Tree Line is one of the best barriers printed recently. If you're looking for a barrier to keep the Runner out – as opposed to simply being a gear check, or something used to gain economic advantage and pull off combos, or something intended primarily to delay the Runner a click and waste one run's worth of credits – then Tree Line is probably your best choice in the current metagame.

First off, this ICE's basic statistics are very good. Normally, mid-sized barriers are strength 3, cost 3, and have some minor upside: Maskirovka, Klevetnik, Masvingo. (The original of course was Wall of Static, but ICE is slightly better than that nowadays. Palisade is also an interesting comparison.) Tree Line has strength 4, which makes it 1 more taxing than your typical mid-sized barrier; it also costs 1 more to rez, but you will get that credit back if you can fire the subroutine (and you frequently will be able to fire it on the initial rez). For Cleaver, one of the more commonly used fracters now that Paperclip has rotated, it costs 2 (or one Leech counter) more to break than your typical mid-sized barrier. These are not bad stats at all, and would mean that glacier decks would be seriously considering this ICE anyway (even out of faction) – given that Fire Wall is no longer legal, your next step up in strength would be Pharos which is considerably more expensive.

With the release of The Automata Initiative, and the rotation out of the Flashpoint cycle, barrier strength has suddenly become much more relevant than it has been in the previous two metagames. When faced with ICE that's a point stronger, a Paperclip would just pay an extra credit, and a Botulus or Boomerang (or the recently banned Endurance) wouldn't even notice. But Paperclip has rotated out, and there's now much more variety in decks with respect to how barrier-breaking is handled: Arissana frequently tries to break barriers with Slap Vandal (and maybe Poison Vial), several runners are trying out Banner, and the "default" fracter now seems to be Cleaver, with Propeller seen occasionally and Curupira a little more often. These newer, or newly-relevant, ways to get through barriers tend to struggle when they have high strength; Cleaver is hard to pump, Curupira has to be pumped quite a distance, and most of the rest have a limit for the strongest barrier they can break, normally around 5 or 6. This means that ICE that can be advanced for strength is in a fairly valuable spot in the metagame: if you can get the ICE above a certain strength breakpoint, the Runner's rig might have no way to deal with it. (Most commonly, the Runner is left with a single out, usually either Boomerang or Botulus; these cards are both good against Tree Line but it is often possible to overload them.) Tree Line is pretty useful in this respect because it isn't that far off the magic 6–7 strength that suddenly stops half the opponent's breakers working; you could get it up there with 2–3 and 2–3, which is expensive, but not completely unaffordable if it makes a server impossible to run.

I've been trying out Tree Line in pretty much all my Corp decks recently, initially in "let's try this out and see how it goes, I might want to write a review" mode rather than because I necessarily thought it deserved the slot. Generally speaking, it's been very good at what it does – frequently it's the card I'm hoping to draw, and when I do install it it does its job better than the alternative barriers would. I've found myself adding more and more copies of it over time, often starting as a 1-of and going up to the full 3. However, despite this, it isn't actually helping to win that many games. Part of the problem is that you can only run 3 Tree Lines in a deck, and the card seems to be hit by the 3/deck limit much harder than most cards are. Frequently it is hard to draw them by the point at which you need them. When you do draw them late, they're more vulnerable, because this is the general nature of ICE that's drawn late: if you can't put them on the inside of the server then they become more vulnerable to Inside Job, and Hippo, and Tsakhia "Bankhar" Gantulga. That's a downside that hurts almost all ICE in theory, but when you're running mediocre interchangeable ICE you don't notice much – it just starts really stinging with Tree Line because you know that some of its potential is being wasted. Part of the problem is that locking the Runner out of one server does not win the game; you generally need to defend at least two servers (typically R&D and a remote server; for some decks, this is instead R&D and HQ), and getting two active Tree Lines takes longer than getting one.

Tree Line has a second mode: you can pay , 1 and expend it in order to triple-advance a piece of ICE. This ability is in theory very good if you want to triple-advance a piece of ICE (it is slightly better for that purpose than Dedication Ceremony, because it works even on unrezzed ICE). You are spending one card, but saving two credits and three clicks; this is a huge economic swing if triple-advancing a piece of ICE is something that you actually wanted to do. There's a basic problem with this mode, though: if you're in a gamestate where you want to have highly advanced ICE, it is probably also a gamestate in which using Tree Line as a piece of ICE would be particularly good. So expending a Tree Line is a bit of a weird thing to do; if a highly advanced ICE is valuable enough against the current opponent that you're willing to spend resources on setting it up, it usually makes even more sense to pay the extra clicks and credits to install the Tree Line protecting a weak server and advance that manually. This means in practice that expending a Tree Line is a bit of a desperation measure – something you do when you need to reinforce your servers in an emergency, at the cost of having good servers later in the game – and so far I've lost every game where I've had to do it.

The expend on Tree Line is therefore probably best (only?) used in situations where having an advanced ICE is important, but having an advanced Tree Line in particular wouldn't help. There are a few ICE that work well advanced in certain specialised scenarios: Colossus (versus fixed-strength killers like Mimic and Num), Hortum (versus AI breakers like Aumakua and Audrey v2), and Oduduwa (in front of advanceable ICE to protect a server, usually R&D but occasionally HQ, from a deck designed to spam runs on it). Incidentally, Tree Line is a pretty good choice of advanceable ice to put behind an Oduduwa in order to make use of the free advancements; doing this is punished by Botulus but pretty much nothing else, so you only have one card to play around. These situations do come up, but they're rare, and in practice you never seem to have the Tree Line in hand when you need it.

