Has anyone figured out why this card exists and why it costs one influence? As it stands, it has a similar effect to Deuces Wild. Typically people play DW and net 1 and draw two cards. But DW can be used for other things. Save 2 (or more) s by removing a tag. Or make sure you can get into that juicy server before committing to the run. More importantly, (at least for a little bit longer) you can make DW better with Prepaid VoicePAD. No such possibility with Build Script though.

If it was influence free, I might include a couple in a Criminal deck to help with draw. But because of the influence, I doubt I'll ever play it.

EDIT: So I realized that this card would be decent in a Comet deck. Not amazing, but decent. If you can make room for it influence wise.

I haven't actually used this card yet, so I could be wrong, but I feel that it is too powerful; especially considering the zero influence and play cost. I envision a deck that includes three of these and three "Freedom Through Equality"s to potentially turn any two-pointer into a four-pointer. Combo with a few expose cards like Infiltration and Drive By to confirm the presence of an agenda in a remote server. And/or combo with Globalsec Security Clearance or Find the Truth to get the agenda off the top of R&D; no multi-access required. If you go the latter route, you may want to have a Councilman on the table to stop an un-rezzed Jackson from ruining your Mad Dash.

Now I would hesitate to use this card versus Jinteki, especially PE, unless you've already stolen their Philotic Entanglement or you'll get game point.

Perhaps this won't work as well as I envision, but I'm definitely going to try it out once it is coded on jinteki.net.

Look at that! 3 influence for a powerful console. What a novel idea!!!

And because my review must be longer: Combine with Salsette Slums when accessing assets and upgrades (or trash-able ICE and Operations) to still get the effect.

Spot the Prey is not a very good card. First off, I'd like to say that expose is a fairly underutilized mechanic. It is great to have if just to deal with Mushin No Shin, but it can be hard to find room in your deck and so, many times, runners have little or no means to expose cards. If you do find room to include an expose card or two, though, I would suggest something else.

Lets compare to Infiltration, an influence free neutral card that has been around from the beginning. In most cases, Infiltration is a lot better than Spot the Prey. Infiltration is free to use. StP costs 2 , which is way too much for what you are getting. Infiltration can expose ICE while StP cannot. In general you want to expose non-ICE cards, but perhaps in a rare case you want to expose a piece of ICE. Infiltration gives you that option. Nothing worth exposing? Infiltration gives you the option to gain 2 instead. This isn't game changing, but I'm sure we've all had times where we were short 1 when we needed it.

Now the one area where StP beats Infiltration is in click compression, but only sometimes. If you use StP on a newly Mushin'ed card and see it is an agenda, then you can go grab it with the same click. This click compression costs you 2 though, not always worth it. And there are times when you won't want to make a run after. Say the Corp has four servers. The three central servers are protected by ICE that you aren't currently equipped to deal with. The new server contains a triple-advance Junebug. In this case, you'll just need to run at the Junebug and jack out. You didn't get any benefit from the run component of the card. Now it is worth noting that you don't have to run at the server with the exposed card. You may choose to run at R&D for an access after the exposed card turned out to be a trap.

All in all though, I don't expect to see this played. If you find yourself wanting to include some expose in your deck, there are better choices. Try Infiltration, Drive By, or even Lemuria Codecracker.

I really liked this card because if it worked out, it could be a real tax to the runner. I included it as a "one of" in a few decks and often was happy with the results. Of course, sometimes it was annoying if I drew it first without a Data Raven as support. But with the release of Thoth, this became even easier to use. However, the release of another card has rendered this card basically obsolete in my opinion. I speak of course of IP Block. (Aaron Marrón too can be a real bummer.)

With IP Block's second subroutine, it can fulfill basically the same role as Pachinko. It does cost one more to rez but has two significant factors in its favor that more than make up for this price increase. If the runner has an installed AI, boom, they take a tag, thereby activating the second subroutine (Hunting Grounds can disable this feature, but it is still a strong point in its favor). The second factor is its first subroutine which has the ability to give a tag as well.

Now a runner without an AI installed will be able to break just the first subroutine or beat the trace. But that is usually going to cost at least a couple credits. Certainly better than a Pachinko without support. And if used in conjunction with Data Raven, Thoth, or Gutenberg it becomes better.

So Pachinko was rarely used before but now it'll probably be totally forgotten. Though I suppose you could try to use it with Chief Slee.