Ob is, at the time of writing, easily the most complex identity in standard, not just on the Corps side of the table, but in general. With the sheer number of possibilities opened up by its text box unmatched by any single other ID, perhaps not just in standard but in all of Netrunner's history (see Eternal), though CI might give it a run for its money, albeit for very different reasons. With time, you'll come to see Ob as a collection of combo lines that you'll need to learn if you can hope to master it, or even simply play against it. The goal of this review is to provide, as best I can, a comprehensive list of the most notable combos that can be done in standard at the time of writing, both as a resource for new players and as a mental exercise for myself. This will inevitably change over time, either as new cards are released or as rotation and banlists strip cards away, in fact, even Ob itself may come to be banned in due time, so for posterity's sake this review is being initially written as of the 25.04 banlist (no change in gamestate has been removed as of the time of writing).

Fundamentals

Obs ability to tutor does four main things for you.

1. Influence Saving, for example where most Corps would feel the need to play 2 The Holo Man to find it consistently thus spending 6 influence outside of NBN, Ob can get away with 1 since they can tutor it so consistently, and thus save themselves this influence. Similarly a Ob deck with 1 Phật Gioan Baotixita and at least 2 Cybersand Harvester is almost as consistent as a Jinteki deck with 3 Phậts.
2. Incidental Value, when you play cards that already have inherent value for most Corps but trash themselves once emptied, you can generate some extra incidental value on the back end of this (think Regolith Mining License or Anthill Excavation Contract etc.).
3. Consistency, by including tutors in addition to the cards themselves you're able to establish your core gameplan far faster and more consistently than comparative decks
4. Tricks, this is a catch all term for combos that only work in Ob, think Stavka + Hafrún, tutoring a Spin Doctor off of Slash and Burn Agriculture + Azef Protocol things like that.

But it's not without its drawbacks, Ob has three main drawbacks that can cause problems for them and that'll you need to be aware of if you want to beat them.

1. Deck Thinning, by repeatedly tutoring instalables out of your deck you "thin" your deck, irrevocably increasing R&D's agenda density over the course of the game. This makes you very soft to R&D multiaccess once you reach the late game and often puts you on an implicit "timer."
2. Fragility, it's entirely possible to draw your cards in the wrong order, if you draw your Hafrún it's not possible to pull of the Stavka combo from hand, and you may need to expend your precious recursion from something like Spin Doctor just to get the Hafrún out of your hand and back into your deck.
3. Cheapness, many of your staples are very cheap cards, there simply exists far more options for trashing 3 cost cards to fetch 2 cost cards and so on and so forth than there are ways to trash 7 cost cards to fetch 6 cost cards. This tends to lead to Ob decks playing quite cheap ice, pushing them towards Rush and Asset decks, although some attempts at glacial Ob have been made in the past.

Unconditional Tutors

There are two notable unconditional tutors in standard Mavirus and Cybersand Harvester. These assets can trash themselves at any paid ability window and will allow you to tutor for any 2 or 1 cost card respectively.

2 Cost - Manegarm Skunkworks, Hafrún, The Holo Man, Tucana, Regolith Mining License and a slew of 2 cost gearchecks like Kessleroid, Descent, Flyswatter and so on

1 Cost - Phật Gioan Baotixita, Bladderwort, Tranquility Home Grid, Humanoid Resources, AMAZE Amusements, Wall to Wall, Hearts and Minds, Malapert Data Vault, The Powers That Be and Tithe have all shown up in Ob decks at one point or another and are worth considering.

You can also cascade a Mavirus into a Cybersand Harvester into a 1 cost over the course of 2 turns as well if you really need a specific 1 cost.

Conditional Tutors

These are primarily cards that trash themselves after emptying, thus giving you an Ob trigger, but only if you can protect them for the requisite amount of time. There are many of these, such as Otto Campaign, Nico Campaign and so on but the three most notable that see play are Anthill Excavation Contract, Regolith Mining License and Humanoid Resources.