So, in conclusion: if you're trying to build a deck around keeping the runners out of your servers, and are looking for a barrier to slot into it, Tree Line is going to be better than its competitors – but you are going to have trouble drawing it when you actually need it, and the Runner may have won by the time you can set it up. If you're looking for a mid-strength barrier to tax the runner a little, Tree Line may still be the best in slot now that IP Block has rotated. It's a good piece of ICE – although it improves the type of deck that may struggle for other reasons, and may not improve it by enough for it to be worthwhile playing a deck like that. It has an expend ability, but it's hardly useful because you have to choose between an expend and an install, and the install is almost always better than the expend: both are situational, but for most situations in which the expend is good, the install is even better. But even just looking at it purely as a piece of ICE, it's pretty good – against most decks, you don't even need to advance it for it to be good, its base stats are perfectly adequate on their own.

ZATO City Grid is a defensive upgrade that has quite a lot of potential, but is also pretty clunky to use. As far as I can tell, there are two main ways to use it: a) as a source of semi-repeatable unbreakable " End the run." (ETR) effects or b) as a way to fire high-impact subroutines without having to rely on the Runner faceplanting into them.

Looking at the first mode first, ZATO City Grid can do a sort of Anoetic Void impression via making all your ETR ICE into a sort of poor corp's Border Control. It isn't nearly as strong as Border Control, because you can wait to use that effect until the Runner's passed all of your ICE (thus forcing them to spend their way into the server). It loses even further to Anoetic Void, because you can wait to use that effect until the Runner approaches the server, a timing which allows Void to combo with Manegarm Skunkworks and/or Formicary. The advantage over Border Control is that you can fire it multiple times in a turn by trashing multiple ICE, and the difference with Anoetic Void is that firing it multiple times consumes a different resource (rezzed ETR ICE rather than 2+2 cards).

As such, using ZATO City Grid to defend an agenda is somewhat reminiscent of playing an AgInfusion: New Miracles for a New World glacier deck. Ag glacier was one of the top Corp decks for quite a while (and is still playable), and scores agendas in the late game via stacking enough unbreakable methods to prevent the Runner breaching a server that they run out of clicks trying. Perhaps the first time you try to run, you hit a Border Control; the second time, you get thrown to Archives by Ag's ability; the third time, the run is stopped by Anoetic Void; the fourth time – wait, did you have enough credits to get into the server four times without even spending a click to prepare? I guess I'd better use my Nisei MK II, or my Sand Storm, or sonething. ZATO City Grid, in the late game, effectively lets you do the same thing out of a Weyland deck; you might not have an ID ability that directly helps, but you don't need to find 3–4 different ways to end the run, you just need 3–4 ETR ICE rezzed on the server. Of course, this will only work in a deck that naturally can build a server of 3–4 rezzed ETR ICE, which is unusual, but isn't unheard of; this is a plausible late-game setup for three different strategies (glacier, rush, and rigshooter decks – the rush deck probably didn't want the game to reach the late game, but can nonetheless build itself a pile of ETR ICE as a plan B if it fails to win early on, and often doesn't have any better alternatives).

Is ZATO Grid good for this purpose? I suspect that it is at best a plan B. If you're trying to do an impression of the infamous Haas-Bioroid: Precision Design rush deck, scoring behind a small pile of ICE and a big pile of upgrades, there are much better options (like the infamous Manegarm Skunkworks / Anoetic Void combo); and although those options have weaknesses of their own, ZATO City Grid doesn't really fix any of those weaknesses. On the other hand, if your deck's natural plan is to win via some other method, and that other method naturally tends to build (or can cheaply be modified to build) large servers in the late game, ZATO City Grid can give it an alternative path to victory by only spending a card slot or two. Diversifying your win conditions is usually worth it if you can do it cheaply – many Runner decks will be great against some of your win conditions but poor against others – so being able to use just one or two card slots to gain a late-game way to blow up your scoring server in order to forcibly score an agenda is generally a good trade.

A good comparison is Audacity (which blows up your hand to score an agenda). Some fast-advance decks are built around Audacity, because it's a really strong card; but most decks can't afford the downsides of playing an Audacity in the mid-game and leaving themselves vulnerable. However, even for decks that couldn't survive after playing an Audacity, a 1-of Audacity can nonetheless be worth it as a way to get the last couple of points scored when the deck is otherwise running out of steam. ZATO City Grid plays similarly, but can work with larger agendas (4/2s and 5/3s are just fine because you're planning to score the agenda over multiple turns anyway) – "all" you need is a pile of rezzed or rezzable ETR ICE on the server.

Of course, just firing ETR subroutines, while practical in some circumstances, might seem like a waste of the potential of a card like this. Many impactful subroutines are balanced by the difficulty of firing them; one particularly commonly seen pattern is for the subroutine to do something that doesn't matter in the early game, but to have no real chance of firing except on a face-check (and the Runner is unlikely to faceplant into your ICE once the early game is over). As such, the game has lots of ICE that isn't really very useful because it only really functions in a situation that's unlikely to ever come up.

