The Seventh Rotation is upon us. All the FFG cards have rotated out, apart from the few that were reprinted in Ashes or System Gateway (or
reprinted with a different name in Elevation). I think this has removed more cards from the Standard metagame at once than at any previous time – and that shifts the context of the cards that are still left, because the game has changed around them.
Take Game Over, for example. Historically, it hasn't been a very good card, in most gamestates effectively reading "Pay 4 and take 1 bad publicity. The Runner pays 6 and trashes a few cards that are no longer relevant." That effect isn't completely terrible, but it was historically outclassed by, e.g., Hard-Hitting News, which was much better in a metagame where Corps were generally rich midgame and doing economic damage to the Runner wouldn't matter much in the late game.
But the rotation has made both Corps and Runners a lot poorer, especially if either of the two players is trying to force interaction (and many staple Runner economy cards, like Daily Casts and Rezeki, have been banned). That's had two main effects on the game, which are both somewhat favourable for Game Over: Runners are more likely to be using an economy which needs to flood the board with resources or non-icebreaker programs in order to function, as there aren't so many alternative options nowadays; and Runners who get hit with Game Over are less likely to be able to pay. Additionally, with many of the older cards gone, it's more likely that Runners will be making use of some of the many cybernetic cards in Borealis – so it may sometimes even be relevantly possible to hit Hardware. So the card is probably worth re-evaluating in the context of the new metagame.
The first thing that's worth noting is that Game Over is a somewhat situational card, but it's a situation that is somewhat common and that many decks benefit from having a card to cover: Game Over is at its best when it's protecting a lead that's starting to slip away. That in general is a really common scenario for Corps in Netrunner, though: in general the Runner has an advantage at the start and end of the game and the Corp in the middle, so if the Runner isn't particularly aggressive, it is common for the Corp to have a somewhat precarious lead going into the late game, and the game is often decided by whether or not the Corp is able to close it out. I've been testing it out in a fast-advance deck, which might potentially lose an agenda to random accesses early-game, is likely to fast-advance a number of agendas in the mid-game and get a lead, but then has to face a difficult late-game where the centrals are being hammered. Perhaps the Runner is trying to R&D-lock you; the Corp counterplay to that is to draw a lot of cards in order to sneak agendas past the R&D lock, and the Runner counter-counterplay to that is to steal the drawn agendas from HQ. So you effectively end up in a situation where the Corp needs to survive just one Runner turn with their agenda in hand and their fast-advance tricks available, but may not naturally be able to do so because the Runner is able to keep up constant pressure.
Game Over shines in this sort of situation. For one thing, the Runner is probably spending lots of credits in order to keep up the pressure. Game Over isn't very good if the Runner is rich, as they'll just pay to keep everything important. But (as is commonly the case for NBN) it's much better if the Runner is under economic pressure. Cards that give the opponent a choice, like this one, are usually worse than they seem, because the opponent can pick the least damaging option and thus the card is only good for you in cases where both options are good for you. But if you pick a card type that's powering the opponent's economy (either by making credits directly or by saving them credits), Game Over is effectively giving the opponent a choice between losing credits or losing credits – they can pick the option that loses them fewer credits (which in this situation is usually to trash everything), but either way they are losing credits: and as long as they needed those credits to get in and stop your plans, Game Over can be sufficient to buy the turn you need to win the game. (Compare to something like Oppo Research: Oppo is great to hit the opponent with in the midgame because it takes them a while to recover, but it doesn't do that much to close out a game where both players are close to winning, as the opponent can just ignore the tags and try to win that turn.)
Game Over's somewhat awkward timing restriction (it has to be played the turn after an agenda steal) can matter, and it restricts the deck types that you can put it in. In particular, you're generally aiming to win the turn after playing Game Over, which means that if you're planning a scoring win, you will need an agenda left to score – and the Runner just stole one, so you need to have had two of them. Likewise, if you have a kill combo that depends on things with a trash cost, you need the Runner to not trash them in the same run that's stealing the agenda, So your deck will need to be the sort that draws lots of cards, ideally ones that the Runner wasn't able to access recently. This is a problem that isn't unique to Game Over: the "R&D lock", which aims to prevent the opponent ever drawing an agenda, is a common option for Runners for their late-game strategy, so Corp decks often need a way to counter it. That means that Game Over will be better if your deck has cards that aim to win through an R&D lock (as opposed to preventing the lock being set up in the first place), e.g. bulk card draw and things that shuffle R&D. This means that I think Game Over is better in decks that are particularly vulnerable to R&D lock (such as fast-advance decks) and are therefore already playing cards to try to deal with the situation.
As a summary, to play Game Over, you need a deck which a) can get a winning combination of cards into its hand even while under pressure and b) just needs to be able to survive a turn to be able to actually use them to win. If you do have such a deck, though, a Game Over in hand is extremely good at converting a lead into a win: if the Runner starts to come back into the game via spending most of their credits stealing agendas, you Game Over them, locking them out for a turn, and win the next turn – and if the Runner doesn't manage to steal any agendas, you won't be able to play Game Over, but you win regardless. The bad publicity would have been a major downside if you played it earlier in the game – but if you're planning to win on the turn afterwards, you only compensated the Runner 1 per run they make on their net turn, which probably won't be enough for them to get in anywhere.
Game Over is kind-of terrible in the early game, or if you're behind, though. If you play it before most of the Runner's cards are on the table, the positive effects of the card won't have a significant impact and the bad publicity will really hurt – and thus if the Runner manages to score six points in the midgame, the card will be entirely useless. Likewise, if you play it when you're behind, it will probably hurt you more than it hurts the Runner. As such, you really want your deck to be one that leverages the Corp's mid-game advantage in order to be ahead going into the late-game.
You also really want the Runner's deck to be one whose economy relies on installed cards rather than events: but this condition might not be as bad as it seems. For one thing, Game Over takes up just a single card slot in your deck (because you're only planning to play it late-game anyway, and can generally leave it in your hand until then), so it's OK to use it as a tech card rather than a core part of your strategy: if you have a deck that struggles against Runners who gradually build up a resource-based economy over the course of a long game, then this can be your tool for dealing with it, and you can ignore it in the matchups that don't look like that. Additionally, there's a sort of "situation stacking": the card has two requirements to be good (you have a lead going into the late game, and the Runner has an economy based on a lot of installed cards) , but those requirements tend to be met in the same sorts of games (a Runner who is spending lots of time setting up a large board probably doesn't have enough aggression to take the lead in the midgame), and thus when one requirement is met, the other also tends to be met.
So is Game Over actually good now? I'm not sure yet, but assuming that you're playing the right sort of deck for it – a deck that tends to get the advantage mid-game, wants to use a tech card slot to help it close out the game against late-game-focused Runners, forces the Runner to spend a lot of credits on interacting with it, and is sufficiently scared of R&D locks that it's already running ways to escape them – it might well be. When the right moment to use it comes up, it's great, so the only real question is as to whether those moments come up often enough for the card to pull its weight, or whether it would be better off as some card that's more generally applicable.