In addition to the existing ability to tutor 2 and 1 costs, Humanoid Resources opens up the ability to tutor 0 cost cards, notably:

Spin Doctor, Svyatogor Excavator, Angelique Garza Correa and Mitra Aman.

Lamplighter falls into this category since it can and will conditionally trash itself. The only notable combo I've seen pulled off with this so far is that if the runner steals an agenda from a server protected by Lamplighter you can fetch an AMAZE Amusements and present a "surprise" 2 tags that the Runner may not be prepared to deal with. However, it's worth saying that if you tutor 1 cost cards like Phật or Powers they will not "see" the score that trashed Lamplighter and thus will not immediately fire (unlike Azef Protocol which occurs before the score).

Envelopment is also technically a conditional tutor since it can trash itself, but as this is attached to a subroutine, it will only happen when and if the Runner wills it to.

M.I.C. can be used to trash itself during a run, allowing you to get a 5-cost card in the process. But anecdotally, this is far less common than the ubiquity of the now rotated Border Control.

Catalysts

These are cards that trash another card, usually for some benefit, but, by getting the benefit on the catalyst itself and the Ob trigger, you double dip on value.

• Extract is a lot of money (6 credits, 2 more than Hedge Fund) but it can also be used for tutoring.
• Svyatogor Excavator can fire repeatedly if left on the board, both making you money and assembling your game plan.
• ZATO City Grid can be a powerful defensive upgrade, or a powerful "offensive" upgrade used to rig shoot.
• Stavka is the catalyst for the Stavka + Hafrún combo, but it can also just be used in general to get a very efficient one time sentry while firing Ob
• Azef Protocol requires you trash an installed card as an additional cost to score it, but this too can fire Ob

The most notable Azef combo involves fast advancing it with Slash and Burn Agriculture and trashing a 1 coster to fetch Spin Doctor and immediately save the Slash and Burn Agriculture in Archives. However the ability to tutor other cards like Tucana, The Powers That Be or Phật Gioan Baotixita which then still "see" the score, as the trash occurs before the score are also notable as they can allow you to immediate get the pay off from the clickless install from Tucana or Powers or present as surprising burst of 3 damage that the Runner may not be prepared to survive.

Ammunition

There are a notable handful of ice which have powerful effects when rezzed, Obs ability to tutor these at unconventional times can have very powerful, sometimes even deadly effects.

• Ping can tag the runner.
• Flyswatter can purge.
• Bumi 1.0 can trash a trojan.
• Anemone can do 2 net damage.
• Hafrún can disable a breaker.

Some of these can be found using Mavirus, others will need a mid-run catalyst like Stavka or ZATO City Grid. It's worth saying that all of these cards only fire when rezzed "during a run on this server" which is important because it means you cannot use Ping to give the Runner a tag on your turn for End of the Line nor can you install Hafrún on a different server to the one the Runner is currently running on and expect it's ability to fire.

For the uninitiated, the Stavka + Hafrún combo involves using Stavka to rez a Hafrún just as the runner approaches the Stavka, allowing you to disable their Killer and attempt to forcibly fire the two program trashing subroutines. This can be beaten by having multiple Killers installed, flickering a Killer using Simulchip or bypassing the ice using something like Malandragem, Laser Pointer or Physarum Entangler. Or by having otherforms of redundancy, such as a pre-installed Boomerang or Botulus in addition to a Killer. Or, by simply destroying the ice on encounter using Arruaceiras Crew.

Fodder

Ob's ability to tutor an ice when needed and then dispense with it once it's outlived its usefulness while cascading into another card allows it to get value from ice other decks deem too unreliable. Ice like Envelopment or Sandstone are over efficient when rezzed but decline in efficiency over time, in the long term this isn't worth it for most Weyland decks but for Ob they can make the most of it during the honeymoon phase and then trash them using a catalyst once it starts to decline.

Furthermore, the many incidental purges that come from cards like Mavirus or Flyswatter can unintentionally refresh Sandstone, extending its usefulness.