ZATO City Grid can be thought of as giving this ICE a reason to exist. Something like Zed 2.0 has a great subroutine (everyone wants to be able to blow up Endurance, right?), but is incredibly porous in the early game and unlikely to fire in the late game (you can't actually blow up the Endurance because it'll just break the subroutines). ZATO City Grid, by force-firing subroutines, can give you a way to actually fire these subroutines for once. The primary problem is, this still isn't necessarily going to be very good – if you decide to use ZATO on Zed to get rid of an Endurance, you've just spent 9 to get rid of an 8 card, and spent two cards and two install clicks on top of that, and probably several more credits installing additional ICE on the server. So you're behind on economy, and the Runner is still running into what is presumably your scoring server (if you try this on a different remote server the Runner probably won't ever run there), and you didn't really do much permanent damage because Endurance is normally run as multiple copies. Similar reasoning applies to firing, e.g., bulk net damage subroutines (Bathynomus), which could win the game but is more likely to fall flat,

However, there is one fairly common subroutine that does make sense for this sort of combo: " Trash 1 program.". This is a sort of perfect storm of "useful outside the ZATO combo" and "worth it when used with ZATO":

• Program-trashing ICE is generally useful in rush decks (except against Anarchs who rely on conspiracy breakers like Black Orchestra), because it acts as a pseudo-ETR when combined with an actual ETR ICE (normally a code gate because almost everyone is running Paperclip and it's hard to ETR with a sentry). The idea is that you have your program-trashing sentry in front of a run-ending code gate (say Thimblerig or Magnet), as a form of gear check that keeps your server safe until the Runner finds their killer; if they attempt to run the server without the appropriate breakers, you trash their decoder and now they can't break through the ICE behind. So although the subroutine isn't spiky in the very early game, it's nonetheless useful in helping to keep its server safe.
• Against some decks, trashing a program can be really high impact, sometimes effectively winning the game on the spot. Against Anarchs, the impact isn't too great, normally just disrupting their economy a little, because they can normally reinstall their breakers from their heap, so you're either forcing them to pay to do that, or just destroying economic programs directly. Likewise, the various Apocalypse decks tend to have plenty of spare breakers because they're planning to blow up the board themselves. However, Criminals often only run one of each breaker; blowing up their Amina or Cat's Cradle can make all your code gates impenetrable for the rest of the game, so all you need to do from that point is to find enough code gates to beat their bypass effects and Boomerangs. Shapers are a little better at recovering from trashed breakers, but often run very light on ways to recur them nowadays (and if you can trash the World Tree from the 80-card Kabonesa Wu deck that's going around at the moment, the deck will have extreme difficulty trying to draw into a way to get it back). So even if you need to do something janky in order to get the subroutine to fire, there are plenty of matchups where the payoff is worth it.
• ZATO doesn't care about the strength of the ICE you're using – the relevant factor, other than its subroutine, is its rez cost. With many types of subroutine, this would introduce tension between running cheap ICE (good with ZATO but useless without as it isn't very taxing) and expensive ICE (taxing, but a big loss to trash to your ZATO). With program-trashers, though, the cheap ICE is just as good as a gear check as the expensive ICE is.

The upshot of all this is that, unlike with most non-ETR subroutines that you might want to use with ZATO, you can find program trashes on ICE that wouldn't be embarrassing when the ZATO isn't there. Something like Sapper is perfectly viable for forcing a killer install (when stacked with a code gate on your scoring server), and great when used with ZATO because it only costs 3. If your deck is naturally running that sort of ICE, then adding ZATO to its server will give it a new lease of life once it no longer works as a gear-check, perhaps giving you a scoring window or even winning you the game out of nowhere.

All this discussion of the upsides of ZATO so far has, however, neglected a serious downside that needs to be mentioned in any review. The elephant in the room here is Pinhole Threading. "Dies to Pinhole" has become a bit of a meme, because it applies to such a lot of cards – and the primary purpose of Pinhole is to get rid of defensive upgrades like this one, so you'd expect Pinhole to beat it – but the problem is that Pinholes are close to mandatory for many decks in the current metagame, so you're very likely to run into them, and it's hard to justify a strategy based around ZATO City Grid when your opponent can just Pinhole the Grid away and cause your strategy to cease to function.

It isn't just a case of "this is a defensive upgrade so Pinhole beats it", though – ZATO is even worse against Pinhole than upgrades normally are. This is partly because ZATO is limited to defending remote servers, so it can't do anything to help stop the Runner Pinholing through Archives (whereas the other similar defensive upgrade we got in Parhelion, Nanisivik Grid, is very good at defending Archives and so you can use one Nanisivik to help out another). It's also partly because ZATO cares about the ICE arrangement of the server it's trying to defend (unlike most defensive upgrades, which don't care at all); as such, setting up a ZATO means investing resources into getting your scoring server just right, and if the ZATO gets Pinholed, all the resources you spent on that are worthless. And it's also partly because unlike other defensive upgrades, ZATO can (sometimes) defend a server even with no other upgrades helping it, which means that it often has to try to do the work by itself, and if it gets Pinholed, the server is now much less defended rather than slightly less defended; this means that it can be very hard to tell whether you have a scoring window or not, and thus rather raises the risk that you'll try to jam an agenda, only to have your ZATO Pinholed and your agenda stolen.

A secondary downside is that ZATO is pretty similar to Nanisivik Grid, which is somewhat easier to use and which has already found a home (in the AgInfusion glacier decks which were mentioned earlier). Nansivik Ag is a strong enough deck that some Runners have taken to making weird card choices in an attempt to beat it – things like Tracker which previously weren't seeing play at all. Because the two Grids have such similar rules text, this leads to some amount of "splash damage" in which tech cards being used to beat Nanisivik are also capable of beating ZATO, so you don't even get the "maybe my opponent's deck will be unprepared for this" factor that you'd normally get when running an unpopular card.

So is ZATO unplayable? I think it might be in most identities, but it can be somewhat redeemed by the ID it was probably designed for, Ob Superheavy Logistics: Extract. Export. Excel.. The obvious combo here is to use ZATO's trash to trigger Ob's ability; there are some janky suggestions in the other review for particular combinations you could use, but even something simple like "trash Ballista to trash a program, installing Border Control," can easily keep the Runner occupied for long enough to let you finish scoring the agenda that they were trying to steal (and is probably more effective). However, this specific use of Ob's ability doesn't do anything to stop you being Pinholed.

