This card is getting some love in the reviews so far. I really hope the positive reviews are right - heck, I argued in favour of Fisk Investment Seminar on this very site. I want cards to be playable and powerful and fun. Here though, I'm going to play devil's advocate. My suspicion is that in the final analysis this card sucks.

Compare this to Archived Memories from a purely economic perspective. They both take a to play. With Archived Memories that's the end of the story. You've recurred a card that you want in your hand. By contrast, Allele repression needs advancing before it does anything. 1 and a for each card you want back. Then you have to rez it for a cost of 2. Then you have to spend another card for each card you want to recur. That's some expensive recursion. Sometimes the extra cards you discard will be stuff you don't need: silver bullets that aren't appropriate to the match-up, ice that doesn't help your current board-state, Shocks and the like. That's not going to happen reliably though. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not in the habit of putting cards that I consider 'junk' in my deck.

All this expense might be justified if Allele Repression was the key to combotastic awesomeness, and it's clear that a lot of folks think that it is. The card most often mentioned is Snare!, and I think that's the best argument for repressing alleles. I'll come back to it. Other candidates mentioned by Bigguyforyou are Neural EMP and Trick of Light. With the former, Ronin instead of Allele Repression does the same job better. Allele Repression offers more versatility, but it will never be king of the kill. The latter could be helpful sometimes, but you need an awful lot of advanced things on the table to make that work. If your deck advances things and then Tricks out agendas it's already quite complicated. More moving bits increases the need for your deck to come out in a particular order and put pressure on slots that you'd really like to fill with ice and economy.

At this point I should talk about Mushin No Shin. With Mushin you can circumvent the cost of playing Allele Repression and with Allele Repression you can recur Mushin. It's a match made in heaven! Except no. Mushin is in many ways an economy card, so saying it makes Allele Repression playable is like saying Hedge Fund makes Clairvoyant Monitor playable. There are already quite a lot of good targets for Mushin. The opportunity cost for a Mushined Allele Repression is a Mushined much-better-card. On the other hand, if you're recurring Mushin with Allele Repression then your strategy is eating itself. I'm going to install and advance a card in order to recur (with some additional expense) a card which provides economy with which to install and advance cards! It can't possibly go wrong.

So. Snare. I can imagine the situation where a runner plays Legwork. In the paid ability window after the runner has committed to access I pop my Allele Repression (which I'm imagining I mushined more than a turn ago and further imagining the runner chose not to run) and fill my hand with three Snare!s. I imagine the requisite Snare!s are already in my archives after a long hard fought game. At this point I imagine the runner's legwork will hit two or more of the Snare!s. The odds are in favour of such an outcome given the circumstances. I'm also imagining that the runner hasn't siphoned me broke because I'm Jinteki and that's what happens to Jinteki if it doesn't spend its precious utility slots on Caprice Nisei instead of Allele Repression. In this situation that I'm imagining Allele repression would win me the game. I'm sure it will happen sometimes, but probably not often enough.

One last criticism. It's a 2 to trash, so on top of everything else, it makes R and D porous. Like I say, I'd love to be wrong, but the bottom line for me is that the expense and opportunity cost just aren't going to justify themselves often enough.

I'd like to make the case for Investment Seminar, but I'd also like to stress that the case is not clear cut. When considering this card it's really important to think hard about the massive downside before you start fantasising about the potential upside.

Just for a moment consider Investment Seminar as pure economy. Both the runner and the corp get 3 cards, but the runner has spent a card and a click to make that happen. If you just count up the numbers then the runner is down on the deal by a significant amount. That fact means that this card is unsuitable for a lot of decks. If you're not putting significant, direct pressure on the corp's ability to play cards Investment Seminar helps them more than it helps you.

Of course it's not that simple. Say you play Investment Seminar when the corp is at their maximum handsize. After their mandatory draw the corp is four cards over their maximum but has only three clicks with which to play. Even if they play a card with every click they'll usually lose a card at the end of their turn. On it's own this isn't good enough to justify the Seminar; the Corp's net gain of cards is still equal to the runner's. Additionally, they've chosen which card to lose - a kind of mini-Daily Business Show effect. Nonetheless, it's a step in the right direction. Forcing the corp to overdraw and discard either increases the agenda density of HQ or dumps agendas into archives. This plays into the Criminal faction's strengths of HQ access and broad early pressure.

The most obvious synergy here is Account Siphon. No, not Laramy Fisk, he's awful. Account Siphon. And maybe even Vamp. All the econ pressure. Emergency Shutdown. Crescentus. If the corp is broke, they can't play any of their shiny new cards. Their new cards aren't shiny at all - they're a painful memory of a carefully constructed strategy destined to be thrown into archives after a bitterly resented turn of clicking for credits. That's the best case scenario and it is awesome. Criminal aggro is where this card lives. It's not about gaining advantage, it's about exploiting advantage. It's about kicking the Corp while they're down. You don't have an end game, you only have now - but right now the Corp has 9 cards, 3 agendas and 0 credits. Good luck with that Corp.

I believe that the potential of this card makes it worth playing despite its drawbacks, but let's get real for a second. If this card is in your deck, you'll often draw it at a sub-optimal time. If the corp has only a few cards or is flush with credits, you'll be wishing this was something else. It's not an unproblematic 'good-stuff' card like Diesel. I think Investment Seminar can be OK even when it doesn't shine though. Your deck needs the potential to exploit it fully in order to justify the opportunity cost of playing it, but if all doesn't go to plan then it's not worthless. The trick is picking your moment. Say the corp has 5 or 6 ; If you can play a strong run then being overdrawn gives the Corp an uncomfortable choice: go broke to rez ice and lose cards next turn, or conserve resources and cede accesses to the runner. If the corp is looking to score an installed agenda, a similar dilemma can be created: Score the agenda and discard valuable cards, or spend a turn playing out cards and give the runner another opportunity to run the remote.