Other ice that doesn't innate benefit from Ob but often shows up in Ob includes Maskirovka, Afshar or Kessleroid because they're reasonably efficient in their own right and because they can be tutored quite easily, or trashed by a catalyst to find another ice as needed.

Because Envelopment is 5-cost, many Obs deck that include it also like to include some 4-cost targets such as Syailendra or Tree Line but this isn't essential.

The Anatomy of a Turn

Most of the time, turns pass by rather intuitively, but when it comes to a strict "once per turn" ability such as Ob, it pays to understand the minutiae of turn structure. Importantly, once per turn triggers can fire once on the Runners turn and once on the Corps turn for a total of two times during a full turn-cycle.

So for example, imagine an Anthill empties during your start of turn, you could then fetch a Cybersand Harvester during your start of turn window (before your mandatory draw), however you couldn't then use that Cybersand Harvester to find a 1-cost until you end your turn and the Runners turn begins. Since your start of turn triggers are considered part of your turn, if something like Anthill trashes itself or if you use Svyatogor Excavator during you start of turn then you cannot use Ob until the end of your turn.

However, if you imagine a situation in which you have already used Ob on the Runners turn, for example, using a Mavirus to install a Manegarm Skunkworks during a run, then an Anthill that trashes itself during your start of turn triggers would still fire Ob to be able to find a 2-coster.

Another small detail unrelated to timing, is that you can use Obs ability purely for the shuffle. You can fire Ob when you trash a 0-cost card (like Mitra, just to forcibly shuffle your deck. You can't actually install a -1 cost card, since such a thing doesn't exist, but forcibly shuffling your deck could be important for breaking R&D lock or outmaneuvering Cataloguer, so it's something worth keeping in mind if there was nothing serious you actually wanted to search for that turn.

M.A.D. Combo Kill

Shoutout to Toron for reminding me that this monstrosity still exists in standard.

There are 2 main combo kill lines in standard for killing a Runner using Mutually Assured Destruction in Ob.

1. Play Nanomanagement -> play M.A.D. trashing at least one 4-cost card to tutor a Bass CH1R180G4 with Ob -> Click Bass CH1R180G4 -> play End of the Line -> play End of the Line

2. Play Nanomanagement -> play M.A.D. trashing at least one 3-cost card to tutor a Wage Workers with Ob -> play End of the Line gaining a click from having played 3 Operations this turn -> play End of the Line

Both of these are 4 card combos that require you to spend a lot of time setting up and pretty much exclusively build your deck around them and they are not very viable in Standard right now for those very reasons.

Fun Fact: The Eternal variant of this combo which involves M.A.D., Jeeves Model Bioroids and High-Profile Target is far quicker, more reliable and deadlier but thankfully we don't have to deal with that in Standard.

Wrap Up

This has been a fun excercise for me and hopefully this will be a useful resource for you dear reader. If I get the chance, I'll hopefully update this with new info when the next set releases. Assuming Ob is still around terrorizing Runners...

This might sound weird but I wanted to write an obituary. Asa Group was and still is one of my favourite identities of all time and and it's rotation felt all too soon.

It had a rather unique style of play, never truly going tall, like glacial decks, and not as wide as full asset spam, it lived somewhere inbetween, creating multiple remote server and yet icing them all up. It was one of those rare Corp statergies that both felt fun to play and fun to play against, you never felt quite locked out against Asa Group, nor overwhelmed by credit denial or swamped in tags or hand-pressure. It was made up, almost exclusively by scoring decks, primarily ones that tried to score behind ice, in remote servers and yet it wasn't your conventional mid-range deck. Yes it used tempo tools to rapidly score out behind gear check ice but there was also a kind of added intrigue and nuance, you almost felt like you were building a Rube Goldberg machine in real time, assembling a fascinating assembly line to score out agenda after agenda. When it worked it was a kind of organic, velvety smooth process, the likes of which I hadn't found before and haven't found again since it's rotation.