The redeeming feature comes in the less obvious combo – instead of firing Ob's ability with ZATO's trash, what you can do instead is to use Ob's ability to install the ZATO mid-run. Like all operations, Pinhole Threading costs a click to play, meaning that it can't be played in the middle of a run and you need to make time in a turn to play it. When you're trying to steal an agenda, every click counts – so if you install ZATO mid-run using something like Border Control (which pretty much any Ob deck should be running at three copies), the Runner will have to take a click off to Pinhole it before running back onto the server again, effectively allowing one Border Control to eat up two clicks. The great thing about this is that you don't need to draw the ZATO or spend a click installing it; all you need is to have it in your deck. (In fact, you'd rather prefer for it to still be in your deck so that you can search for it – this leads to an odd sort of deckbuilding requirement in which it's probably right to include multiple copies to increase the chance that one of them is still in your deck in the late game, weirdly mirroring the principle via which some cards are run as several copies to increase the chance that you see one early.)

It's possible to do better than this, though – instead of using Border Control to install ZATO City Grid, you can use Stavka. The idea is to wait until the Runner is locked into encountering an unrezzed Stavka, then rez it, trashing a rezzed 4 card (e.g. Mausolus, or a second copy of Stavka). You can then trash Stavka to ZATO, trashing one of the Runner's programs, and without the Runner having any opportunity to Pinhole it at all. (Against most Criminals and some Shapers, the missing program will probably also force them to jack out, so it's possible and even reasonable to do this in the middle of trying to score an agenda.) Although this combo might itself be janky, its components (other than ZATO) aren't, being perfectly reasonable cards to run in glacier or rigshooter. So it's possible to be playing what looks like a perfectly normal deck, then suddenly go into jank mode out of nowhere, trash a critical program with a ridiculous combo, then go back to sensible Netrunner again and finish scoring your agenda.

As a consequence of all this, I suspect that ZATO City Grid may be viable in some decks. However, it isn't remotely dependable. One of its biggest downsides is that it has a more serious case of Pinholitis than perhaps any other card; it also tends to get hit by tech cards that Runners are running for other reasons. Additionally, both of its main uses (destroying programs, and taxing the runner out of clicks during an attempt to steal an agenda) are somewhat situational; you're paying quite a cost to make use of them, and although the benefit you get from paying that cost might be worth it, it also might not be. In order to make it worthwhile, therefore, I suspect that it needs to be placed into a deck that can take advantage of both of its major modes and can also help patch up the Pinhole weakness somewhat – and even then, it's the plan B, not the primary strategy.

Fortunately, decks like this do seem to exist. "Toolbox Ob" has quickly become an established shell for a deck, and is typically quite happy to play situational cards. It generally has rushing as at least one of its plans, which naturally pushes it towards playing lots of ETR ICE; and it also pushes it towards having a range of ICE types at a range of costs (which in turn means that it's usually running Sapper, which is the best 3 sentry for non-Jinteki rush decks). This sort of deck is a perfect fit for ZATO (I already had one built prior to Parhelion's release, and ZATO fit right into it without needing to change many card slots). Despite that perfect fit, ZATO City Grid hasn't been amazing in my testing, but it has at least been doing enough to justify its slot. This does, however, make me suspect that the card isn't strong enough to justify a slot unless you're already running the sort of deck for which everything likes up perfectly – after all, even if you are, the card merely becomes decent rather an an all-star.

It is, however, quite a lot of fun (when it doesn't just get Pinholed)!

(This review is primarily for Standard. It does include some speculation about Startup, but I haven't yet tested Public Trail there, nor in Gateway, so most of the conclusions are based around the current Standard metagame.)

Two years ago, I published a review of SEA Source. At the time, it was the primary "same-turn" tagging operation. But times change, and the cardpool rotates. SEA Source has left Standard, and Public Trail was intentionally designed as a replacement for it:

By way of example, Public Trail fills the role that SEA Source occupied, but in a way that’s simpler to grok. It leads players to the same play pattern but without the extra mechanical baggage of trace.

This might lead you to think that the two cards are quite similar, but in practice, the play pattern is very different, with Public Trail playing a somewhat different role in the decks it's in.

SEA Source was, in its first iteration, primarily a win condition: in the original Core Set, if you were sufficiently richer than the Runner (and they made a successful run), you could generally flatline them on the spot by playing SEA Source followed by double Scorched Earth. The most obvious equivalent when looking at today's Standard is Hard-Hitting News, which lands 4 tags on a Runner who is poorer than you and (if they can't or don't clear the tags) turns on tag punishment cards like BOOM! on the following turn. When used against a rich Runner, both of these combos are "all in" combos – you will be spending most of your credits to land the tag, leaving you a long way behind if you can't take advantage of them before the Runner clears them. SEA+Scorched is the stronger combo, as if you have the cards in hand and land the tag, it's an immediate win (and it would probably be unbalanced in modern-day Netrunner); Hard-Hitting News requires the tags to be floated for a turn cycle (i.e. 4 Runner clicks), and as clearing its tags with basic actions costs , 8, a rich Runner will always have access to a method of escaping the tags, thus Hard-Hitting News only really works against poor opponents.

The upshot of this is that operation-based tag-based decks had, before the release of System Gateway, two main modes of operation – either they tried to keep the Runner poor, allowing a Hard-Hitting News kill; or else they tried to keep themselves rich, allowing SEA Source to be landed. The latter is easier to accomplish (identities like NBN: Controlling the Message and The Outfit: Family Owned and Operated can easily make huge amounts of money and are good at tag-based strategies), but the rotation of Scorched Earth means that it had a lesser impact, needing to rely on more situational tag punishment cards like Exchange of Information, or on resetting the credit war with Closed Accounts. So Hard-Hitting News is based on the Runner's credit pool, whereas SEA Source is based on the credit differential. This made them good in different situations, so they didn't directly compete, and could even coexist in the same deck.

