Most initial takes on a Harishchandra build seem to focused on Butchershop-type decks: NBN kill decks that tag primarily through Midseason Replacements and spend the majority of their influence on Weyland meat damage in the form of Scorched Earth and Traffic Accident. Still, that's hardly the only thing the ID can do as it has numerous strong in-faction synergies, both with tagging effects & cards that manipulate/take advantage of the runner's grip. Some notably strong synergies include:

• Salem's Hospitality
• Targeted Marketing
• Breaking News
• Data Raven
• Other hard-to-avoid tagging ICE like Gutenberg, Turnpike, or even Bandwidth

Out of faction, aside from Weyland meat damage, Snare! is notable for its ability to land a surprise tag. Even if the runner clears tags immediately, the corp gets a peak at their grip. It's worth noting that tag avoidance like New Angeles City Hall & Forger would not trigger the corp's ability.

While a lot of people will stick with the other strong yellow IDs, Harishchandra is primed to be relevant for a long time. Most of the cards listed above are good in their own right & adding even minimal value on top of that makes the identity compelling for tag-based strategies. The 17 influence is almost as gratuitous as it is in Near-Earth Hub.

I think top tiers of competition may not experiment with this ID too much, because at a certain level knowledge of a player's hand adds very little value. Top players know deck archetypes well, are adept at reading board states, & accurately interpret their opponent's moves such that explicitly seeing the opponent's hand isn't hugely beneficial. It doesn't help that, in top cuts or late in tournaments, decklists are mostly known so the Harishchandra ability won't be unveiling surprise splashes like Account Siphon in Shaper or Indexing in Criminal. That's just my guess, could be wrong, it's obviously too early to tell.

Has anyone figured out how this card is useful yet? It's obviously a powerful effect, but seems harder to use than most damage prevention tools. What distinguishes Davinder:

• potentially permanent damage prevention, only other card that does that is Paparazzi which renders itself trashable
• handles both meat & net damage
• is a Connection & thus tutorable with Hostage

Those attributes don't set Davinder apart very much. Running down a few other commonly-used alternatives:

• Plascrete Carapace costs no influence & is far superior against meat damage decks since it's hardware & not a trashable resource
• Deus X is 1 cheaper against large sources of net damage & has utility as an icebreaker
• Net Shield is far cheaper against continual net damage pings (Bio-Ethics Association, House of Knives) but doesn't scale well to large quantities of damage
• Feedback Filter is the most comparable card & perhaps a bit worse than Davinder except against continual small net damage pings or brain damage
• I've Had Worse doesn't prevent damage per se but it does make surviving meat or net damage bursts easier, at no cost

Given the spread of available options, I don't see Shapers turning to Davinder much, and it's unclear in what situations Davinder is superior for other factions, too. The most obvious synergy is also present in The Liberated Mind with the new grip-less Anarch archetype encouraged by The Noble Path & Emptied Mind: run with an empty grip, work around damage with Davinder. But is it worth spending even a single influence • when a) brain damage could still flatline you (facecheck an Ichi 1.0 when the corp has more credits? You're dead), b) there are other options that don't cost influence, & c) Davinder is outrageously expensive?

If we think of corp archetypes that use both meat and net damage, Davinder doesn't look terrible. Against Weyland supermodernism (which almost always packs Snare!), Davinder is reasonable yet still expensive, basically an upgrade over Plascrete Carapace only in that the Snare! net damage can be avoided. Against Personal Evolution (which often packs a singleton Scorched Earth), Davinder provides flexibility & hampers Ronin or Project Junebug flatlines severely. But there are far more decks that focus entirely on one type of damage & Davinder doesn't address those well at all, in particular being weak to cheap, small damage sources like Bio-Ethics Association & Traffic Accident. Meat damage decks always need to tag you first so they'll just trash Guru Davinder & then kill you.

