JNET TESTING HAS BEGUUUUN.

Anyway, I really wanted to talk about this card, because in Ob, it's far more than corp Aesop's Pawnshop. The amount of value this card allows you to tap into and the number of wild things it allows you to do is simply unreal.

1) ICE MINING

Pawnshop is usually going to give you 3 credits per card. In Ob, this is not the case. Sometimes, you will have a gearcheck such as Afshar outlive its usefulness on your remote server. Instead of allowing Amina to tax you a credit every turn, you can blow up your own Afshar and pull out a value card like Marilyn Campaign. We spent 3 credits on Afshar, got 3 credits from Excavator, and we will now get a bonus 9 credits if Excavator blows up Marilyn before the last 2 credits are taken. This is before the second Ob trigger enters the equation, so it's likely that this act of Afshar mining nets us even more than 9 credits of value overall.

We can take this even further if we have higher cost ice and wish to ride the mine down. You shouldn't be running Ballista in your deck, which is why you shouldn't feel bad about mining 15 credits from it down to Spin Doctor.

2) YU-Gi-OH LEVELS OF SEARCHES?

If you construct your Ob deck correctly, you'll pretty much be able to search anything you want at will as long as you keep firing Excavator. Need MCA Austerity Policy? Blow up your own Whitespace. Don't have Whitespace? Blow up your own Akhet. Don't have Border Control to find Akhet? Well, Mausolus does the job if you have Excavator. We use Excavator to dig through the entire cost range and find the one card we need while making 9 credits. Fun stuff.

Aside from searching for wincons like MCA, tech cards like Crisium Grid and Mavirus are but an Excavator trigger on Mausolus away. Of course, this isn't free, because we did lose a valuable ice, but having this option is powerful.

One major advantage Excavator has over Extract is that it's clickless. You may go, "Hm, Hoshiko doesn't have a decoder, but she has a fracter and killer ready to go. I can install this 5/3 and get ready to score it next turn, but I need a code gate." Well, Excavator has got you covered! Find that code gate, and slap down your 5/3 fearlessly using the clickless install+search that Excavator has given you. Maybe you want to score 4/2 agendas instead. Teh, isn't Excavator useless here? Heck no, install+advance, then use your spare click to Hard-Hitting News. There's just so much value in having this extra clickless install.

3) DBS AT HOME (WEYLAND)

Daily Business Show prevents the runner from locking you by fetching singles from the top. It turns out that Excavator does basically the same thing, except it gains you money instead of filtering. This is pretty silly. It doesn't matter if you've been hit with The Maker's Eye. Excavator will allow you to repeatedly shuffle your deck before your draw step and see fresh cards. The fact that you permanently have the ability to draw fresh cards is quite new to Weyland, to say the least. There's no way for the runner to delay you from finding your agendas: When this is in a remote, you just shuffle every time the runner fetches a single. Excavator is cheaper than DBS, makes you money to protect the agendas you draw, and totally hides any information about what you could possibly be drawing. Hilarious.

4) GETTING IT INTO THE BIN

Now this is something that requires much more experimentation, and I don't believe that it will be any good. However, sometimes we simply want a card to get into Archives from HQ. In Weyland, this would be getting Archer into the archives and cheating it out with the new Trust Operation. Trust Operation only works on cards in archives, but overdrawing Archer to discard it is some wasted value. Why not get that bit of extra value from Excavator? Install that Archer on archives to dissuade Dirty Laundry for a turn, blow it up with Excavator, then you're good to go!

Anyway, Excavator and Ob aren't necessarily broken, but the number of options that this one card opens for Ob is simply mind-blowing. I'm very impressed that NISEI has managed to design something like this in a game like Netrunner that sometimes feels overly-structured, even if it may end up being banworthy in the future.

I'll just say it: My moderately-experienced opinion believes that this is the strongest corp card in System Gateway, and I don't care about you randos championing Spinny. It does something that very operations do. It's a design space that is equally exciting as it is dangerous, with how quickly Nisei had to hit the PD rush deck that was terrorizing standard. I think we all knew that this card was strong going into release day, but we still underestimated it.

Extra "clicks" are difficult to come by for the corp, and difficult to find cheaply. When they are cheap, it's expensive or interactive. Shipment from Tennin is an amazingly strong card that now finds itself in Nisei jail, and it could be turned off by the runner for most of the game. Jeeves has good numbers as well, but must be preinstalled, has a strict requirement to fire, and can be trashed.