What about Public Trail? In order to land a tag reliably, the Runner has to be at less than 8. This is the same number that (against a Runner who isn't running tech cards or clickless economy) allows you to reliably float a tag around to your turn when using Hard-Hitting News. In other words, it's mostly just worse than Hard-Hitting News is at punishing a Runner on a low credit total; landing Hard-Hitting News against a poor Runner is going to tie up their economy for clearing tags for quite a while even when it doesn't outright win the game, whereas Public Trail just gives you one tag, and two clicks to do something with it before the Runner pays , 2 to clear it. As such, unlike Hard-Hitting News, and unlike SEA Source, Public Trail is bad at being a win condition; it's pretty much just outclassed by Hard-Hitting News against poor runners, and can't serve the same role as SEA Source because it can't reliably land a tag against rich Runners.

However, just because it isn't a good win condition, that doesn't mean that Public Trail is worthless; decks need cards other than their win conditions. In particular, profiting from a Hard-Hitting News requires the Runner to be poor; as an aspiring NBN tag-and-bag player, how are you going to make the Runner poor? The obvious answer to this is Economic Warfare, and that does indeed get run in most all-out tagging decks nowadays; but frequently, three Economic Warfares are not enough on their own (your reverse Sure Gamble gets cancelled out on average by the Runner's regular Sure Gambles, and they almost invariably have economy on top of that). The less obvious answer is "OK, let's get richer than the Runner, then start pumping a few credits into traces on cards like IP Block and Citadel Sanctuary – not enough that they won't pay, but enough to gradually and symmetrically wear down both players' credit pools over time". This sort of symmetrical credit erosion is a really powerful tool for tag-based decks, but sadly, just like the Economic Warfares, you often don't get enough opportunities to use it to keep the Runner's credits low enough.

The secret to Public Trail is that it's actually really quite good in the role of "wear the Runner's credit pool down to make landing a Hard-Hitting News possible". The key observation is:

• With SEA Source, you expect the Runner to take the tag. If they even can pay the trace, something has probably gone drastically wrong.
• With Public Trail, you expect the Runner to pay the credits. Your tag punishment is included to deny the Runner the option of taking the tag.

The thing is, SEA Source's effect in the case where the Runner pays the credits is really quite bad – you have symmetrically reduced both credit pools, but you spent a card and a click to do so, and although a symmetrical reduction in credit pools is something that helps to enable Hard-Hitting News decks, the cost that you're paying to be able to do that is really quite high. Symmetrically reducing both players' credits is something that's only really worthwhile when you can do it for free as a side effect of something you wanted to or had to do anyway. On the other hand, Public Trail's effect in the case where the Runner pays the credits is pretty good! You reduced your credit pool by 4 to reduce the Runner's credit pool by 8 – or in other words, your click and card got you an Economic Warfare (an effect that you were running a playset of anyway and that is really valuable to your deck) plus a symmetrical reduction of 4 thrown in on top of that. As a consequence, SEA Source can only really play the win condition role, but is pretty good at that, working in many situations where Hard-Hitting News doesn't. On the other hand, Public Trail is pretty bad at playing the win condition role, but fortunately it isn't restricted to doing that: when it can't get you a win (and most of the time it can't), it can play the role of the enabler instead, making your future tagging operations more likely to work.

All this means that playing Public Trail is similar in nature to playing other cards that give the opponent a choice. Wildcat Strike ("cards or credits?") will be the most familiar to System Gateway players, and I went over a long analysis of that card on its reviews page (but as a summary, it's a card you only play when the cards are valuable enough that the opponent is forced to give you the credits instead). Cerebral Cast is a more directly comparable example of the same sort of card ("tag or core damage?") – the play style of Cerebral Cast was to have enough tag punishment available to cut off that option, with the rest of the deck benefiting from the core damage. In both these cases, your deck has to be built so that it works regardless of the option that the opponent chooses; this isn't just "gets advantage from either option". but more like "one of these options is so good for me that I can force the opponent into taking the other, and that option is also good enough to make the card valuable".

Public Trail is very similar; the "I lose 4 and you lose 8" option is clearly the "good enough to make the card valuable" option (being slightly better than Economic Warfare, a card that you already wanted a playset of), so the tagging option needs to be the "don't you dare" option. So to make Public Trail work, your deck needs to contain cards that can gain a large advantage off a single tag. This might seem similar to SEA Source, but SEA Source needs a really big swing from its tag punishment to be playable, because landing the tag is so expensive; paying 20–30 to land a SEA Source tag is not unusual, so you need around 30 of value from the tag to make playing the operation worthwhile. With Public Trail, all you need to force the credit option is to be able to get at least 8 Runner credits' worth of value from the tag, pretty much by definition, and that means a much wider choice of tag punishment is viable. SEA Source was pretty much limited to Scorched Earth, Closed Accounts, Exchange of Information, or occasionally The All-Seeing I, but three of those cards have rotated and the fourth is situational (and not particularly good in the current metagame). With Public Trail, you can get away with lower-impact cards, like Retribution, Self-Growth Program, or maybe Trust Operation; these aren't good enough to be worth spending tens of credits on, but are strong enough to force the Runner to spend the 8 to avoid them. (Cards which benefit to a lesser extent from one extra tag, such as Market Forces or Predictive Planogram, won't be strong enough to steer the Runner into paying the credits; these can often go into the same deck as Public Trail does, but not because they're good as Public Trail follow-ups.)