There are other uses too. If the corp is playing with a small hand, then Legwork can become a bit like The Maker's Eye. Conversely, if R&D is an open goal but you've already seen the top cards, Investment Seminar can give you new accesses.

I'd like to take a moment to say I'm not convinced by this out of faction. Two influence is two too many when you have either I've Had Worse or Diesel in faction. Noise especially is probably not a fan. Good players rush against Noise to combat his inevitability. Extra card draws help them do that, they're not bonus mills.

All in all I'd say this is an extremely high-skill card. Sometimes it will be a big win, but at other times you will have to think very hard about if, when and how to use it. I think that's what makes me like it so much.

Sure, it's not strong as a pure econ card, but it's worth noting that it's paying you for something you'd do anyway, so drawing it is like clicking for 2 with a delayed reaction. Two other factions have similar econ cards; Beanstalk Royalties pays you 2 extra the next time you want to click for a credit. Green Level Clearance pays out when you want a card.

Additionally, there are shenanigans. Using it to fast advance with Efficiency Committee counters is one, but there are others. This lets you advance even when you're broke, so you can still Fast Advance with Astro counters or a rezzed SanSan City Grid even after an Account Siphon or other econ denial attack. It also offers a sneaky way to beat Clone Chipped Clots because you can play this and immediately score before the runner's paid ability window.

Finally, this finds its way into some Power Shutdown combo decks as Accelerated Diagnostics can play it out for two advancement tokens without spending an extra .

Wow, loads of reviews of Sacrificial Construct! I'm actually running it at the moment in a janky but reasonably successful deck, so there's a couple of things I think I can add.

Lynx Kurenko mentions SacCon's utility as double resource fodder in Hayley. I think that observation should go hand in hand with a mention of the fact that Aesop's Pawnshop drastically reduces the opportunity cost of playing such fodder cards. Don't need SacCon this game? No problem. It's an Easy Mark.

I'm not a big fan of using this to recur Faerie. In that case the same influence and slot could be used for Mimic, which supports Faerie really well on a permanent basis. I also agree that it's no replacement for Sharpshooter given the number of commonly played multi sub destroyers. But if you've got it in your deck, then sometimes it will be better than either of those cards all on its own. If you're playing against Blue Sun: Powering the Future for instance, you can use this to face check without fear of Nebula, Grim or even a sneaky Wormhole piggybacking a trash routine from somewhere else. That's not nothing.

Against Power Shutdown it's fine, but then practically anything cheap and disposable does that job. Shapers commonly have Clone Chips and SModCodes lying around, so they have some natural protection anyway (although if you do get a SacCon out, you don't hate protecting those options). Protecting Clot is obviously good, but again Clone Chips do that job for you without you having to slot a card purely for that purpose. One argument in favour of SacCon for Clot is the timing of the Corp's turn. Because they choose the order of simultaneous effects they can trash an installed Cyberdex Virus Suite to create a window for scoring fast advanced agendas that beats a clone chipped clot. In the same situation, SacCon offers no such window.

I think the card that really makes SacCon worth considering right now is Marcus bloody Batty (that's his technical name). He's common at the moment and he will ruin your day in a way that no breaker can answer. SacCon counters one of his strong options, and for that I am profoundly grateful to it.

Overall, I think SacCon is good enough as a marginal utility/silver bullet card in a deck that's mostly planning to sell it to Aesop's a solid 60% of the time.

It's an interesting time for Lotus Field. Once the best ice for improving a deck's match-up against anarchs in general and Yog.0 specifically, there are now a couple of solid solutions to it. Net-Ready Eyes will get your Yog up to the correct strength, but unlike its cousin The Personal Touch will also support other breakers, elevating it above 'silver bullet' status. It also has the advantage that it's not hosted. In faction, Faust breaks Lotus Field for a couple of cards - a totally reasonable cost for a runner with a bit of redundancy in their deck, like the WyldCakes combo for instance.

Given the existence of these new tools, is Lotus field still a good card? I'd say yes. Both of the solutions mentioned above require installing another card to be able to get in. An extra gear check is still a valuable effect, even if the gear has improved. Immunity to Parasite is also a giant upside that shouldn't be underestimated. Its numbers look very similar to Bastion, a mediocre but playable ice. It costs an extra , but then its a code gate, so it will often cost more to break (If you compare breakers with similar costs, like ZU.13 Key Master to Corroder or Gordian Blade to Cerberus "Lady" H1).

Lastly, at a low, low cost of one influence Lotus Field is an easy splash. This is especially important for Weyland, who infamously lack decent in-faction code gates. It's cost makes it the middle of the road option between neutral codegates like Enigma and monsters like Tollbooth. Crucially, it demands the installation of a breaker (Enigma and its cousins are parasite fodder). Blue Sun: Powering the Future particularly likes it, because Wormhole is worthless when you don't have any other ice rezzed.

In conclusion, I think Lotus Field will continue to be a big deal in most metas. It's a good thing that anarchs won't have to swear quite as much when they see it, but it was strong enough in the first place that it's still a solid choice, despite having been weakened.