Enter Seamless Launch. Ignoring combos, Seamless Launch is basically the cheapest way to get extra "clicks" ever. As an operation, it cannot be trashed without some kind of tool. Seamless Launch itself cannot be turned off. The way to take away the card's power is to run whatever it's intended for, immediately. This is surprisingly difficult, because any card installed in a remote can be a target.

Basically, the weakness of the card is that it cannot fast advance, so it requires you to build a remote. However, you want to do this anyway. It enables ease of scoring 4, even 5 advancement agendas, and it does so economically positively! You get two advancement tokens for the price of one, and worst case, the extra click you get off Seamless can be used to play an econ operation if you decide to score a 3 advancement agenda.

This card is one of a kind in standard, and naturally in startup as well. With a single card, you get extra clicks while going economically positive. The only card I can think of that can do the same thing is Fast Break, and it goes credit neutral a lot of the time, while being unplayable for a lot of the game.

Without requiring another card to survive in a remote, and allowing you to score basically any agenda you want at low opportunity and credit cost, it does something many runners are just not equipped to handle. This is not to say that the card should be played as universally as Spinny. Some scoring plans just don't need or want it. But if you can make it work, Spinny and Seamless should absolutely make influence 1-9.

Now that this card has returned in SU, it’s worth taking another look at it. Celebrity Gift is an enormous operation-speed credit machine with a huge downside. You almost always reveal the entire 5 cards, netting 7 credits, or rather 3.5 credits per click. That’s an obscene rate.

However, in recent times, we all realized the painful truth: Don’t mind game people with this card. Revealing traps is bad. Revealing that you don’t have traps in hand is bad. Revealing that you do or don’t have agendas in hand is bad. You’re not mind gaming, you’re just giving the runner information. Any deck that plays this needs a way around its downside of giving the runner information, or you it can lose you the game. The clearest way to lose is to reveal an agenda flooded hand. The runner can fetch singles on HQ and slaughter you.

In other words, Jinteki glacier decks are great gift vehicles. It’s no secret that you’re putting an agenda into the remote at some point, and you usually run no weird combos or tricks that you must keep hidden. With SG’s new filtering tools, and also the jammy gameplay, it’s unlikely you privy the runner to a flooded HQ.

Overall, this is a very strong card. It’s basically two economy cards in one. However, its downside makes it much worse in trap decks.

This card has mostly flown under the radar. As of this review, the full set hasn’t been revealed yet, and we’re still in the midst Jnet spoiler games.

PSA: This card is very, very good.

At worst its Beanstalk Royalties or Anonymous Tip. Usually, you’ll just take 3 creds, but the flexibility is valuable, ignoring the tag bonus. Would this be playable as just a flexible BR/AT? Probably not, but when the runner is tagged, it turns out operation speed Rashida, especially with our new filtering tools, is kinda busted.

There are so many ways to tag the runner now, and runners are highly incentivized to float at least one tag. If they aren’t floating any tags, chances are they’re playing too slowly to beat you anyway. Play Reality Plus with some of the new ice, maybe ARES and some Prisecs/AMAZE Amusements. Use Predictive Planograms and go lightning fast through your deck while gaining money. Find PsychoBeale or Boom for the victory. And, if for whatever reason you can’t force the runner to float a tag, using Public Trail for value is still nice. If you’re worried about agenda flood, don’t be. Spin Doctor will fix your agendas the moment it gets bad. Seriously, play this card in your R+ deck.

This is crazy, but hard to use. Turning any agenda into Ronin is amazing. However, Mushin no Shin is leaving us, so unless, and possibly even if we get a replacement, the difficulty of setting up advance-Neurospike-Neurospike is significant. We require the credits to fire two Neurospikes and defend an advanced agenda. That's no small task.

So there are two ways to play this card. The more intuitive is to slowroll a 5/3, like Obokata Protocol, then cook it on 4 advancements. Then, murder the runner with both Neurospikes. You can defend Obo with the new Anoetic Void. A potential deck is 6x 3-pointer Restoring Humanity. You don't even require a 7th point: Just set up the combo and kill as the primary wincon.

The other possibility is to play PE. Since you get 1 damage off the score, double Neurospike off a 2-pointer is a total of 5 damage, which is a still a lot and should kill most of the time anyway.

Overall, even with the few reveals we've had so far at the time of writing this, Neurospike is looking to be pretty strong. The fact that even a deck that looks like its trying to score has a kill threat, that doesn't require a run, is a big deal.