For people like me who are Jinteki players at heart, it's also worth noting that unlike SEA Source, Public Trail is usable as a bluff. If you SEA Source someone, you're nearly always paying a fortune to pump the trace to unaffordable levels, and if you then don't have a follow-up, you look really silly. If you Public Trail someone with more than 8, though, they don't know what's going to happen if they decide to take the tag, and that often leads them into making the wrong decision. I often Public Trail people without punishment in hand, and end up getting the credit swing. Sometimes, I'm not bluffing, and the Runner thinks I am, and ends up with a huge setback as a consequence. This is something that you can't really do with most tagging cards. A note of warning: the bluff does not work well when played on the last click of the turn. This seems obvious, but I somehow managed to get this wrong multiple times while testing out how Public Trail worked.

The obvious next question is "is Public Trail good?" It only really fits into specific decks – those where you're playing meaningful tag punishment that works off a single tag, and want to keep the Runner poor (either to land a Hard-Hitting News, or simply just because you want to slow them down). Fortunately, the current metagame is very much one in which single-tag punishment gives meaningful value and is very much desirable. In particular, Endurance is a very commonly played card, and this means that neither Retribution nor Self-Growth Program is likely to suffer for targets (and many decks which don't play Endurance are tag-me decks playing Obelus; Self-Growth Program is great and Retribution decent against those). Drago Ivanov has proved itself to be competitively viable, and Drago decks will typically be running the sort of tag punishment cards that work with Public Trail. In fact, there's a lot of overlap and synergy between the various parts of a tagging deck nowadays. When you have single-tag punishment cards, Public Trail helps keep the runner poor for Hard-Hitting News. Hard-Hitting News also likes the single-tag punishment cards because then it gets value even if the Runner manages to clear three of the tags. If you land any tagging combo and it doesn't win the game, the Runner frequently gets stuck in economic hell trying to clear the rest of the tags or reinstall their Endurance, opening up more tagging windows, scoring windows, or both.

The combination really seems to work if you build a deck around it (and I've been putting up decent results with it, although I haven't found a specific list that I'm happy with yet); the basic idea is to ruin the Runner's economy with operations every now and then, and just score out, or find enough ICE to block their Stargate, while they're distracted trying to fix it. This seems to be a fruitful direction along which to attack the Endurance-based decks in Standard. (Maybe I'll check to see if it also works in Startup, although the lack of Hard-Hitting News there means that it probably doesn't.)

The main drawback of the deck style seems to be deck slots. Hard-Hitting News + Economic Warfare + BOOM! is a lot of deck slots on its own; that already fills most of the space a Corp deck has for things that are neither economy, nor ICE, nor agenda. Fitting in Public Trail, Retribution and Self-Growth Program alongside that means that space starts to become incredibly tight, and in particular, the central servers start to feel the pressure against cards like Stargate, because you no longer have room for additional ICE or card draw / card selection, and thus have trouble drawing the right sort of ICE for the situation in time. I suspect this problem is probably fixable, but am not sure; maybe the correction option is to keep the Runner poor enough that even an inappropriate piece of ICE can keep them out.

In summary: when used as a win condition, Public Trail is a bad Hard-Hitting News; but it can also be used as an enabler, as sort of a jankier Economic Warfare, and it's actually pretty decent in the latter role. Fortunately, you don't need to decide; if you're building a tag-based deck, it'll be able to play both roles for you, and it synergises pretty well with both halves of your tagging strategy. (You were probably playing both Hard-Hitting News and Economic Warfare anyway, after all.) It helps to make cards like Retribution and Self-Growth Program more playable, which is great because those are the sort of cards that are really strong in the current metagame. The problem is that you're now dedicating a lot of your deck to operations that don't directly make you money, protect your servers, or score you points, so the "Netrunner fundamentals" are somewhat lacking. This is probably fixable, but makes Public Trail decks play rather differently from typical Netrunner decks (and even typical tag-and-bag decks).

I've been trying out Top Hat in my Criminal decks recently, and have been surprised at how impressive it's been.

A common scenario for Criminal decks in the Netrunner late game, especially when playing against combo decks (which Criminals are often weak to), is that they have a lot of money, but no servers to use it on – HQ is too well-guarded to get into repeatedly and you can't trash operations there anyway, and the remotes are either empty or full of defensive upgrades. In this situation, if things don't change, the Corp is eventually going to draw into the other half of their combo, either via clicks or perhaps with cards like Rashida Jaheem. The vulnerable server in this setup is normally R&D – against Criminal, it's common for Corps to dedicate most of their defences to HQ, and hope that R&D accesses get blocked by ICE or a Hedge Fund or the like. As long as the Corp is "bulk-drawing", you can't R&D lock them with only basic runs, so they often don't mind too much that most of their ICE went into defending HQ (and the remote, if the deck needs one).

Top Hat papers over that gap really well – if you're in a situation where R&D runs are cheap, but you have nothing much to do with your clicks, it lets you establish a very strong R&D lock (or alternatively, just get a lot of random accesses to hope to snipe the last few points – if you're playing a Criminal deck that runs a lot, you're normally on 3-5 agenda points by this stage in the game). You run R&D, and access the top card. Then you run R&D, and access the second card, and so on. The idea is to remember how far into R&D you've gotten, count the cards that the Corp draws (so you know how deep into R&D you've looked already), and continue your R&D runs where you left off. As long as you can run often enough, you can ensure that the Corp never draws an agenda, so every point that turns up will go into your score area rather than the Corp's (which is very important if they're loading up on Audacity or Biotic Labor).

