1 card from your grip for later...

Making an Entrance: Can be used to bounce one card to the bottom of the deck rather than drawing it.

I could go on about Mad Dash, Clan Vengeance, Respirocytes, and more but I’ll leave the rest as an exercise for the reader.

Konjin is a really interesting piece of ice. A third of the times the runner encounters it, it is going to do absolutely nothing but force a Psi game, but two in every three encounters you'll get to have the runner encounter the most dangerous or taxing piece of ice you have rezzed. It's somewhat unreliable, but this is kind of like getting a piece of ice two thirds as good as your best ice for only 3. Definitely a good deal for any glacier deck with huge ice like Chiyashi!

There are some pretty scary ways runners can beat Konjin, though. Hunting Grounds blanks it once per turn, and Hippo can trivially trash it (breaking no subroutines means you broke all of them). I doubt Konjin will be the centrepiece of any ice suite anyway - that's more likely to be the expensive ice you're copying with it - but its worth considering its placement carefully to avoid stuff like Hippo.

Finally, Konjin makes possible a three server Mythic ice combo with Mother Goddess and Loki. With exactly these three ice rezzed, you can have two servers be impenetrable to traditional (Fracter, Decoder, Killer) breakers, and a third server secure 2/3rds of the time. Thankfully Mom is rotated now so we won't see this in Standard, and I'm not convinced its reliable enough to stand up to the crazy kinds of things runners can do in Eternal.