Hive is arguably the second best Weyland ice in the game, and is a strong include in nearly every Weyland deck.

"But it's expennnnnsive!" "But it has a drawwwback!"

No. No. Shut up. No.

Hive is the best rush ice in the game.

Little Engine can give it a run for its money (heh), but it's in the wr... (I'm sorry, can we just take a second to appreciate that double pun?) ...rong faction. Chimera is a neat little trick, but there's actually a lot of opening hands that can slap her down. ...Phrasing.

• A turn-1 Corroder steal requires them to get 3's in their remaining 2's, and also to faceplant into a turn-1 unrezzed ice with just a Corroder out, probably on their last click (they probably shouldn't do this)
• A turn-1 Faust steal requires them to do the following:
  • 1: Install Faust
  • 2: Draw
  • 3: Draw
  • 4: Run and discard their entire hand

Both of those plays are either incredibly stupid, incredibly lucky, or both. Inside Job is a "welp", but don't do this against criminals you idiot.

More often than not, Green is the "rush" ID, and even if you aren't rushing, you're still probably relying heavily on powerful cards like Archer (she's clearly Hive's better half) and Corporate Town, both cards that require you to at least score one agenda before they can take hold. Scoring early in Weyland is a bit like scoring an early Astro in NBN - it truly sets the pace for the rest of the game. Nothing (besides fast-advance) lets you secure that first agenda quite like Hive does.

Let's address the elephant in the room, though. Hive is clearly designed to be overpowered in the early game, and then become crappy as the game goes on (it's kind of like the "bad pub" of ice). Luckily, Weyland is the faction best able to shovel that crap into the neighbor's yard.

• Use it to protect cards that swing the early game hard in your favor
  • Assets like Melange Mining Corp, Capital Investors, or The Root
  • Score out agendas like High-Risk Investment, an over-advanced Project Atlas, or (ideally) This Ridiculous Card
• Recycle it with Blue Sun, or make one of the most brutal plays in the game by rezzing an Archer in front of it and turning those subroutines back online (Corporate Town can do this too)
• Using your buckets of credits, your EASY Atlas tokens, or just a very broke and overextended runner, proceed to Do What Weyland Does Best:

Finally, I'd just like to point out that even after scoring a 2-pointer, Hive is still as cost-efficient as a Spiderweb. If you score to 4 and then close out the game with a 3 pointer, Hive is doing work for you all game.

I like to think of Always Be Running as training wheels for the bike that all runners should be riding anyways. Learning how to facecheck confidently is a huge part of being an effectively aggressive runner, and one of the things that makes running so intimidating for newer players. Forcing the corp to spend money on rezzing their ice early can cripple their economy, but it often requires advanced metagame knowledge to avoid or mitigate the risks of slamming into that ice.

Adam (and this directive specifically) does something wonderful for bad runners - it picks them up and throws them in the pool. With water wings on. Too many inexperienced players gravitate to Noise, to AI breakers, or other "solitaire" auto-pilot decks that don't need to interact with the corp (or at least don't have to respond to them in any meaningful way).

The temptation is strong to turn off Always Be Running with Dr. Lovegood or delete it with Independent Thinking or Aesop's Pawnshop. But resist that urge. At worst, ABR will make you a better player, helping you to understand the corp's board state without paying (severe) consequences for it. At best, it will turn your Adam into an aggressive powerhouse, threatening one-ice servers all game long, and giving you an excellent way to pay through gigantic ice, especially in combination with e3 Feedback Implants.

Because for Adam, every ice is a Bioroid.