I want to use this space to leave a memory of Asa Group behind, something to explain how it worked and why it worked towards the end of it's lifetime in standard and I figured there was no better place to put it than here.

Liberation

Asa Groups ascension to greatness undoutably began with the release of the Liberation Cycle, make no mistake, many of it's strong cards originate in prior sets Fully Operational most notably but also just staples like Ikawah Project, Project Vitruvius, Rashida Jaheem, Tranquility Home Grid, Drafter or Gatekeeper come from earlier sets. But Liberation brought with it half a dozen or so very strong asset cards which Asa Group was well positioned to make use of.

Wage Workers and The Powers That Be

Two "nearprints" of much older asset tools, Jeeves Model Bioroids and Team Sponsorship respectively that any asset deck was happy to have, but which slotted particularly well into Asa Group as they allowed you to rapidly set up, easily score and then rapidly rebuild and tempo forward after scoring.

Ablative Barrier and Tatu-Bola

Two pieces of gearcheck ice that fit exceptionally with Asa Group's gameplan, allowing you to protect your existing assets with affordable gear checks while potential setting up future plays. Asa's "once per turn" effect was especially useful here as it allowed you to install two cards from Ablative Barrier instead of one, reinstalling an important asset from Archives while protecting it with a piece of ice from HQ at the same time. Meanwhile Tatu-Bola allowed you to change the contents of a server mid-run, rapidly adapting to changing boardstates and outplaying the Runner in the process.

Cohort Guidance Program and The Holo Man

These cards didn't show up in every variant of Asa Group, but were important in the ones they did, Cohort gave Asa some draw filtering while making you money and then could pivot on a dime into a surprising neveradvance tool to rapidly score out 4/2s or score out a 3/2 and have a click left behind to still get an Asa double install on the turn you score. Meanwhile The Holo Man was a powerful, re-usable fast-advance tool that doubled as never-advance and it's mobile capabilities fit perfectly into the semi-horizontal style of play Asa employed.

The Meta Game

Part of what allowed Asa Group to really thrive in the 2024 Worlds Championship was the spread of top-performing runners. While Anarchs could bulldoze Asa, homogenizing and invalidating their single iced-server gearchecks with Bankhar, Shapers (the dominant faction of the tournament) actually needed to present unique breakers to deal with every type of ice, making a mixture of cheap yet powerful gearchecks the perfect compliment to an otherwise fragile asset statergy.

In fact, many asset decks pivoted to include a surpirsing amount of ice at top tables during worlds with both the winning R+ list and the runner-up Personal Evolution list including 8+ ice, a surprsingly large number for decks otherwise largely focused on assets. These inclusions gave the asset lists depth by forcing out breakers, augmeting the functional trash costs of their most important assets and providing utility through forced tags, damage and tempo (like from the aforementioned Ablative Barrier and Tatu-Bola).

Despite not making the finals, the most represented identity in the top cut was in fact Asa Group, with mutliple different variants, brought by multiple different testing teams and many players performing well across the two days leading up to the cut. These decks ability to pressure Shapers from multiple angles simultaneously while scoring out quickly before the Shapers could reach their inevitable end game gave Asa Group a fighting chance. Some went even further, including click taxing cards like MCA Austerity Policy, Pulse and Active Policing as ways to specifically target the click-intensive Deep Dive statergies. giving Asa Group even better odds against what was otherwise generally agreed to be a Runner favoured meta game.

It's Flaws

I won't pretend Asa Group was perfect, that would be disingenous, it had it's flaws, especially surrounding consistancy. Despite being a tempo scoring deck it often played like a combo one, complete with all of the draw backs of needing to assemble a perfect hand. You needed a constant supply of cards, in the right proportion of assets to ice to agendas if you wanted to succeed and the difficulty of getting a valuable double install as consistantly as say EtF was able to get a single install meant that while Asa had a very high ceiling, it also had a very low floor. When you draw your cards all in the wrong order, or your Fully Ops kept getting trashed by Freedom Khumalo or Imp and you just can't find enough ice to protect all of your assets or can't find enough assets and end up with a whole bunch of useless and empty iced servers and... well, you get the idea.