The one use case that jumped to my mind: if you're doing a False Echo-DDoS type deck that builds to a ridiculous single-turn multi-Medium dig (see the Seattle regionals winner), then Davinder will absorb multiple Fetal AI & Snare! accesses in a way that's cheaper than Feedback Filter & more likely to ensure survival than I've Had Worse. But it's still a fringe application that requires a substantial amount of credits & spending an influence pip in a deck that's very short on them.

Two obvious, notable interactions:

• Ashigaru gains an unmanageable number of subrountines once this is rezzed, but is influence expensive for HB
• IQ becomes incredibly strong & great value if you rez it before using Cybernetics Court to prop up your HQ size

Arguably better than Research Station since its effect is larger & trash cost higher, though you're unlikely to want to defend this whereas RS benefits from your HQ ICE as well. Unless you're comboing with something or negating the downside of Cybernetics Division there's just not enough benefit to increased corp hand size to warrant a deck slot.

A support card for the new Pālanā Foods, this asset allows the ID to double dip & receive drip credits on their own turn as well as the runner's (assuming the runner draws, which is guaranteed with Wyldside, for instance). Currently, Drug Dealer, Astrolabe, & some rarer interactions (e.g. I've Had Worse triggered by pro-active net damage) are the only ways to get that credit.

While this card looks simply like a bland support piece to make Pālanā even richer, it's extremely interesting as sources of corp card draw are few & far between (Jackson Howard most notably, Anonymous Tip mostly forgotten). With one Agroplex running, the Corp is essentially a runner with Wyldside installed (draw 2, 3 left) & no Adjusted Chronotype. I await with bated breath the corp version of Noise that makes this a viable proposition all on its own. Given that the Agroplex is continuously active & more likely to stay in the game than JHow, it's actually the only source of stable increased card draw other than the Near-Earth Hub ability.

There will be times when Agroplex will be counter-productive, because giving the runner a free draw is a tremendous downside. It's likely wrong to simply install it as soon as you see it. Rather, Palana might shine in the late game when the runner is already set up & additional cards do little to improve their board state. Besides the runner's draw, there are certainly times when the corp doesn't want to draw, either because they're already agenda flooded or because their whole turn is locked up advancing an agenda to score. Unlike Wyldside however, the corp can simply turn off Agroplex by installing over it.

Other potential uses outside P Foods:

• Industrial Genomics likes to overdraw so it can discard, Agroplex is an in-faction way of supporting that
• Jinteki Biotech also might not mind overdrawing since The Tank ability can simply flip archives back into RnD
• In general, asset spam decks that Always Be Installin' need to draw a lot to find new assets to install, that's mostly only been possible in NEH due to the ability but Agroplex is decently splashable card draw
• Corp combo decks aren't very prevalent at the moment, other than Cerebral Imaging where the influence is too tight, but this card will deserve a look from them

Pālanā Agroplex is a balanced, interesting card with an effect we haven't quite seen before, the corp forcing the runner to draw a la Fisk Investment Seminar. There are probably going to be very inventive uses but finding a way to gain value from it despite the downsides will be tricky. In P Foods, it's probably an auto-include, though maybe only a 2-of as running multiple at once introduces too much corp draw.

TL;DR — HC won't see much out of faction play because it's not powerful enough to pay influence for & Jinteki doesn't have six influence-cheap cards to import alongside it. In faction, it's best use is to fuel some fun, inconsistent combos.

An unassuming little card that introduces the "alliance" dynamic of the Mumbad cycle. Let's analyze, shall we?

We draw three cards, paying 1 , like I've Had Worse, but then we put one back on top of our deck. That makes HC function poorly as pure card draw; the end result after playing it is only one additional card in your hand, so if you're trying to accumulate cards then simply clicking to draw is more efficient. However, draw cards like these essentially thin out your deck so there's some modicum of utility there, but Anonymous Tip and the HB Clearances are strictly better.

