Nebula is extremely interesting.

When I first saw this Identity, I thought it would be fast-advance city. But after playing with it a few games and looking at the current attempts to make a fast advance deck work, I've realized how elegantly it prevents linear play.

First, you only get four 3-for-2 agendas - 3 Embedded Reporting and 1 Tomorrow's Headline. That's 8 points in your deck you can easily move to your score area, but you need to decide how you want to handle the other 12 points. You can dilute your deck with 3-for-1s, spend more effort fast advancing bigger agendas, hide the agendas with Spin Doctor effects or build a scoring remote for just some of your agendas. Pick your poison.

Second, you have to keep the Runner out to fast advance. Sure, glacier decks can keep the Runner from running R&D and HQ consistently, but Nebula is already spending half their deck on their fast advance plan. See Point One - every Nebula deck needs to dedicate slots to handling the unruly 12 agenda points in their deck.

So Nebula games are still netrunner, just weird netrunner. The Corp only cares about two servers, but they're spending so much effort and so many deck slots to handle their unruly 12 agenda points the Runner still has a fighting chance.

Props to Null Signal games for such a cool and fun design.

Design-wise, the first sub is a great way to let Jinteki safely draw cards mid-run. Draw 1 card. You may add 1 card from HQ to the top of R&D. is a strictly-better Look at the top card of R&D. You may draw 1 card.. In non-Jinteki Corp, it could be Look at the card of R&D. You may draw 1 card..

• If you don't want the card you drew (like an agenda into an unprotected HQ), then you just “undraw” it right back.
• But you can also poison R&D mid-run (like with a Snare!), harden R&D with an untrashable card (ICE/Operation), tuck an agenda to be milled or shuffled away (like by Spin Doctor), and so on.
• CF. Flower Sermon.

In gameplay, it's “relevant but resolvable”, interesting for both players.

As the Corp:

• Protecting R&D, you can (before the breach) tuck a non-agenda.
• Protecting HQ, you can (before the breach) tuck away an agenda.

As the Runner:

• Even with a Killer, Phoenix can let it fire to Sabotage 1 (as well as save a credit or two).
• With Revolver, you can let it fire to “save a bullet”; and thus, break it a third time (not just twice).
• With Botulus, you can let it fire to “save a biofilm”; and thus, break it once every two turns (not just every three).

Still, the facecheck is mostly Do 3 net damage. Give the Runner 1 tag. (AKA. the Empiricist “Snare!’s” you.)

• NSG is printing more Jinteki ICE with incidental single-tagging (like Phoneutria, also an AP - Observer), which works with punishment like Mindscaping, and which adds another, non-flatlining effect to its taxing ICE (adding to credit-zapping).
• With its 5s/3↳ stats, the damage, and the deck-manipulation, it feels like a much “milder Anansi”.
• BTW, it's templated as ↳ Do 1 net damage. Give the Runner 1 tag. and ↳ Do 2 net damage., not ↳ Give the Runner 1 tag. and ↳ Do 3 net damage.. This double-triggers AU Co. or a Prāna Condenser (and is relevant for direct-subroutine-resolution like Mycoweb).

Flavor-wise, an Empiricist (🥼🧪) works under research and development, keeping whatever passes the experiment in headquarters, letting go of whatever in headquarters couldn't be replicated.

If you aren't putting an agenda agenda faceup into a remote behind some of the cheapest off-the-shelf ICE Weyland's defense researchers slapped together and smiling smugly at the runner turn 1, you're playing BANGUN wrong. If you ever refer to BANGUN without using all-caps and don't say it like BANG-GUN every time, you're playing BANGUN wrong.

OK, I'm joking. But just a little.

BANGUN, as the name and ability suggests, plays aggressive. Very aggressive. In the vast majority of games I've played, I've done the turn 1 I just described -- slammed down whatever agenda I had in my opening behind a Descent or Maskirovka, balanced my budget with a few Key Performance Indicators, and passed the turn. That's because BANGUN agendas thrive in the wild, not in cozy central servers. Unlike beloved Argus Security: Protection Guaranteed, BANGUN only BANGS when agendas are installed faceup in remotes. Like a bird of prey swooping down on newborn rabbits, the runner can snatch your vulnerable projects from the nerds in R&D and the suits in HQ with 0 (immediate) consequences. That's not OK. Your agendas need the trial by fire of the remote. Shove them out there. Let them be free. Hire Angelique Garza Correa to babysit them and keep them amused. Just don't let them languish in centrals.

That's the main thing, really. Go fast. Go hard. Give the runner catch-22s at every turn -- Do they take the sure thing, and bite the bullet (literally) by running your remotes? Or do they run your centrals hoping to win off random accesses -- some of which Byte! or are a sight to Behold! If they let you score, pressure with Measured Response. If they go aggressive, follow their Public Trail and show them what lies at the End of the Line. For real plays, Play Public Trail when they have the money to dodge it, THEN play Measured Response and kill them.

If you lose your steam, grind the runner through a Biawak or 2, courtesy of your Eminent Domain.

BANGUN is all about giving the runner as many bad options as possible.

BANG!