But when it did come together, when the right proportions in deck building lined up with the right draws and the right pilot, it could be a thing of beauty, unmatched in it's silky smoothness.

Legacy

I've tried a number of times to recreate an Asa like deck in another ID post rotation, as I'm sure many other players have, due to the fact that Fully Op still exists in standard, but I've yet to quite recapture the magic.

Poétrï Luxury Brands: All the Rage is much lest consistant at triggering it's clickless installs and no other HB identity gives you clickless installs to begin with. The agenda suite is in shambles with the loss of Ikawah and Project Ingatan is a poor replacement for Project Vitruvius while the rotation of Rashida has left almost all Corps far too slow to deal with most Runners.

But I have hope, that, some day in the future, something more akin to Asa will arise, after all, it's playstyle, while rare, is not unreproducable. There are many ways to reword Asa's ID ability into something different, yet akin and I look forward to the day we shall see Asa's progeny rise to take it's mantle.

For now, rest well Asa Group, you need no longer stay vigilant.

Nanomanagement is a direct reprint of Biotic Labor from the ANR core set which is in turn a direct reprint of Overtime Incentives from the original netrunner ccg released way back in 1996. This is a card that has quite literally existed as a part of Netrunner for as long as Netrunner has existed. Needless to say, old-heads know this card well so I'm going to target this review exclusively towards newer players who have never had the joy of firing a Biotic Labor and might currently be scratching their heads looking at this card and wondering what to do with it.

Corp Turn Fundamentals

Playing an Operation takes a click, so functionally, you are spending 1 click and 4 credits to gain 2 clicks for a net result of +1 click and -4 credits. Essentially allowing you to take 4 (non-nanomanagement) clicks in a single turn.

Let's start from the top by taking a look at all the potential actions available to the Corp that they can spend this extra click on.

• Gain a credit: Terrible idea, spending 4 credits to gain a credit is throwing 3 credits down the drain so definitely not the play

• Draw a card/Install multiple cards: If you wanted click compressed draws or installs Top-Down Solutions or Red Level Clearance are much cheaper alternatives so I'd refer you to those

• Purge (and then take another click: Once again you're probably better off playing something like Mavirus or Flyswatter for compressed purges

• Trash a resource: Theoretically a possibility but when you add up the costs and conditions you need to be in a boardstate where the runner is tagged and the fourth most important Resource on the table is worth 6 credits to trash. Anecdotally, this almost never happens.

• Advancing a card/playing an operation/using a card ability: Now we're cooking, this is the meat of Nanomanagment’s applications, fast advance and (to a lesser extent) combo kill.

Kill Decks

Certain click intensive combos like Mutually Assured Destruction + End of the Line require extra clicks to be played in one turn and Nanomanagement finds a home here. Other click intensive kill combos that include Pivot or multiple copies of Public Trail + End of the Line find use for Nanomanegement as well. But these combos are expensive and finicky to pull off so while you're more than welcome to have some fun designing exciting combo kill decks this review will focus on fast advance from here on out.

Scoring Agendas

Let's establish some logical lines of reasoning.

1. At its core, netrunner is a game about scoring agendas (some players might disagree with me but let's operate on this doctrine for now).
2. If you want to score agendas, you're going to need clicks.
3. The click requirement to score an agenda is simply the advancement requirement + 1. Since to score an Agenda you must spend 1 click installing it and a number of clicks equal to it's advancement requirement advancing it.
4. A normal Corp turn consists of 3 clicks which means the only type of Agenda that can be “naturally” scored from hand are 2/1s.
5. 2/1s represent the lowest amount of points you can get from an agenda (we don't talk about Domestic Sleepers) and since 2/1s tend to have relatively weak abilities too, most decks need to score at least some number of larger agendas to win and this can't naturally be done directly from hand.

To score larger agendas, you'll often need to install the agenda and potentially even pre-advance it on one turn, and then score it on the next.