Although this strategy might seem expensive – and for a Shaper, it would be! – the release of Cezve has meant that repeated centrals running is now well within the reach of many Criminals (except when playing against glacier). As such, the main effect that playing Top Hat has is to force the Corp to put a lot of ICE on R&D, and then pay to rez it, two things that generally aren't high priority for Corps playing against Criminal. Stretching the Corp's resources too thinly and forcing them to cover too many servers is how Criminals win games, so it's possible to get a surprising amount of benefit from one card slot that costs 0 and 1 influence.

Top Hat also has a fringe use as a tech card, in that it makes it possible to run R&D, and access cards in it without "breaching" R&D or accessing cards in its root. This dodges some defensive upgrades, notably Prisec and Mwanza City Grid. It'd take a very weird metagame for this use as a tech card to become a reason on its own to play Top Hat (even though the main users of Prisec and Mwanza City Grid, Ob Superheavy Logistics and Jinteki: Personal Evolution, are quite popular at the moment, the metagame hasn't reached that level of distortion yet). However, it's a bonus, that does help contribute to the strength of the card.

What about combos? The combo with Insight is obvious, but not really where a Criminal wants to be spending influence – being able to look at four cards in R&D and then run in to steal one (for two cards, three influence, and ) is only a slightly better effect than simply just running in with The Maker's Eye (which is one card, two influence, and , 2). And The Maker's Eye typically isn't making the cut in Criminal lists (or even Shaper lists) nowadays – even Ken can often find better uses for the card slots.

However, there's another combo, with Möbius, which I have been trying out – it's probably unplayable outside Ken decks, but seems marginally playable there. Ken decks need a huge critical mass of run events to work (and Möbius qualifies), and are often facing an undefended R&D turn 1 (a situation in which Möbius is probably the best economy card in the game, gaining 5 for a click and seeing the top card of R&D twice – this is a better rate of return than even Carpe Diem). As such, Möbius has obvious early-game advantages for Ken, but suffers from falling off somewhat in the late game because it's hard to get benefit from both runs (and yet you need to succeed at both in order to get the 4 from Möbius). Top Hat helps to make Möbius playable by giving it a late-game purpose as well – if you're trying to R&D lock with repeated R&D runs and accessing a different card each time, making two R&D runs in the same turn is reasonable, and making the pair of runs , 4 cheaper is definitely worth a card (and another , 1 cheaper if it triggers Ken's ID ability and Swift's refund). It's also always fun to see your opponent reading the cards you're playing.

There's probably also a viable combo with Find the Truth (build your own R&D Interface with two 0-cost cards!), but I haven't tested this one myself so I don't know how well it would work.

So is Top Hat worth it in Criminal? I think it's a serious competitor for a deck slot in some Criminal decks, but I'm not convinced that it'll actually win that competition. It definitely has an effect that many Criminal decks want, and that they find hard to get by other means; and it helps to shore up some common match-ups (especially fast-advance and combo decks) that Criminals often find difficult to win. The main question is simply as to whether you can find another 45 cards that give a larger benefit to your deck than the rather situational benefit that you get from a Top Hat, and that's going to depend a lot on how the deck is designed, what its economy looks like, and the like. (Top Hat seems to be better in decks with a mix of an event economy and Cezve – this economy mix can get up to high credit totals in the mid-to-late game and is good at repeatedly running R&D, but will eventually run out of credits if the game goes very long, and thus needs some way to close games out.) You also need to check whether the deck can use the similar (but more expensive) Stargate instead – Stargate has a better effect if you can get it installed, but many decks can't afford the influence, or the install hit, or (in particular) the memory cost. Top Hat can thus be seen as a "baby Stargate" – a similar but worse effect, but one that's much easier to include in a deck and that may be sufficient to patch a Stargate-shaped hole that you can't afford an actual Stargate to fill.

As such, for many Criminal decks, I suspect that this is a card to try out, and eventually reject – but it's hard to know whether it's worth rejecting without trying it, and it seems to slot into some decks really neatly.

Subliminal Messaging is an interesting card that does a lot of different things, and its main focus – and use in a deck – has shifted around over time.

As an economy card

The most obvious use of Subliminal Messaging is as an economy card that gives you 1 every turn the Runner doesn't run (but that doesn't work as well in multiples). This can be a pretty good rate of return, if you can set your deck up in such a way that you can penalise the Runner for running a lot. Against many decks, most Runners will run most turns anyway, so Subliminal works best in cases where they don't. The key thing to notice is that a single copy of Subliminal doesn't cost you a server, or an install click, or a rez cost – all you need to do is draw it and it'll be ready to make money right away. The fact that it gives you a 1 bonus on the turn you drew it, even if the Runner ran last turn, helps to blunt the cost of the card (one card is worth more than 1 but not by that much). It does cost a deck slot, though, which means that it normally isn't worth playing Subliminal unless it's a particularly good fit for your deck.

As such, generally speaking, Subliminal Messaging as a pure economy event works best in pure glacier decks; standard strategy against those doesn't include running every turn, so you're likely to get the free credit quite frequently. Non-glacier decks face the issue that many runners (Hoshiko, Sunny, Smoke, Freedom, and most Criminals) get enough value from the fact of having made a run that they will naturally want to run pretty much every turn, if there's anywhere they can get in (and sometimes even if there isn't) – only glacier decks are likely to be able to ICE up everything to the extent that "value runs" become worthless.

