(Core Set only perspective here, so relevance may vary)

What you'll think this shows: "Forget the risks, full power to all the ICE!" "Yes sir. Right away sir..."

What it really shows: "Are you kidding me?!" "Oh shit. Boss drew a handful of agendas again..."

Every. Damn. Time. My precious points...right in the bin...and no easy way to get them back. If you're going to play this you really should do one or all of the following:

1. Don't do a 3-click, full-turn score on this unless you're just after the points. If things blow up in your face you'll need some clicks to salvage the mess.
2. Have at least one Archived Memories or your preferred recursion card in hand to rescue you from complete disaster.
3. ICE up archives (if you haven't already) to not make it quite so easy for the runner. Careful though, since suddenly icing up archives will clue in a lot of people to what you're about to do.

Basically, if you want to be safe with this card, you have to take a deep breath, slow things and turn it into 'Kind-of-fast-but-let's-not-be-stupid-now Beta Test'. Do I ever do any of this? Oh my, no.

What's more, I know that even if I don't have some (or even any) of these safety nets, I'll still fire the ability every time, because the chance for that free Archer and/or Tollbooth is way too tempting to pass up.

For players just using just the Core Set, this card is risky, infuriating but potentially amazing; a lot of fun. For everyone else, use one of your three Jackson Howards and enjoy your 2 points.

Speaking as a relatively new player with few cards outside the Core Set, Aurora is so obviously bad that I'm pretty sure it was released as a teaching tool. With deckbuilding being a core part of Netrunner, Aurora is a simple way to nudge new Core Set players into it and experiment with those 15 influence points. No matter how much money you're making with Gabe you'll soon think, 'Man, breakers are expensive.' Then you move over to Noise and think, 'Whaaaaat?'

So you swap in a few red cards, see there's no code gate breaker readily available, bring in a Yog.0, then maybe a Datasucker to overcome its weakness, thinking about some useful green cards you can get for your remaining points and before you know it, you're deck building. I'm not being sarcastic when I think that's a very helpful thing to be in the game.

So, thank you Aurora for being so obviously bad that it made that intimidating first swap so simple. Thank you, and whenever the inevitable Arctic expansion is released and you get a 'Borealis' host card that lowers all usage costs by 1 , I'll be glad to welcome you back.