The question of how to do this without the runner just stealing them is central to archetype divergence and playstyle.

Will you hide them amongst a sea of assets? Bluff them with the threat of nasty traps? Defend them under mountains of ICE reinforced with powerful defensive upgrades? Rush out using gear checks and tempo scoring tools? Fork the runner with the threat of nasty reprisals?

Nanomanagement (and other fast advance tools like it) offer you another solution by letting you bend the rules of the game, by giving you a 4 click turn (or by placing multiple advancement counters in 1 click) it's possible to score out 3/1s or more commonly 3/2s in a single turn, directly from hand without needing to leave it in a remote server for a turn.

This leads to the archetype known as fast advance, often shortened to FA and occasionally called “rush.”

There are also “hybrid” decks that score out some agendas behind ICE and then fast advance the last agenda to win. Anecdotally these decks have found more success in recent years than the “pure” FA variants have. But both variants must include some amount of "fast advance tools" nonetheless.

The only catch is cost, Nanomanagement tacks a 4 credit premium on top of the existing costs to score out an agenda and when scoring agendas is already one of the most expensive activities in the game you are going to need a very robust economy to make this card viable.

Additionally, its high influence cost at 4 pips per copy makes it difficult to import outside of HB.

Combos

Operation contingent Fast Advance like Sudden Commandment or Nebula Talent Management: Making Stars can be combined with Nanomanagement to FA a 4/2.

Wage Workers + Nanomanagement can also FA a 4/2.

Nanomanagement + The Holo Man can FA a 5/3 in MirrorMorph since the first three clicks will technically be Operation, Install, click Holo then you can still triple advance.

Alternatives

All factions have atleast some means to gain clicks or place multiple advancement counters in 1 click.

Jinteki

Jinteki has the most limited Fast Advance options in standard, the only one being Moon Pool, which requires extra agendas already in HQ or Archives which you then cycle back into R&D for clickless advancement counters. In a deck with a large number of agendas (10+) this is worth considering, otherwise, it will be hard to consistantly trigger it.

Weyland

Slash and Burn Agriculture is incredibly cheap and easy to use, but it puts an agenda face up in archives, so unless Archives is well defended, you have a Spin Doctor on the table or it's the winning Agenda, you're going to have to accept that you're functionally trading points with the runner. Additionally, Agendas cannot be imported so you can't play this outside of Weyland.

Plutus isn't fast advance in and of itself but it can be combined with click-neutral operations such as Petty Cash, Red Level Clearance, Greasing the Palm or Peer Review to become a fast advance tool. It is incredibly cheap once setup, to the point of sometimes even being credit positive and can be used multiple times so long as you have multiple click neutral operations, but it needs to be pre-installed and protected, and comes with a special rez cost that can be difficult to pay.

Puttin these two to the side, let's talk abou the real King and Queen of FA, HB and NBN.

Haas-Bioroid

Big Deal It's easier to use than needing to assemble 3 Biotic Labors to FA a 5/3. But it's high cost makes it inflexible and strictly inefficient for fast advancing 3/2s. And its trash cost makes it vulnerable to the runner while you're busy saving up the credits.

Greasing the Palm By installing and placing an advancement counter in 1 click you can FA 3/2s and it's one of the very few credit-positive FA tools in the game. However it can be challenging to get the runner to float a tag, especially in HB which lacks much tag support.

Otto Campaign Another credit positive FA it can be used to FA 4/2s on the turn it pops. But, since it takes 3 turns to tick down and has a measly trash cost of 2 credits, it gives the runner plenty of time to shut it down before it can be useful.

Bass CH1R180G4 While cute and thematic (he's even referenced in Nanomanegement's flavor text) is simply inferior to Nanomanegement. Since you have to spend a click to install him on a prior turn, he doesn't functionally save you any credits over Nanomanegment and he doesn't have any frills like being reusable. I suppose certain niche decks might consider him because he's one influence less or because you can rez him at a discount using something like Mahkota Langit Grid but for most decks, there's little reason to play Bass.

