Criminal have been in a pretty weak position lately. Anarchs have been dominant, and it seems as though any attempt by the MWL to bring them back into line just causes Shaper to pick up the slack.

Temujin Contract, I think, is an attempt by the developers to bring Crim back. Because hoo boy is this card good.

This is, obviously, an economy card. And the value of an economy card is the number of credits it provides you above and beyond the things you would have been doing anyway. With that in mind, there are two ways to size up Temujin Contract. Similar to how Dirty Laundry works, you can make throwaway runs, or valuable runs.

If you make throwaway runs (on Archives, typically) then Temujin essentially becomes a turbocharged Liberated Account. Liberated Account gives you a net gain of 10 for an expenditure of 5, for an economic value of +5. Temujin Contract gives you a net gain of 16 for an expenditure of 6, for an economic value of +10, twice as good.

This is bonkers amounts of money, but there is a catch: the corp can cut into your profits by putting ice in your way. To avoid this, you'll probably want your Temujin turn to be "Install, run three times", which lets you get a lot of value before the corp has a chance to respond. In fact, you're making 8 credits over 4 clicks, which is 4 clicks on a Mopus or a Day Job, and you still have two 4-credit runs waiting for you if they don't ice up.

At this point, the corp will generally throw down something to stop you. For most pieces of ice, the cost to break it twice exceeds the cost to rez it: Enigma costs 3 to rez and 2 to break with a Passport, so by playing it they are reducing your Temujin payoff by 4 for a cost of 3 and a click. A more efficient taxing piece of ice like Eli 1.0 or Data Raven might even put them ahead.

And they know that you will, eventually, need to get into that server to clean off the rest of the Contract. Why? Because Temujin Contract is unique. So long as you have one on the board, you cannot play another one to replace it. So by blocking the completion of the first Contract, they are blocking you from playing the other two you probably have in your deck. And once they've iced Archives, the second Contract would need to find a new server to target. This gives them a pretty strong incentive to slow you down.

[EDIT: The previous paragraph is incorrect. The rule regarding unique cards is that if a second copy ever becomes active, the first copy is trashed. So you can forfeit any remaining credits by playing a new Temujin contract, although this is not generally optimal.]

This is all assuming, however, that you are running a server for no other purpose besides income. But Temujin Contract does not replace accesses. In fact, it places no requirements at all, besides "successful run on the chosen server". This means, then, than you can play the Contract targeting a server that is actually valuable, like R&D or HQ.

In this case, Temujin is essentially reducing the cost to get into that server by 4 for the next 5 runs you make on it. Since you aren't throwing away the run, this raises the economic value of the card from +10 to +15. But in doing so, you are again giving the corp an enormous incentive to ice the bejeezus out of the targeted server, not only to slow your economy down, but to stop you from getting those accesses.

But hey, this is Criminal. Forcing the corp to rez ice, forcing the corp to protect their central servers at the cost of their scoring remote, and making money by running, all of these are solid strategies that synergize super well with what Criminal is trying to do. If Gabe with a Desperado files a Temujin Contract on HQ, then Emergency Shutdowns the ice protecting it, the corp is going to have to scramble to keep it locked down. Meanwhile you can Account Siphon them, Legwork, them, and just when they think they've got it secured, you can play that Sneakdoor Beta and get in sideways. Tasty.

It's only 2 influence, though. Which is sad, because it means that it's probably not going to be played in Criminal decks as much as it really deserves. Instead, the Anarchs and Shapers will import it to fuel their late-game Keyhole/Medium/R&D Interface digs.

In summary, Temujin Contract puts a huge strain on the corp to either fortify the targeted server, or let you walk away with ludicrous dosh. A deck that wants to make money by running and that can capitalize on this pressure will love Temujin Contract.

I'm not sure what it says about the Netrunner universe that runners get "Priority" events (Fisk Investment Seminar, e.g.) while corps get "Terminal" operations. But certainly, the "Terminal" status of this card makes it a wholly different animal than it's close relatives SEA Source and Midseason Replacements.

SEA Source has been around since the core set, and is used for essentially one thing: Scorched Earth. Click one SEA Source, click two and three double Scorch is a kill shot against any deck not running protection. Tag n' bag, mate.