Putting a card back on top of RnD, however, is an interesting effect. It functionally means one can make RnD safe from single access for the next turn (& slightly safer from multi-access), presuming we don't trigger shuffle effects such as Jackson Howard. That makes this card not only a combo piece but an odd sort of RnD defense. Combined with the draw effect, this has utility in Industrial Genomics lists that run few ICE but many traps, letting one defend RnD for a turn plus overdraw to discard cards & power the ID ability.

@alex_monk's review points out the Mutate interaction, which is powerful but not exactly efficient. Jinteki just don't have many huge pieces of ICE that make a four card combo worthwhile; we need a cheap piece of rezzed ICE, plus a big piece of ICE, Heritage Committee, & Mutate in our hand. If, for instance, we Mutate a Pup into Susanoo-No-Mikoto, we will have spent 3 cards, 3, & 4 just to cheat out a 9 piece of ICE. That puts Heritage Committee at roughly the same effectiveness as Green Level Clearance (if you value 1 at 1 but yes this is an abstraction) but only if you have the combo pieces. If we're using Mutate, Janus 1.0 and Archer are much better options from out of faction and they're not too bad an influence strain given their power level. I'm going to build decks based around this idea for months, & I will be frustrated by them.

Finally, one interaction that was missed in the prior review was with An Offer You Can't Refuse. Offer has, to this point, mostly been used on Archives as the corp can load archives with on-access triggers like Shock!, Shi.Kyū, News Team, & Space Camp. Heritage Committee adds RnD to the mix as well; we can put a Snare! back on top, which sets us up for either a Scorched Earth or Neural EMP* flatline. If the runner takes the bait (they never will, trust me).

You probably don't pay two influence for this out of faction. As @alex_monk points out, there are some marginal interactions with the two Accelerated HB cards. That said, HC only ensures the very top card is useful, so it does not reduce the risk factor of those cards enough to warrant a deck slot. The Foundry is perhaps an exception to this, as one could use HC to place a valuable ICE (something The Foundry often has in HQ) on top, then fire an ABT, and shuffle back non-ICE cards per the ABT-Foundry ruling. I can envision a NEXT ICE Foundry deck aiming for the Batty-Gold combo with these inclusions:

• 3 Swordsman ••• (or, alternatively, Lotus Field, meta dependent)
• 2 Marcus Batty ••••••
• 1 Recruiting Trip •
• 2-3 Heritage Committee (0 influence cost) to taste

That leaves the list with five free influence, enough for 3 Jackson & something fun (Tollbooth, 2x Crisium Grid, etc.). Not bad, but not great. The problem here is that finding 6 easily splashable Jinteki cards is awkward with the current card pool. The faction has many odd cards that only synergise in faction & the most desirable ones for other factions have aggressive influence prices, with Caprice being an obvious example. Lotus Field & Swordsman are arguably the most splashable Jinteki cards & I could see them commonly appearing in Heritage Committee lists that attempt to take advantage of the Alliance dynamic.

The other direction I could see an out-of-faction HC deck take is a Mutate-Janus 1.0-Wotan combo, also out of HB. Mutate, like Batty, is three influence so you could have a similar spread of 2 Mutate & a bunch of influence-cheap Jinteki ICE, with Pup being very appealing (good on its own, easy to sacrifice to Mutate). So, of the other factions, HB is clearly the best for HC. Weyland also has some huge ICE for the Mutate combo, and Blue Sun: Powering the Future has the advantage of being able to return a Curtain Wall or Orion to hand only to cheat them back into play, so that's another possibility. But, again, that the Alliance benefit kicks in at a whopping six Jinteki cards makes this extremely tough to do in an effective manner while addressing a deck's other needs.

* Niche rules consideration: Neural EMP's condition is "if the runner made a run during his or her last turn", but An Offer You Can't Refuse fires on the corp's turn, so it does not fulfill this condition. The runner still needs to initiate a run for this flatline combo to work.