The Wizard's Chest is an incredibly fascinating card and I want to start by giving a big shout-out to the World Champion Richard Hall for giving us such a wild and intriguing card to theory craft with.

In a nutshell, this card combines soft-tutoring and soft econ, you get to sort through your deck with some caveats and then install one of the revealed cards, ignoring all costs. This by its very nature, makes it a combo card that is hard to evaluate. When analyzing ICE, we can test how expensively various breakers perform against it, and visa-versa with icebreakers and common ICE. With conventional econ like Sure Gamble or Telework Contract or Bravado we can compare them and see their use-cases and break even points and profit margins.

A card like this, however, is directly dependent on what you can find and install with it, and thus its power level will be highly dependent on the power level of the cards it can find. Below will be less of a strict analysis of its usefulness, and more a musing as to its potential applications, what future applications might arise and how best to utilize it.

The most expensive runner cards at the time of writing are all programs: Orca and Lobisomem, Femme Fatale and Mass-Driver. Unfortunately, programs, especially icebreakers, are suboptimal targets for The Wizard's Chest since you often need the icebreakers themselves to access all three central servers, thus making it a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Spark of Inspiration is generally better for searching and installing large programs cheaply and comparatively unconditionally.

As a rule then, this narrows our targets to Resources and Hardware. The most expensive of which, Endurance, is banned, the next most expensive Maw, is generally considered to be overpriced for what it offers and most Anarchs prefer Patchwork or Keiko, both of which are markedly cheaper. Knobkierie is also banned, and Māui and Daredevil also see very little play.

This leaves Resources, the most expensive of which is Liberated Account, by using this on LA you can save yourself 6 credits, which, since this is an economy card, you essentially get to keep as profit, however, if you are resorting to these measures for extra credits you are probably just better off including more econ cards in its place, same goes for something like Red Team or Professional Contacts.

And besides, to consistently hit your target you have to include few, if any, other cards of the same type, a hefty requirement when there are so many different and potent Resources. Meeting of Minds offers you arguably more consistent tutoring while not only allowing, but encouraging you to include a large number of Resources in your deck.

This brings us back to Hardware but with the most expensive ideal candidates being 4 cost Consoles, it's a hard sell, as most decks would prefer to just include conventional card draw and conventional econ to install their Consoles normally.

The most promising candidate in standard is perhaps Jeitinho, decks that include Jeitinho tend to be built around it by its very nature and usually need at least some way to tutor for it to soften the inherent inconsistency relying on a single card to win brings you. The Wizard's Chest helps with that, acting as the 4th, 5th and even 6th copy of Jeitinho, as you can install The Wizard's Chest, make a successful run on each central server and still then use the paid ability to go find Jeintinho and install it, Jeitinho will then still trigger at the end of your turn, bringing you closer to victory. However, of the few decks I see that include Jeintinho, most prefer Asmund Pudlat as he is more consistent and in faction for Criminals.

At this point it might be tempting to write The Wizard's Chest off to the annals of Netrunner history, a cool card that never made sense to include but I believe this card has yet to have its "Golden Age," having just been released, there are almost certainly many more sets to come before it rotates, giving us many more years to see potential combo candidates.

If I had to speculate, the ideal target it probably either going to be:

• A. A very expensive Resource, ideally one with a hefty influence cost of 4-5 making people only want to include a single copy, or perhaps even the specific restriction of only being able to include a single copy per deck. Something like DJ Fenris only somehow more powerful and more expensive or;

• B. A super pricy Console, something 8+ ideally, something on par with Endurance in pricing or even larger like the now rotated, Monolith, Blackguard or The Toolbox

TLDR: A really cool card with few practical application at the time of writing but I look forward to seeing what new combos players can cook in the coming years and Cycles!