The other option used for tag 'n bag was Midseason Replacements. This is an interesting tradeoff. The activation cost of 5 is more restrictive (although the base trace strength is higher to compensate), and it requires an actual stolen agenda rather than just a successful run, making baiting plays harder. It was also higher influence, making it harder to squeeze into the home faction of murder (although putting murder in yellow remains easy).

But, Midseasons could be used in ways that SEA Source could not. SEA source only put a single tag on the runner--enough for Scorched Earth, but if the kill didn't immediately follow the runner would just clear the tag and move on. This meant that you needed to have money, SEA Source, and two Scorches in hand, all at the same time. But a successful Midseasons could easily dump 5 or more tags on the runner all at once. Clearing this many tags is essentially impossible (unless you meet the one person running Paper Tripping), guaranteeing that you would win when you do eventually draw it.

There are also other uses to a perma-tagged runner. Closed Accounts and The All-Seeing I let you cripple a runner's economy if it looks like they might be able to dig themselves out. Psychographics lets you speed out agendas. Resistor and Pachinko become much nastier pieces of ice. Lily Lockwell can find you your murder and still have tags left over to use it. There are lots of ways to creatively torture the runner once they go tag-me.

Hard-Hitting News fits in a weird place between these two. In terms of cost and trigger restrictions, it's very similar to SEA Source--one credit more expensive, but it has a 4-trace instead of a 3-trace and the run doesn't have to be successful to qualify. Except that it gives four tags instead of one.

And crucially, you cannot Scorch the same turn you play this card. Nor can you Exchange of Information or Subcontract. You play Hard Hitting News, pass turn. That means the runner has a full four clicks before you get a chance to actually make use of these tags. With that in mind, you can never use Hard Hitting News to kill a runner with no tags and 8+ credits. Even if you win the trace, they can always spend their next turn going "clear, clear, clear, clear". This means that its utility as a kill-enabler is severely limited. It's not enough to just be richer than the runner--the runner has to be actively poor. You can bring about that situation with oppressive cards like Reversed Accounts or advertisements in Spark, or raise the cost to 12 credits with SYNC, but this is a bit tricky.

No, in general, Hard-Hitting News is best used to crush a runner's tempo. Force them to clear those tags--losing a turn and spending 8 credits is a massive hit, and it will put the runner behind. Of course, they need some incentive to actually clear the tags--if you aren't running some form of punishment they'll just shrug and ignore them.

And you'll also need to actually win the trace. If able, a wise runner would gladly spend 8 credits to beat this trace, since they'd have to spend that anyway to clear the tags. Which means you're going to have to spend a minimum of 7 credits playing Hard-Hitting News against a runner with money; three for base cost, four to get the strength up.

So before you throw this card into a deck, you need to ask yourself--is my deck willing to pay 7 credits to make the runner lose 8? Or do I have a way to guarantee the runner will be broke, letting me stick the tags for cheap?

So there has already been quite a bit of fuss over Sandburg. Specifically, the current Deck of the Week Haandy Sandburg. I personally believe that this build is one of the best incarnations of the Sandburg strategy. Which is both praise and warning--I think CodeMarvelous has created a powerful deck, but there is little to no way to improve it beyond this basic "NEXT Foodcoats with a coat of paint".

But this isn't a deck review, this is a card review. What makes Sandburg tick?

Sandburg's flavor text pretty explicitly gives away the name of the game. "Money is power". To use this card effectively, a number of conditions need to be met:

