Lean and Mean's anarch cousin. Unfortunately suffers from all the problems of Lean and Mean (see my review of that one) and adds some extra downsides: it's 1 more expensive, 1• more influence and it has a much harder condition.

The latter is the biggest problem. Running with only 3 programs installed is doable. It's not perfect but in the right deck it's doable and it's perfectly safe. The biggest problem you'll have is running into traps but those generally don't kill you and the odd ice that can't be broken unless you have an AI (e.g. in a Excalibur / Off the Grid combination).

Running with 2 or less cards in your hand on the other hand is dangerous. There's no shortage of corp cards that can deal one damage and if you run into a couple of them you're dead. Sure, it works nicely in an Emptied Mind deck, but frankly if I see a runner run that I wonder if their mind really is empty. ;)

I can get why the extra strength is appealing, if you're running Faust. But for Faust you want to have a lot of cards in your hand and that doesn't work with Pushing the Envelope. Faust decks often do not have more than 3 programs installed however so if you can spare the influence Lean and Mean is the much easier option.

So, no, not a good card.

P.S. FFG, is there any reason why the phrasing of Pushing the Envelope and Lean and Mean is different? It just needlessly complicates comparison by making us reviewers check for gotchas.

Insult to injury for derezzing decks.

He's unfortunately unique (criminals would love a few clones of him, but Jinteki wouldn't play ball). Other than that though there's very little not to like. The install cost of 2 is paid for the first time you derez ice with him installed, possibly even in the same turn as you install him.

Since there's very little to analyze about his ability on itself lets look at the options for derezzing ice. * means will rotate out soon once the first pack of the cycle after Red Sands hits.

• Brute-Force-Hack - Double, pay rez cost off ICE to derez it.
• Crescentus * - 1, to derez ice just broken with any breaker.
• Emergency Shutdown * - After running on HQ derez a piece of ice.
• Exploit - After running all centrals derez 3 pieces of ice.
• Flashbang - Derez a sentry being encountered.
• Golden - 2 and pop back to grip to derez ice just broken with this breaker.
• Leave No Trace - Derez ice rezzed during a run.
• Maxwell James - After running on HQ to derez ice in front of remote.
• Peregrine - Golden for code gates.
• Rubicon Switch - + rez cost of just rezzed ice to derez.
• Saker - Golden for barriers.

Certainly no lack of options. The old ones (Crescentus and Emergency Shutdown) are powerful but obviously not the way forward. Exploit is cool if you can pull it off but doesn't work well with Keros since it's a high cost to derez 3 but you only get credits for derezzing one.

The rest works pretty well with Keros. One card in particular stands out however: Rubicon Switch. You can only use it once per turn but Keros only gives money once per turn and the effect of combining the two is a 2 discount on Rubicon Switch. With a decent enough economy that can make life really annoying for the corp.

A bird lady deck can also use Keros pretty well. At the very least you get back the money needed to make one bird return to the nest each turn.

From a deckbuilding perspective Keros is easy. If you derez ice often enough he's very good economy, if you don't he doesn't do anything and thus can be left out.

Another soon-to-rotate out fracter that's made obsolete by Paperclip.

Here's the cost difference:

Where Morning Star can break it's at least as efficient as Paperclip but it's rarely more than 2 more efficient. Meanwhile Paperclip costs 1 less , 4 less to install and installs from heap.

In the general case the flexibility and lower install cost makes Paperclip the far better option.

I know this is almost rotated out, but doing the math it's not really a bad card compared to the pretty efficient Inversificator.

Torch

Inversificator

Torch - Inversificator

For gear check ice (0-2 strength) there's no efficiency difference since Inversificator has base strength 2. For 3 strength ice Torch is 1 cheaper (0 vs 1 for Inversificator). For 4 strength it's 2 (Torch doesn't need a boost, Inversificator needs 2 boost) and from there it's constant (both need boosting and are equally efficient at it).

4 and 5 strength code gates are common enough to matter (Mausolus, Fairchild 3.0, Lotus Field, Authenticator (ok, I just expect Authenticator to be popular)). And that 2 difference per run can quickly bridge the difference in install cost.

But it doesn't matter really. Because you only need to break a hard code gate once with Inversificator to swap it with something less annoying. That makes Inversificator much more effective than it shows from the raw numbers. And there's also the major difference in install timing. A 6 breaker can be installed earlier than a 9 breaker and doesn't empty your bank account if you did a "start of game - Hedge Fund" opening.

I do think that Torch and Inversificator are related. They're both expensive breakers with 1/1 break/boost cost. The fact that Inversificator has been released close to Torch rotating out makes me think it's a replacement. It would make sense in that case that it is more efficient because Torch is rarely seen in the wild. And unlike with Paperclip FFG managed to not make it so efficient that it's always better than the previous king (Gordian Blade).

I was curious at what point Nfr becomes more economical than Paperclip, assuming Nfr has been sufficiently charged up already. Here's the tally:

So for 1 sub barriers Nfr is 1 cheaper for breaking than Paperclip. But before you get there it has to be charged up 2 times. And looking through the list of barriers strength 5 barriers are rare: 5 total (2x 1 sub, 2x 2 subs, 1x 3 subs).

Really the only time Nfr is really worth it to include is if you know while building your deck that you're going up against ice like Hadrian's Wall and Orion.