1 credit, 2 MU Scrubber is pretty good! Dewi MU jank aside, your shaper decks probably want this card to hose assets, which are very common right now. With trash costs being much lower in the current era, Azimat will allow you to trash corp assets and upgrades for pennies. As shaper, it is very easy to install this program and start dismantling the corp's board. If you need to, you can Muse or Self-modifying Code for it, and power-drawing Madani shaper rigs wll likely find it in short time. Annoying assets like Cohort become free to trash, while Bladderworts and Regoliths don't fare much better. Even if you're not being spammed with like 10 assets by turn 5, many matchups have enough trashables to make this a gamechanging install.

After some experience playing both with and against this card, my conclusion is: it isn't as good as it looks, which is a bit concerning given that (at least to me) it only looked decently good rather than amazing.

The three main ways in which a piece of ICE can have a good effect are stopping power, taxing power, and the facecheck. But Mycoweb doesn't seem to do particularly well in any of those dimensions.

Let's look at the facecheck first. Jinteki generally only wants to spend 8 on rezzing one piece of ICE in the early game if it does enough damage to the Runner in the process to make up for the cost of the rez. Spending 8 is quite the tempo hit, potentially taking a couple of turns to recover from – but that's forgiveable if you land a hit on the Runner that also takes a couple of turns to recover from. In this case, though, an early-game rez of Mycoweb frequently does nothing at all: in the early game you normally need to install all the ICE you draw (meaning that it doesn't end up in Archives), if you spent 8 on a rez then you won't be able to rez anything else impactful even with the 2 discount, and you're unlikely to have another spiky sentry or code gate rezzed to copy a subroutine from. Some Runner decks opposite will keep the "period of time where rezzing Mycoweb is useless" around well into the mid-game; in one game I played as a Runner, the opponent rezzed a Mycoweb when I already had a decoder installed (hoping that I would pay the costs to break it), I judged that the subroutines would do less damage than the break cost and let them fire, and the Corp realised that none of the subroutines actually did anything useful in the gamestate at the time and had to let me past.

In the very late game, the facecheck would theoretically be more impactful, if you could get the subroutines to fire – maybe by that point in time you have a lot of highly-damaging subroutines to copy, and Archives might be loaded with ICE (especially if the opponent is trashing it). But at that stage of the game, the facecheck doesn't matter so much because the opponent will almost certainly have a way past the ICE anyway (especially because ICE installed late tends to be on the outside of a server, the most vulnerable location).

What about stopping power? If someone is trying to make the critical game-winning run through a Mycoweb, they can usually get through by matching 5 strength and breaking two subroutines (the last two). Mycoweb is in a weird spot where it has a lot of subroutines, but they rely a lot on synergy in order to work, e.g. the first two subroutines usually have no immediate impact other than setting up the last two subroutines (although they are helpful for future runs). In one of my games, I was trying to steal the last required agenda point from R&D with low credits and dubious breakers, and couldn't afford to break all the subroutines – so I just broke half the subroutines, and still got in. In the early game, the stopping power is even worse – you can't use a Mycoweb to stop a steal unless you have a run-ending sentry or code gate rezzed already, or rezzable from the play area or Archives, and you won't be able to afford both the ICE to copy and the Mycoweb. As such, the stopping power is somewhere between "somewhat porous" (late-game) and "this doesn't matter at all" (early-game). One way you can try to patch up this weakness is to play ICE like Anemone that make the first two subroutines relevant even on a last desperate run; but this is only a tax of 1–2 more, so the synergy probably isn't worth it unless your deck wants to play Anemone anyway.

I was initially expecting the taxing element to be the best part of Mycoweb, and it is, but it still isn't as good as I'd like. The basic issue is that the normal approach to taxing ICE is to put it on a server that the opponent's deck wants to run repeatedly (e.g. R&D against certain Shapers) in order to limit the number of runs that they can make there (via forcing them to spend more money, and thus more time repairing their economy between each run). In order to get value for that, you want to have your taxing ICE rezzed early – otherwise the opponent will get most of their value runs in the early game and just switch server once you've spent effort in fortifying the server they were originally attacking. But Mycoweb isn't useful for taxing until you're already set up with additional ICE to copy, or appropriate ICE in Archives, so it only taxes through a small proportion of the game – and that mostly negates the purpose of taxing the opponent, because the number of runs you're stopping is low in absolute terms and thus the amount of damage you're doing to their gameplan doesn't justify Mycoweb's 8 rez cost. The actual amount taxed is also smaller than it looks: decoders are generally more efficient at breaking things than fracters or killers, the opponent can know or guess that some of the subroutines might be irrelevant and not break it, and the opponent may consider face-tanking the subroutines in certain gamestates (often the best you can do with the last two subroutines is 3ish net damage, which most runners are capable of tanking if they don't have to do it too often).

I'm not yet sure whether Mycoweb's status is "playable as a 1-of in most decks which synergise with them, because it's decent in the late-game", "playable only in decks which synergise with it particularly well", or "never worth it regardless of deck" – I don't have enough experience with or against it to work out in which of those categories it falls. But I don't think it's a staple, and your deck would need to fit it particularly well to consider playing it at 3 copies.