Mongoose

Mongoose

I rate this as a good card due to a scenario I often find myself in when playing :

Early game, I have money, I have 1 or more breakers in hand but no Faerie. Often I have a Special Order too. As crim you want early aggression, but also, with limited or no recursion you don't want to take Net damage and lose your precious breakers in hand. Or install the breakers then fear running because of Destroyers. In the past I would draw hoping to see a Faerie, often just drawing cards I don't want to see and discarding them (like Emergency Shutdown). I could Special Order for a Faerie but that never feels good.

But now I can Special Order for a Mongoose!

In this case Mongoose is a filler breaker, it lets you poke and put pressure on early. All while stopping you from wasting your Faeries on low strength Sentries. When you then put down a Faerie you can break things ultra efficiently. In short, it fills a nice spot that needs filled!

23
This is very true. It saves Faerie for doubled-up Sentry servers, which reduces the recursion burden significantly. —
Gingerbread

Gingerbread

The chance for this card to emerge from the binder has been missed with the release of D&D. With there being 5 new tracers released in D&D, as well as the newly added Gutenberg and the resurgence of Ichi 1.0, I thought FFG might once again be able do its magic, taking a considered 'bad' card and making it shine.

Unforutnately this is not the case. The reason being that two of the most powerful new tracers (Gutenberg and Archangel) have 6 strength, while Assassin has 5 strength and 2 subs. Meaning all these new ice are a whooping 5 and 4 to break with Gingerbread. This is a ridiculous amount for a specialist card like this, you are better off paying the trace. Unless you run Net-Ready Eyes in your criminal decks, you can seal this one in the binder for good.

23
I don't completely disagree with your analysis, but you should compare it to killers/decoders and show that it is empirically worse. You'll find it isn't. It's got a low install cost and decent starting strength. It can break Gutenberg for 5, as you mentioned, but Mimic has to spend 3 Datasucker tokens (hefty), Faerie only gets to break it once, and Garrote costs 7 to install and 2 MU and only breaks it for 1 credit less. While I don't think it is playable in most decks, I can see it in decks like Apex, where packing a full breaker suite alongside his Endless Hunger is out of the question. —
Also, Assassin is only 4 credits to break (2 to pump, 1 per subroutine). That's 4 less than Femme, 1 more than Faerie (but a permanent solution), 1 less than Ninja, 1 less than Garrote.... It is not a bad little icebreaker. —
The part I didn't include is that it takes up a deck slot, and if you only run one, which means in most cases you will need to spend resources to go fetch it. This is a huge tempo loss, especially against any NBN ID, as you most likely need a killer as well (Architect). This tempo hit would only be worth it for large amount of value. The value is just not there. PS thanks Phoenix, corrected the Assassin cost :) —
You can make an argument for Apex. Endless Hunger doesn't break ETR traces, so such decks can benefit from Gingerbread. On the other hand, Gingerbread won't break Grim or Architect, among other sentries. It all depends on what else you're running. —
I don't understand why they couldn't make this card better. Should be something like 3 strength, 1 cred to boost by 2, 1 to break subs. That would be usable, certainly not overpowered, and it would be really fun. —
I agree. For a card with such limited use it should have better stats. —