NBN

Focus Group It's technically an option but its inconsistency means it almost never sees play.

Sudden Commandment It has utility applications and provides bonus card draw but it has substantially more rigorous requirements than Nanomanagement, needing Threat 3 and another click Neutral or click positive operation to combo with. Plus, like Big Deal it can be trashed.

Shipment from Vladisibirsk While a Big Deal at one 17th of the cost might sound appealing I wouldn't underestimate the requirement. Getting the runner to float 2 tags is quite challenging and the amount of time and resources you'll spend on giving the runner those tags and getting them to stick is variable, but it's ultimately a large hidden cost I wouldn't underestimate.

The Holo Man is flexible, reusable and more efficient than Nanomanagement if used more than once. But, it needs to be pre installed and can be trashed, meaning even if you don't need to protect your agenda, you'll need a way to protect the Holo Man.

Vladisibirsk City Grid is like The Holo Man in the sense that it's reusable and more efficient if reused but needs to be preinstalled and protected. Generally The Holo Man sees more play unless you have some synergy like that of Pravdivost Consulting: Political Solutions.

Closing Thoughts

Ultimately, Nanomanagement, while not necessarily the most efficient in a vacuum, shines due to its overwhelming consistency. Unlike almost every other FA option, it doesn't require setup, support or extra conditions to make it work and can't be easily trashed. As long as you have the money, Nanomanagement can do the job.

These traits have classically made Biotic Labor a staple in many HB FA decks, HB hybrid decks and still made it a valuable import into other factions in spite of its incredibly high influence cost. I have no reason to assume the same won't be true for Nanomanagement.

So, the next time you find yourself struggling to score out that last agenda, try slotting a Nanomanagement or two to make it a hybrid deck and start experimenting from there!

TLDR: A reprint of what is arguably the most classic fast advance tool of all time and remains one of the most reliable ways to fast advance today.

This card already has two reviews, but if you read either of them, let alone both, you'd probably be confused and slightly misled. Is this card unplayably bad? Or is it a great console for any Anarch? Well... neither.

This card is built for Esâ Afontov: Eco-Insurrectionist and Esa only, I have never seen this card show up in a competitive deck outside of Esa and I have never seen a competitve Esa deck that plays anything else in it's console slot. It is, without question, one of the most "hard-coded" console/runner pairs in standard.

For the average Anarch this is indeed Brain Cage + Spoilers + Akamatsu Mem Chip and that is not worth your console slot, almost anything else would be better, even importing a console like Aniccam or Hermes would be preferable to this.

For Esa however, it does many things

+2 Hand Size - let's you take 2 additional Core Damage, that's two more Running Hots or two more Finalities on top of your "regular" Core Damage budget. After all, since Esa treats hand size as a resource, it stands to reason that +2 Hand Size would be worth a lot

1 Esa trigger (bought and paid for) - That means 2 extra sabotage and one instance of card cycling as soon as you install it

1-2 (sometimes more against certain decks) Bonus Sabotage - Whenever an Agenda gets scored, you'll get an extra instance of Sabotage to boot, which will usually be at least once or twice a game

Cheap Infaction MU - with Begemot requiring 2 MU, having an cheap, zero-fuss source of extra memory is another nice bonus

Best case scenario this card is functionally bankrolling 2 Chastushka's worth of sabotage over the course of a game, half of which it triggers itself. That's... exactly what Esa needs.

Would Esa play Brain Cage if it was still in standard? Almost certainly. But in the context of the more limited cardpool, where your only other alternatives are cards like T400 Memory Diamond, Hippocampic Mechanocytes or Supercorridor, Marrow is simply the best option you have when building an Esa deck and that's why for the foreseeable future, this card will continue to be hard coded to Esa.

TLDR: Esâ Afontov's Console, and Esa doesn't like to share...

An interesting and rather unique defensive upgrade.