Just as it takes 3 turns to cook up, appreciation of this card comes in 3 stages:

• Stage 1: Lizzy Mills you look damn fine in that dress. TAKE MY MONEY!
• Stage 2: Alright sweet, I'm gonna combo this with like, so many cards. Free Archer? Free Corporate Town? Hell yeah! Let's glaze on some Gagarin Deep Space and Paywall Implementation for good measure, and oh! oh! oh my god...(giggles uncontrollably) I'm gonna play Encryption Protocol with it...ahahaha...
• Stage 3: I know you're amazing, Public Support, but I lose 70% of the games I play with you. It's probably some Netrunner conspiracy, and has nothing to do with you, but I'm going to have to put you back in the binder just to be safe. It's over :'(

This card just seems so good on paper, but often flops in execution. At 3 influence, we can safely assume it won't be splashed anywhere, and as an asset that doesn't help you at all for 3 turns, it's most likely to be seen in Gagarin, where the runner will have to pay a hefty 5 to it (more if you can ice it up a bit). As a "worst-case scenario", that actually seems...great, right? Tax them pretty hard, and just keep doing whatever it was you were doing.

As mentioned earlier, it can be forfeited to enable Corporate Town (asset + Gagarin = good) and Archer, both of which have historically been difficult to play in Gagarin because the best food for those has always been Hostile Takeover, and bad pub is pretty crippling to your ID ability.

Even just used for points it looks sexy. Weyland has excellent 2-pointers in Project Atlas and Oaktown Renovation, usually polished off by some NAPD Contracts and Hostile Takeovers for an easy 7th point. Having a way to cap off 6 points without having to score 2 more is always nice, and unlike Hostile Takeover, runners can't steal this for a similarly easy 7th point.

After this glowing praise, it's difficult to nail down why exactly this card just isn't that great. A lot of it comes down to deck-space issues. Why don't all Haas decks run Domestic Sleepers, if it's basically a guaranteed agenda point? Because clogging your deck with slow agendas that don't count towards your deck's minimum just usually isn't worth it when you could have more ice, more econ, or more nasty combo cards that really make you a threat like fast advance or flatline packages.

Look again at what it does. If they trash it naked:

• You spent 2 and 2 to tax them 1 and 5
• So in terms of net gain, you might think of this as an operation that costs 0 and reads "The runner loses 3."
• It's not even as good as that, though, since it's an asset, so it doesn't happen on demand. In fact, if they can afford to give you the point, then it doesn't happen at all. The runner gets to choose what's better for them.

If you decide you want it and let it cook up in your scoring remote:

• You can't score agendas for 3 turns
• You give the runner a huge time window to set up their board and generate money
• Your hand may start to clog with other cards (like agendas) that you want to install in that remote

Neither of those sounds particularly appealing. The real best-case scenario is probably somewhere in between, where you can afford to throw Public Support in an extra remote with a piece of taxing ice on it (preferably one that's already been rezzed). The problem with this is that it's not easy to play a horizontal ID and also have enough ice for not just your centrals (which are your biggest weakness) and your scoring remotes, but also your extra remotes too.

There's no single thing that makes Public Support bad, and it is by no means unplayable. But neither is it a competitive card, in my opinion, once you gather up all the little things that make it problematic. If you can pilot a deck to first place in a major tournament with this card, I'll eat my hat.

While it's tempting to write this off as "The runner version of Cerebral Static" and call it a day, I believe a closer examination will reveal it to be far more powerful.

Consider how turning off ID abilities differs across both sides of the Netrunner table. Runner IDs, broadly speaking, give them minor economic boosts, or small rig enhancements like or that would normally cost deckspace, drawtime, and a or two. Though seemingly minor, these little incremental boosts can be game-unbalancing over the course of 20 turns. Turning them off temporarily, however, is usually not going to give the corp anything other than a very tiny economic edge until another current is dropped or an agenda is stolen.

For the corp, turning off an ID ability is most impactful when it actually opens a scoring window, or when it throws a huge wrench in a decklist that relies on the ID too heavily. Cerebral Static probably gets the most mileage against Noise, Leela, or possibly Nasir.

What about the runner, though? If Haas-Bioroid: Engineering the Future is any indication, Corp IDs are designed in pretty much the same way - minor economic advantages or efficiencies. Or...are they?

