I think this card is a sleeper. The fact that it's a 4/2 that isn't Nisei MK II makes it easy to discount, but it has a lot of upsides. First of all, it's 5 cards, which is a good boost to your economy. The reveal effect is slightly annoying, and clearly only there to create a slightly artificial-feeling synergy with the Hyoubu Institute: Absolute Clarity, but you can live with it. The counter mechanic means you can pull the cards as you need them. It's not Corporate Sales Team, but it's still a significant pace advantage.

Then there's the shenanigans. As Ip87 has already pointed out, you can use this to trap the top of R&D on demand. It's not really a 'mind games' effect though, as you can fire it in the window after the runner has committed to accessing. I actually think that Jinteki trap decks would be more fun with lower variance, and this supports a move in that direction. It's more 'if I have a trap in HQ, the runner will hit it', with a consolation prize of ensuring the top of R&D is safe even if you fire speculatively and draw drunk. You can also use it to clean/trap HQ in a similar way, although given that the only place you can 'hide' agendas is on top of R&D that's often not going to be a flawless plan. I guess you could argue that's where the mind games come in. Or you could just drop an Anansi over R&D.

Another very notable synergy with this card is Political Dealings. By firing it on the runner's last click, you can stack an agenda on top of your deck to set up a reliable fast advance. This makes PolDeals a much more viable card, as you can drop it among your shell game servers and rez it only when you know the fast advance is on. This makes it comparable to a Biotic Labor, except that now the runner has to spend resources trashing it.

All of this means that Flower Sermon belongs in an entirely different deck to Nisei. Sermon gives you pace, while Nisei supports a slow, grindy game. Sermon helps with fast advance trickes while Nisei wants you to play a bunch of ice. That means that arguably, the agendas Sermon is actually up against are Fetal AI and Project Yagi-Uda. The first may be better if you're doubling down on death and don't see yourself scoring agendas that can't be never-advanced. The latter has its own, more obvious synergy with fast advance and shell games - simply being a 3/2.

This makes Flower Sermon a bit of a puzzle. It's not as good as Nisei in the Jinteki decks that are currently thought of as strong. That's why I think it's a sleeper. It will need a slightly novel deck archetype to succeed. I hope someone works it out.

I've played Lat a fair bit, and I wanted to offer the flipside of BlackCherries' review. To be clear, I think that review is a valid way of thinking about him, but rather than go over the same points, I'm just going to make a strong argument for the opposite analysis so hopefully the reviews will function as yin and yang.

I think Lat is a good vanilla ID, and the best way to play him is not to worry about his ability too much. Play a standard shaper deck with plenty of events and other easily playable cards, and triggering his ability is really not that hard. There's no need to include special combos, just get used to the fact that most turns the corp's handsize will dictate how many times you draw and how many cards you play out. This is generally not that onerous, and if it is you can just sacrifice your bonus card for a turn.

The corp might choose to do weird handsize things to faff with your ability. That's fine; they usually hurt themselves more than they hurt you. Go ahead and let them play as if they have zero handsize if they want. They're really showing you.

I agree that The Artist is a good card for Lat, but I'd like to highlight the other ability. The option to spend a spare for 2 is good because Lat's ability often leaves you wanting to burn a click without drawing (generally this is a parity problem; it happens when your handsize is even and the corp's odd, or vice versa).

Playing Lat as a vanilla shaper makes Hayley Kaplan the obvious comparison. Both give click compression at the cost of some faff. I won't deny that Hayley is better, but Lat has some advantages. Early on, he feels much smoother - you're not scratting round for s to fire your double installs. And he can play events without them getting in his way too much. I think these factors give him a slightly faster early game. Then there's his . That is very much not nothing at the moment, as IP Blocks and similar are still a common sight, and even taxing the corp a credit when they Hard-Hitting News you can prove crucial.

But Lat's biggest advantage over Hayley is one that goes outside pure strategic analysis. He simply takes much less brain space for the player. I took him to a small tournament for that reason and he was solid. I firmly believe that not having to process all Hayley's combos and options helped me to avoid burnout during the later rounds.

