It’s been a long time coming but after many a candle-lit vigil FFG have answered my prayers. Golly, my knees are sore from such long entreaties – but it’s all been worth it because everyone’s favourite feline terror Hellion Alpha Test now has a tag team partner. In Netrunner, the cats herd you – into the path of Weyland’s renovators! I think that’s some home improvement we’d all like to watch …accompanied by the smell of burning flesh.

The Flare that burns twice as bright burns half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly, Marcus.

The 1980s weren't nearly as good as everyone thinks, although they were certainly better than the '90s. Nothing went right in the '90s outside of the birth of CCGs and the golden age of Sportcenter. Like everyone else I ushered in the new millennium a year early just to be grateful to flush away a grungy, ten year old flannel-wrapped, turd.

If you're not old and grumpy like I am, you may not be aware of just how massive of an Easter egg Marcus Batty is. You probably won't care - which is fine because everyone gets sick of old people telling them in one breath how easy they have it at the same time as saying how much better things used to be.

Not only is he the sort of card that makes you immediately do a t:ICE search just to see how much evil you can pull off (66% of the time, it works every time!) but he happens to share the surname with Roy "I want more life, fucker" Batty from Blade Runner WHILE being a direct call back to Dr Dreff, a sysop upgrade in the original Netrunner CCG. Dreff himself was a call back to Dr Emmett Brown of the Back to the Future franchise (still leeching money from Gen X pockets today!), who was in turn a call back to Albert Einstein. That's three layers of call back regression in one great, great card. Lastly if I'm not mistaken our good man Batty bears more than a passing resemblance to John "Cyrus the Virus" Malkovich. I may be reaching with that though.

The best and funnest card in a little while for me. Until Turbeau Delacroix v2 comes out with Data and Destiny at least. I know you're in there!

Firstly, Faust rhymes with ‘browsed’, not ‘forced’. As the leading source of objective truth in this world, Wikipedia describes:

“Faust and the adjective Faustian imply a situation in which an ambitious person surrenders moral integrity in order to achieve power and success for a delimited term.” Fits the card pretty nicely.

Apparently Faust himself was a bored German (well, Württemberg-er, probably at the time) who decided to scale the heights of the “All Time Worst Ideas’ list by inking a pactum (promise) in blood with the devil’s bagman, Mephistopheles (later a successful shoe salesman, also in Germany) for 24 years of earthly knowledge & pleasure. So… basically, Bedazzled with less Hurley and more pork knuckle.

Strangely, at some point Faust gave financial backing to Gutenberg, although it appears that in the world of Android he decided he really needed to know Faust's home address rather than develop something useful, like a printing press.