As a combo card

Despite its obvious use being as a source of economy, Subliminal Messaging also started finding its way into combo decks. This is based on the fact that it's an operation that refunds when played – these decks mostly don't care about the 1 economy, but purely about the fact that the operation refunds itself. In particular, a copy of Subliminal was standard in Accelerated Diagnostics decks, back when they were legal – if you can hit Subliminal Messaging off Accelerated Diagnostics, you just refunded the click (and credit!) cost of the Diagnostics. Accelerated Diagnostics' best friend Power Shutdown also combos somewhat with Subliminal Messaging, in that the run that turns Subliminal off turns Shutdown on.

The Power Shutdown/Accelerated Diagnostics combo is behind us, and that's probably for the best – it's banned in everything (even Eternal, a format which only has four banned cards). The "Subliminal click" lives on, though, in the form of MirrorMorph: Endless Iteration. MirrorMorph's ability gives you a bonus click as long as your first four actions are all different, but it doesn't care about actions beyond the fourth. This means that in a MirrorMorph deck, Subliminal Messaging can be used for "click laundering", counting as a "play operation" action without actually spending a click, and serving as one of the simplest ways to get a five-click turn (thus allowing you to play two duplicate actions, as nothing stops the fifth action being the same as an earlier action). An extreme example of this is when you have a Bass CH1R180G4 pre-installed; you can 1) install an agenda, 2) play Subliminal, 3) pop Bass, 4) advance the agenda, and now that you've satisfied the MirrorMorph trigger the 5th, 6th and 7th clicks of your turn can all be advances, making it possible to score a 4/2 from hand. A preinstalled Bass can normally only score 3/2s, but the Subliminal Messaging managed to smuggle an extra click past MirrorMorph's trigger.

As an amplifier for Jinteki economy cards

Subliminal Messaging, when played, gives 1. However, you don't necessarily have to play it immediately after it comes back to your hand, and this turns out to give synergy with some of the Jinteki economy cards. There are two really big synergies which mean that Subliminal Messaging can easily earn a spot in JInteki decks that run operation economies:

• Subliminal Messaging can be discarded to Hansei Review, and yet you didn't really lose a card in the process (just 1 because you discarded the Subliminal rather than playing it). This removes Hansei Review's disadvantage over Hedge Fund. Admittedly, it also removes the advantage, but hey, it isn't like Hedge Fund is a bad card – most decks that play an operation economy would be happy to play six.
• Subliminal Messaging can be revealed to Celebrity Gift, and you still get to play the Subliminal Messaging afterwards. This helps to blunt Celebrity Gift's downside; if your hand is full of Subliminal Messagings that the Runner knows is there, you can just show them to avoid having to show something more important. Especially if running multiple Subliminals, it's quite common to be able to hide a card or two from the Runner and yet still get the full value of your Gift.

Hansei Review and Celebrity Gift are probably the top two Jinteki economy cards at the moment (if building a Jinteki deck that can't use an asset economy, and most of them can't, those are the main Jinteki cards I would consider for its economy – most of the best economy cards are neutral). So Subliminal Messaging being able to combo with both of them is something that really pushes up its value, and helps to make Jinteki as a whole a more viable faction.

There are other Jinteki cards that like Subliminal Messaging, too (e.g. Genotyping and particularly Hyoubu Institute: Absolute Clarity), but they aren't as good or as commonly played. The Review and Gift synergies are easily good enough to give Subliminal a slot in the typical Jinteki deck, though.

As protection for HQ

Sabotage is one of the new abilities in Midnight Sun; it's one of the more popular deck styles in Startup, and people are experimenting with it in Standard too. If you're up against Esâ Afontov: Eco-Insurrectionist, then having a card that you can cheaply discard from HQ and bring back later is very valuable; as such, Subliminal makes for a particularly good discard to sabotages. Once you find the Subliminal, it effectively forces Esâ to run every turn, or else have half of xir deck switched off. Esâ decks are generally set up to be able to do that if necessary, but you're still cutting down the Runner's options, and slowing down their setup; Subliminal Messaging helps to fight those decks by forcing them to spend clicks running rather than giving them the option to take turns fixing their economy. (The same idea can also be used against Alice Merchant: Clan Agitator, who doesn't technically sabotage, but whose ability is very similar.)

Subliminal Messaging is an untrashable operation, too, so it provides some protection even against more normal Runner playstyles; HQ accesses hit random cards, and Subliminal can be one of these cards. Admittedly, you could use almost any ICE or operation for that, but Subliminal goes into an economy slot (so it's helping to move your economy card mix more towards operations, which is a good thing in terms of HQ protection), and it partially works around the main downside of running lots of operations: operations tend to clog your hand if you can't play them immediately, but there isn't any cost to "discarding" one Subliminal per turn (by playing it) and it tends to come back on its own later on, when you might have more room in your hand.

Conclusions

Subliminal Messaging might at first seem to be an economy card, but it's also a combo card – and in Jinteki decks running an operation economy, a better economy card – and tech against sabotage – and a little bit of HQ/R&D reinforcement. That's a lot of jobs that one card can be doing, but they're all kind-of minor, and all of them get affected if you're allowing the Runner to run every turn and get most of the benefit of their click. If you can make (or if your deck naturally makes) running costly for the Runner, though, it isn't rare for a copy to pull its weight economically over the course of the game; it'd be a decent economy operation even if it returns to hand only twice over the course of the game (that would be a clickless 3, which is up there with the premium Corp economy cards). It is, however, at its best if your deck can also do something else with it; if you're running Celebrity Gift and Hansei Review, or if you have a combo that benefits from the click, or if your deck is weak to sabotage, then it really starts showing its value (often even to the point that playing multiple copies becomes worthwhile). But if you're playing the sort of deck where the Runner will want to run every turn anyway, then your Subliminal is worse than useless; it's rarely worth spending a card to gain 1, not even when you can make the trade clicklessly, and yet if you never get to bring it back, your Subliminal will never get to do anything else.