• Blue Sun can allow the corp to suddenly grab 14 without spending a in order to make a game-winning play like SEA Source or Midseason Replacements
• Haarpsichord can allow the corp to stuff 10+ agendas in archives with no real worry that you'll steal them and win the game
• Industrial Genomics can force you to pay 15s if you want to an Ash 2X3ZB9CY, Caprice Nisei, or a Sundew
• Cerebral Imaging can allow the corp to have a 30-card hand
• Jinteki Biotech can flatline you at any time if you make a mistake
• Replicating Perfection can permanently lock Kit out of their scoring remote if she's relying on decoders
• Tennin Institute will heavily pressure you to run every turn
• Jinteki: Personal Evolution will make you play extremely cautiously with your hand size, and makes large multiaccess tools a constant flatline threat

I could keep going. The point is not that corp IDs are more powerful than runner IDs - they really aren't. But (at the moment) Corp IDs are more likely to fundamentally change the way the game is played, so allowing the runner to turn off those abilities suddenly can be much more devestating.

One of the most annoying cards to be released in awhile, News Team is NBN's new in-faction ambush, very often played as a passive central defense like Snare! or Shi.Kyū.

As an non-advanceable asset trap that doesn't need to be installed, this can be shuffled into your deck to discourage digging, held in your hand to punish Legworks and Gang Signs, or installed on the board to bait an aggressive runner into it. Perhaps most alarmingly, this ambush will fire in Archives, meaning that if they access and trash it, they've just inadvertently turned Archives into a pit of nastiness.

The comparison to other ambushes is important, especially with Snare!, which is the gold standard:

• (+) Doesn't cost any to fire (Snare costs 4 )
• (+) Can fire in archives, which is incredibly powerful for an ambush
• (-) Allows the runner to choose their punishment (similar to Shi.Kyū, Cerebral Cast, or An Offer You Can't Refuse)

I feel this last point really needs to be stressed. You'll notice those other "choice" cards are ones that rarely see play, and there's a good reason for that. Allowing the runner to pick the least harmful punishment is a massive downside to any card. While it's easy to dream up contrived situations where both choices are terrible for the runner, in the vast majority of cases you're playing one of these cards because you specifically want one effect and not the other, and your opponent knows this as well.

So should you play News Team? To answer that, you need to understand what it actually does realistically, and then decide if that's actually advancing your deck's strategy or not. The runner's choices are:

They take 2 tags

• Opens them up to generally game-ending tag punishment like Scorched Earth, Traffic Accident, The All-Seeing I, or Closed Accounts
• If they choose to clear them, they're immediately losing 2 and 4 for a trap that the corp fired for free
• Doesn't get rid of the trap. If they don't trash it, it stays where it was. If they do trash it, it now goes into archives where they can run into it again

They add News Team to their score area as an agenda worth -1 agenda point

• If they were already winning or controlling the board, this may slightly delay their win (if they were at 6 points and their game-winning steal is a 2 pointer, it won't matter)
• Permanently removes the trap from the board
• Makes the game longer, but doesn't cost them tempo (unlike Snare! which always tags them and wipes out a huge chunk of their hand)

So clearly in most cases, the runner is just going to take the -1 agenda point and keep going. If they're Medium slamming R&D, then they're just going to eat this and....keep Medium slamming. If they've got a Clot down and are checking every remote as you drop it, they're going to eat this and...keep checking and trashing/stealing your remotes.

If you're losing, News Team will delay your loss slightly (hopefully). If you're winning, News Team will make you win more (sort of).

News Team really shines when the runner does NOT control the board, but is nonetheless racing you for agendas (with burst multi-access, for example, like The Maker's Eye). If you've got a reliable fast-advance strategy that can't really afford a strong central server defense, News Team might be exactly what you're looking for. But if you're looking for a new devilish way to tag the runner for your Scorch package or to tax them with SYNC, look elsewhere. If you can spare the and influence, Snare is almost always better.

Silly Interactions:

• Works great with Haarpsichord Studios when you're intentionally dumping all your agendas in archives
• Can be sold to Data Dealer to make you cry
• Score out an early Philotic Entanglement, and then play 24/7 News Cycle once the runner has eaten 3 News Teams, 3 Shi.Kyūs, and a few agendas for 8+ net damage