1. Sandburg must be installed and rezzed. This seems like a trivial thing to mention (especially given the 0 rez cost), but it bears repeating--Sandburg is an asset. If he (it?) gets trashed, the card no longer affects the board. Given the potential effect of the card, it seems likely that a runner would gladly pay 4 to trash him, if able. This implies that Sandburg must be protected in a secure server, while you simultaneously try to score out of a second remote.
2. The corp must have at least 10 for Sandburg to be active, and he gets stronger the more money you have. If you only have 9, Sandburg is a blank piece of cardboard. This means that the corp needs to be extremely rich; 10 credits is not enough; you need to have enough credits floating on top that you can conduct your day-to-day business without risking a drop below that threshold.
3. Sandburg strengthens each piece of ice. This means that Sandburg is strongest when he supports many pieces of ice--this is the key difference from the most similar comparison I can find, IT Department, which only strengthens one piece of ice per activation. If your scoring remote is just a Wall of Static, Sandburg is only going to tax a Corroder by a handful of credits each run: but two Walls of Static and a Magnet, and the Sandburg tax is multiplied.
4. The runner should not have alternate methods of paying through a piece of ice. If the runner is willing to let the subroutines fire, Sandburg is worthless. That means that either your subs need to be "End The Run", or something so horrific that the runner cannot afford to let it fire. This basically rules out tracer ice, most bioroid ice, and many of the more interesting code gates and sentries.
5. You have to intend to actually score behind the boosted ice.. Obviously there's no point in Sandburging if you just plan on fast-advancing, shell-gaming, or murdering your opponent.

The combined effect here leads us to a very clear strategy. Sandburg needs a large number of cheap ice, played out of a rich ID, with a straightforward glacier strategy. If you want lots of cheap ETR ice, NEXT ice (Bronze, Silver, Gold) is a good choice--and of course, the in-faction EtF is one of the richest IDs in the game, especially with the sexbot campaigns, boosted by Breaker Bay Grid for extra dosh. And of course, if you're trying glacier, you use Global Food Initiative, and oh hell we've just built a slightly modifed Foodcoats deck haven't we?

So it's a strong addition to an already strong archetype. But it's creating a new panic because it changes a certain fundamental dynamic of Netrunner.

A classic Stimhack article discusses this in more detail, but I'll summarize. In other card games (i.e. Magic the Gathering), when a player is winning, that helps them continue to win. As a result, any card which relies on a dominant board state to be played is unviable, because the help it provides is marginal when you aren't already winning. But in Netrunner, whenever someone commits resources to scoring or stealing an agenda, they have decreased their resources, giving their opponent (who has not committed so many resources) a chance to respond. If a runner goes bankrupt stealing an agenda, they will be off-kilter for a turn or two recovering resources, giving the corp an opportunity to respond (whether that be a kill-combo or just an additional score).

Sandburg changes this. Sandburg is "win more". If you can maintain not just one but TWO secure, well-defended servers, and you can keep 20 or 30 credits on hand, you can create a lockout board state where the runner simply cannot get into any server.

But let's be honest here. If you have enough of a lead that you can keep 30 credits on hand, while also keeping your entire ICE suite rezzed over at least HQ, R&D, the Sandburg remote, and a scoring remote, you have already won.

Still, because it prevents even that last-turn hail-mary run on R&D or HQ, Sandburg frightens runners. Thankfully, the counterplay is pretty strong. You can run Political Operative. Keeping the corp poor is also completely viable--some updated version of Anatomy of Anarchy, Headlock Reina or other siphon-spam looks nice. Cards that break subroutines without looking at strength are options as well: Quetzal, Grappling Hook, and the newly MWL'd D4v1d are potential options, and all benefit enormously from e3 Feedback Implants. Criminal bypass options like Femme Fatale and Inside Job work nicely. On the jankier end, a solid run by any of those Chaos Theory/Hyperdriver/DDoS/False Echo combos would wreck a Sandburg deck.

So in conclusion, Sandburg is a powerful card, and is something you will have to consider when building your runner decks, but he lacks versatility and has strong counterplay options. As a result, I think he'll drift around in the meta for a while, but as players learn his tricks (and cards like Hernando Cortez and Beth Kilrain-Chang are released) he'll eventually disappear.

Oh man, is this a tempting card. Stealth has always had a place in the meta, and with the recent nerf to Faust people are looking for a strong AI alternative.

But stealth has always had two big problems, both of which are amplified in Dai V, and mean that this is going to struggle as a primary breaker.

First, stealth requires that you get both your breakers and your stealth-powering cards down before you can safely run. The more stealth credits a card needs, the more you need to set up to use it effectively. This slows you down, and puts you at risk of losing to a faster deck.

For a standard breaker (i.e. Refractor or Dagger), the slowdown is pretty small. These cards only need one stealth credit to be functional against any piece of ice with 5 or less strength, and with a deck stocked with Cloaks, Ghost Runners, Lockpicks and Silencers it is pretty easy to find a stealth credit by turn 2 or 3.