For an average "scoring" deck, an agenda suite usually consists of 8 or 9 agendas that are supposed to be scored out in some pattern of 2/2/3, i.e. scoring out two 4/2 or 3/2 agendas as well as a single 5/3. This agenda suite is great for easily scoring to 7, (as opposed to having to score to 9 with all 5/3s), while still keeping your agenda density low to avoid losing to multiaccess (as opposed to a deck running lots of 1 or 2 pointers). It gives you opportunities to fast advance a 3/2 to quickly close games out and the ability to play a few defensive 5/3s, or you can slot tempo 4/2s like Offworld Office to keep pace with the runner. All in all this agenda suite is probably one of the best, most consistent and most versatile in the game, but if you are running this agenda suite, you should not be running Giordano, because at best it is a worse Manegarm Skunkworks and at worst, it won't tax the runner a single credit.

For this card to be worth it, you need a lot of agendas in the runner's score area, and for that to be true, you also need to be running a lot of "small" agendas that you don't mind them stealing, because if the runner has a few 2 or 3 point agendas in their score area, then they've probably already won...

However, since running small agendas comes with its own inherent drawbacks regarding agenda density, this kind of card is best used in a Corp deck that's already ready and willing to include lots of small agendas for other reasons. The two most obvious examples are Sportsmetal: Go Big or Go Home and Thule Subsea: Safety Below but it could also be theoretically imported into Jinteki: Personal Evolution or other similar IDs.

Essentially, these IDs get some additional bonus whenever an agenda is stolen, which offsets the inherent downsides of running lots of small agendas. A Sportsmetal deck is probably happy running three copies of Hyperloop Extension, Megaprix Qualifier and/or Élivágar Bifurcation because if a couple of these cards get stolen, so what? You still get some money or card draw and as long as they don't win before you do, you don't really care how many agendas they steal.

Giordano gives you a "late" game defensive upgrade that could potentially cost the runner as much as 6-10 credits in an average Sportsmetal game by the time you're going for the final agenda push, which can be just enough to keep them out of a scoring remote they thought they could get into if you're keeping the tempo of the game fast enough and they're forced to play low to the ground.

A couple of notable details

• It's unique, so you can't protect multiple servers with these, but that's true of a lot of defensive upgrades so it's not like it's an uncommon restriction

• It's a facility, a lot of people I talk to seem to assume it's a region since it kind of sounds like it should be one, but it's not, so feel free to stack this with Regions and all sorts of other defensive upgrades

• It's ability triggers when the run is successful, this is rare, most similar effects trigger on the approach step, not the success step. Both can theoretically keep the runner from accessing any cards in the root of the server, but this wording is notable for the fact that it's a nonbo with other defensive upgrades like Manegarm Skunkworks or Anoetic Void since you can't force them to pay the Giordano tax then end the run with Anoetic. Plus, on-success effects like Dirty Laundry or Deep Dive will still technically fire too...

• This ability counts non-agenda "agendas" so cards like Nightmare Archive, Hangeki or Meridian all count as "agendas" for the purpose of Giordano calculations. As would cards like News Team, Shi.Kyū or Fan Site were they still in standard. It's for this reason that "Core Sports" decks have evolved as a way to force the runner to add Nightmare Archives to their score area, simultaneously making it harder for the runner to win despite stealing a large number of agendas and super charging effects like Giordano and Fast Break

• It dies to Pinhole Threading and Light the Fire!, this isn't something new nor unique to Giordano, but it's still worth noting that if you are relying on making an impenetrable remote server using Giordano plus a bunch of negative points to make the runner spend 20 credits or something, they can still just Pinhole it like any other defensive upgrade

I don't know enough about sports to tell you what kind of field that is or what kind of sport it is, but someone once said it looks kind of like a Dorito and now I can't stop seeing a Dorito chip whenever I look at it. The quote is a paraphrasing of the old Netrunner quote: "The world changed. Crime did not." for those wondering about that reference.

TLDR: A niche defensive upgrade for Corp decks looking to include a large number of small agendas and/or lots of sources of negative agendas.