I prefer Symmetrical Visage to ProCo. It drops onto the table much more easily, and Lat's draws are a pretty big nombo with ProCo's 'I'm planning to spend half my s drawing' ethos.

A much hated card, now banned. It may be a little perverse to review a card that's now literally unplayable, but I'd like to offer a brief retrospective. A lot of people said Rumor Mill was badly designed. The argument ran like this: it's a very strong effect with no counter-play. It just shuts down the Corp, no questions asked. I think that's wrong for two reasons. Firstly, Rumor Mill was the counter play. It hated on a relatively small number of cards that happened to be very strong. Hate cards need to be above the curve against then strategies they target or they're worthless. Secondly, there were still options for the Corp. They could play their own current, or find a fast advance to kill it. That's counter play right there. Granted Rumor Mill guaranteed an access past Ash, Caprice or Marcus Batty but that's what never advance is for. There was even a hard counter of sorts, The News Now Hour.

The real problem with Rumor Mill was the context it was printed in. Starting with the Mumbad Cycle, and continuing on through Flashpoint and beyond, the strongest new Corp cards in Netrunner were notably skewed towards asset spam and away from glacier. Horrors like Museum of History, Mumbad City Hall, Mumba Temple and the bloody political assets started this trend, but they weren't the end of it, as deeply unfortunate cards like Friends in High Places and Estelle Moon attest.

Meanwhile, runners became richer and more efficient. The pack that Rumor Mill came in, for instance, upgraded Corroder to Paperclip and also afflicted the meta with Temüjin Contract, the most broken economy card ever printed (that's including Bloo Moose). Smoke and Şifr also both largely invalidated ice in their different ways. All this was bad news for glacier decks. What Rumor Mill did was turn off their last remaining advantage - defensive upgrades. It was a solid kick to the perineum of an already beleaguered archetype. Worst of all, it was the final piece in the Valencia Blackmail spam archetype. Now Val had no need to interact with glacier at all. She just said "no".

The combination of absurdly powerful Runner economy, anti-ice options, and a strong alternative Corp strategy in the form of asset spam, left glacier broken. Rumor Mill was the straw that broke the camel's back. And it was everywhere, because hey, turning off Jackson Howard was always gonna be good. In a different meta, losing the reliability of Ash, Caprice and Marcus might have prompted Corps to explore different options, such as Old Hollywood Grid, but as it was there was really no mood to try out downgraded versions of decks that were already falling behind.

I'd argue that a lot of this situation wasn't really Rumor Mill's fault. You'll note that this review has mentioned a lot of cards that are also now banned or restricted. That's where I'd lay the blame. Caprice and Jackson are now gone. Ash and Marcus are still with us, as is the sleeping giant Sandburg. I don't think it would be awful if Rumor Mill came back in some form to offer a counter to those cards. I realise I'm in a minority here. There's no arguing with the fact that it's strong, so maybe it should be on the restricted list, or reprinted in a weakened form.

Mimic is generally considered a solid card. It saw lots of play in the early years of the game and it's still efficient at what it does. Na'Not'K costs one more than Mimic, but it saves one influence in-faction. The only time it's worse is against a lone strength 3 sentry. That's pretty rare. For these reasons it seems likely that this will see play as a good-but-not-great killer option in shaper.

Grappling hook probably still isn't a real card, but it's worth noting that it's been slowly growing in power as ice gets bigger, uglier and multi-subbier. The old combos with e3 Feedback Implants and the newer ones with Tracker are still as unwieldy as they ever were, but there's an increasing number of commonly played cards that are effectively mitigated by having a 'hook on the table. Fairchild 3.0, DNA Tracker, Chiyashi, and now Tithonium all have potentially game-winning facecheck penalties that Grappling Hook can reduce to a manageable level. That's added to its efficacy against old standards like Archer and Komainu. It's also hilarious against Little Engine, although that's unlikely to come up these days.

Grappling Hook has nice synergy with Mammon because you can facecheck ice with a single counter knowing that you have a viable breaking option on the table if needs be. It isn't an AI - it's not even an icebreaker - so it can even deal with the nasty subs on AI hate like Swordsman and Hortum.

God knows what you cut for it, but it's definitely better than it used to be.