But Dai V needs not one, but two stealth credits to function. You can burn through a Ghost Runner in a pinch, but usually you're going to want to have two Cloaks up and running. And it must be Cloaks--it's not a fracter, decoder, or killer, so unlike Switchblade, you cannot use Silencer (or Lockpick or DFG). This limit on stealth sources makes the 2 credit requirement a significant hurdle.

Which brings me to the second limitation. Stealth puts a cap on how many pieces of ice you can break in a single turn. If you have 4 stealth credits at your disposal, and a server has 5 pieces of ice that each require a stealth credit to get through, you're locked out. Even if they haven't managed to stack a server that deep, there are many cases when you might want to make multiple runs in one turn, and once servers have been double- or triple-iced that starts to get real taxing. Ghost Runners is a temporary solution, but only temporary. Mirror gives you a boost if the first run is on R&D but otherwise is just a discounted CyberSolutions Mem Chip.

And Dai V makes this even harder. If Dai V is your only breaker, it's going to cost 4 stealth credits to get through a server consisting of a Vanilla in front of a Quandary. Even if you have all three Cloaks out, you're still going to need a Ghost Runner to support it or you will not get in. That's a huge rig to break two tiny pieces of ice--if that's your only gameplan, you're not going to do so well.

On top of that, Dai V isn't even that efficient of a breaker once you do get your stealth on. A base strength of 1 with one-for-one boosting gets to be a real problem on larger pieces of ice--that's Zu levels, and anyone who has ever had to break a Wormhole with Zu knows how unpleasant that can be. And for the privilege of using this breaker, you paid 6 to install it.

Dai V is begging to be used to fill in gaps in a stealth rig--if you can't find your Refractor, Dai V will let you threaten the corp while you dig for it...but only if you can get the right mix of Cloaks and Ghost Runners first, and that's a pretty big if.

Speculation time, though--the console in this same pack, Mirror, is clearly the console of the runner Ele "Smoke" Scovak (smoke and mirror, get it?) who has been quoted in flavor text before. A stealth console suggests a runner with a stealth ability. If that ability provides any way to get additional stealth credits, that could potentially make Dai V viable as an early game threat. We'll have to wait and see.

This is the first mini-faction card to see print since Data and Destiny was released, and it slots nicely into Sunny's playstyle.

Sunny is, by design, a very slow, methodical runner, who starts weak but evolves into an absolute juggernaut as the game progresses. Her cloud breakers (Striker,Sherman,Shrike) are inefficient against small ice, but become massively efficient at breaking towering glacial ice, especially once you get some Security Chips. Her console Security Nexus requires that you get yourself some extra link strength to really be effective, but lets you effectively ignore a piece of ice every run. And because she uses cloud breakers and has two link, she has a fantastic drip econ package with Data Folding and Underworld Contact.

"Another Day, Another Paycheck" is an economic card that lets her close out a game in style. It's no use in the first couple turns of the game, or if you've been completely locked out of their scoring server. But suppose the corp is sitting at 4 points, and you steal an agenda to bring you up to 5 points: that means that if the corp can't win that trace, you walk away with a whopping 9.

So the corp might try to win the trace. This is also a win for Sunny. Even if Sunny has played no other link-boosting cards, the corp has to spend at least 3 to have any chance to block Sunny from gaining the credits. But in that case, Sunny can just call by spending 1 and immediately turn a profit--smaller than she would have had otherwise, but with a 3 tax on the corp to balance it out. And of course, if you're playing a Security Nexus build you will have a lot more than 2.

Unfortunately, while this card provides Sunny with another late-game economic option, that was never her issue. Late-game Sunny already has 4 or 5 pieces of drip econ going; having a money-making current (which can be sniped out by a quick 15 Minutes or Breaking News) doesn't substantially change her board state.

And you would never see this out of faction. Three influence is a lot to ask already, and without some link strength the corp tax isn't strong enough to be worth including.

In short, it's a well-balanced Sunny card that makes her better at what she does best, but doesn't shore up her greatest weaknesses, and is supremely underwhelming out of faction.

But look at those cute kids. This art just puts a smile on my face. You go, Sunny.