Flavor review!

Roger Penrose (born 1931), alongside Leonhard Euler and Carl Gauss are the suite of mathematician breakers in the Ashes cycle, which each have a bonus on the turn you install the program. Among Penrose's large body of work, the one that is displayed here most prominently in the art for the card is the Penrose Triangle - which he worked with his father on - what is known as an "impossible object", a type of optical illusion.

But...

Scott Penrose (born 1969), alongside Harry Houdini, Dai Vernon, Isaac Fawkes, and Harry Blackstone Jr are all magician breakers, which each use stealth credits to boost and break. Penrose is a former president of The Magic Circle, and has worked on a number of films and shows, and even appeared on QI to give Stephen Fry his membership to The Magic Circle.

What a cool intersection of two cycles, in both mechanics and flavour!

GameNET looks at first glance to be very powerful.

"Hey look, it's a 'whenever'! It's always the 'whenever's that are the broken cards!"

Sadly, there's a bit more to this.

ICE is often bemoaned for either never firing or not doing enough, and that's for a good reason: the runner has the choice to let subroutines fire or to pay credits to break the ICE. These "punisher" effects that let your opponent choose what happens always play much less powerfully than they appear on paper — remember, when evaluating cards, you shouldn't look solely at the best case scenario: you need to consider the average case and the worst case too.

GameNET falls down because when the ID fires is almost entirely dependent on the runner. They choose when to run, they choose when to let subs fire, they choose when they spend credits on traces. Would you want your economy tied to the actions of your opponent?

Let's also look at it from a different angle: economy is most effective early in the game when you want to be setting up: you need money to install ICE, to rez ICE, to advance agendas, to play Hard-Hitting News. When does GameNET come into play? When your Gold Farmers and Turnpikes are already rezzed. GameNET starts raking in the money when you can force the runner to run through your servers over and over... but how did you get to that point? How did you get the money to rez the ice and to score enough agendas to force the runner's hand?

The answer is that you were Azmari EdTech instead.

Maybe GameNET would be less underwhelming if it had been released a few years down the road. As it is, the shadow of the slightly-too-pushed Azmari will loom over GameNET for most of its Standard-legal lifespan.

It's going to be compared with Black Orchestra, let's face it, so let's do just that.

Common code gates:

• Enigma: Utae 2-3, Blorch 3
• Hortum: Utae 4-5, Blorch 3
• Thimblerig: Utae 1, Blorch 3
• Tollbooth: Utae 8, Blorch 9
• 2-sub Slot Machine: Utae 6, Blorch 6
• DNA Tracker: Utae 8, Blorch 9
• Fairchild 3.0: Utae 7, Blorch 9 (or 6 + trash)
• 6-strength Gatekeeper: Utae 7, Blorch 6
• 0-strength Gatekeeper: Utae 2, Blorch 3
• Archives Crick: Utae 6, Blorch 6
• Mausolus: Utae 5-7, Blorch 6 (plus one sub)

Looks like it's mostly just comparable rather than anything else. Over the course of a game, Utae could save anywhere between 2-8 credits. (Or more, obviously, but let's not look at the best-case — more useful to consider the average-case)

The worst-case is that you need to break two code gates and you don't have three virtuals installed yet, at which point the much more flexible Black Orchestra is looking a lot better.

So the golden question for whether to run this or Black Orchestra: Does the extra efficiency of Utae make up for the set-up cost of three virtuals, and the need to pre-install it?

I think for a lot of decks the answer will be no. Black Orchestra's not being dethroned, but cracks are showing...