The general function of this card is similar to Personal Workshop, but the differences matter.

They are similar in the respect that these are two different 1 resources that let you install hosted programs and counters in the middle of a run, sometimes with a small discount. That's the core functionality that a Shaper needs, really; being able to see the ice and prepare moments before you slam into it.

However, Paule's Cafe represents a more significant risk-reward payout and build-around.

With Personal Workshop, the only thing you need to do to get the discount is wait. This only gets you 1 credit of value per turn; but as long as you can keep something on it at all times, you're guaranteed that drip econ. You can also afford to wait a very long time; there's no hurry to install anything once it's on the workshop, apart from the risk of getting tagged and the corp blowing the resource up.

Paule's Cafe, meanwhile, is actually a cost, if you don't have any connections installed. Assuming that you are installing the one discounted card per turn, you need 2 connections in order to see the same discount as Personal Workshop. Any turn you take off, you're losing the economic benefit. And if you double-install on one turn, you're losing the benefit and still paying the 1-credit overhead.

The best-case scenario, on the other hand, is pretty good. If you can get down 3 or 4 persistent connections, you start to generate some serious advantage. Getting an instant-speed install at a discount of 2 or 3 credits every turn adds up extremely quickly.

But, that is kind of difficult. Any strategy built around unique cards has the problem of "dead draws"--by putting more than one copy of any unique card in your deck, you run the risk of drawing it when you already drew an earlier copy, wasting the click. If your only dead draw is a second copy of your console, that's reasonable, but if you're filling your deck with unique connections you start to have a statistically appreciable number of dead draws, counteracting the economy of the cafe.

You can avoid this by having a deck full of 1-off connections...but then you run into the problem of how many viable connections there actually are in your format. If you're playing weak connection cards just to fuel the Cafe, you're weaking your deck's overall game plan.

The 4 influence also is pretty prohibitive to put into any non-Shaper deck.

Overall, I think this is strictly worse than Personal Workshop. But Paule's cafe is Standard-legal and the Workshop isn't, and so any Shaper deck which is already running 1 or 2 connections could consider slotting a singleton Cafe without worrying about it.

So, first off, the flavor on this card is killer. The alias used by this runner is a reference to one of the oldest and most pervasive cons in the history of the Internet...the Nigerian Prince scam. That's right. We have a Nigerian criminal hacker who is, in essence, calling himself the Nigerian prince. Sick.

Mechanically, the base of his card is pretty boring. 45/15 deck limits, nothing fancy. He gets 1 to start with, which makes it easier to use cloud breakers or Security Nexus, if that is what you want. Nothing interesting to talk about.

So let's move on to his ability. The first time each turn the Corp installs something each turn, they have a choice; pay 1, or expose it to you.

Now, historically, pure expose effects haven't seen much play. Infiltration managed to survive the core set revision, which is strange, given how rarely it was used. No one ever uses the expose option on Deuces Wild. Lemuria Codecracker was a joke.

But this is a little disappointing because, in the game of bluffs and calls that Netrunner should be, knowing the difference between a Wall of Static and a Neural Katana is a big deal. Early game, when you don't have icebreakers, ramming a Wall is a cheap way to cost the corp some credits...but hitting a Katana without a killer means, at best, losing tempo to redraw the lost cards, and at worst you lose a key rig piece or die outright.

There was also a consistency issue. Late game, expose effects are not greatly useful; the board state is well established, you have your breakers. It's mostly only useful in giving you a way to dodge a Project Junebug bluff in their scoring remote, which many corp decks don't even use. So you don't want to put in too many expose cards. But putting in only a couple expose cards means not having them reliably when you need them early on.

But, 419 changes that. Now, expose isn't a thing you have to add to your deck. It's something you get by default, the whole game, at no cost, repeatedly. That is a terrifying amount of information. Knowing every trap the corp has laid down, knowing every ICE the corp has played, lets you make the perfect move every time.

So the Corp is going to want to stop you. And they can do this in two ways. First, they can install multiple cards in a turn. This is only somewhat effective, though; spending an entire turn to install only gives them 2 "invisible" cards and wreaks havoc on a lot of gameplans.

The other way is for them to spend 1. That doesn't seem that bad, does it? Here's the thing though. Doing that every turn absolutely kills a corp's economy. Remember the old HB core identity? It was easily the strongest ID in the faction because it generated so much freaking cash. So, inversely, losing 1 credit each turn you install makes a corp broke...which is exactly where Criminals want corps to be.

So, your corp can't just give out free information every turn, and they also can't afford to pay up every turn. So you need to prioritize. Give out some information, and keep the important stuff secret. Oh, but then you've just told 419 what stuff is important. After all, you wouldn't pay to prevent exposing a simple PAD Campaign or a Pop-up Window. So if you're hiding it, it must be valuable...or dangerous.

So far, though, I've just been describing a vanilla Criminal deck run in 419 instead of, say, Silhouette or Nero Severn. Where this gets bonkers is in the combos and support they added.

Aumakua becomes an insane AI breaker--with the amount of exposing you do, and the opportunity to bounce off un-iced remote assets, you can quickly get it to 3 or 4 strength, and cruise through low-strength ice until they purge. Falsified Credentials becomes another three Sure Gambles that can be played from 1 credit. Blackguard is okay, but is not as good as 419's own console Zamba, which is a respectable 4 for 2...and makes it so the corp has to choose between paying, and letting you get paid AND see their stuff AND buff Aumakua.

But you'll notice that while these abilities are all really strong, the combo pieces are all very simple, and there aren't that many of them. 419 has so much room to build his deck. He's strong, but versatile.

Hail to the Prince.

It's like Donut Taganes for the Corp!

What's that you say? "Who's Donut?" "I've never seen that card before?" "Why would anyone play that card?"

The third question answers the first two. The fact is, operations and events are pretty dang important. Very few decks make their economies work without any form of burst econ, or sneaky one-use tricks.

Which, maybe, makes this card a little more viable? If you play Rolling Brownout, and the runner plays an event, then the net impact is that you are down 1 credit and the runner is down 1 credit as well. If they play two events on two turns, then you've broken even and the runner is down 2. Which is...maybe acceptable?

Of course, the runner could simply not play an event until they bust the current, in which case you are just down 2 credits. And to make that happen you had to run a deck with very few operations, a risky proposition against any runner who likes to hit HQ and trash stuff.

But it's one influence, I guess? In case you wanted to play this bad card somewhere else?

So, NEXT Ice has never been bad. Maybe it's never been great. But it's never been bad.

4/2 agendas have never been great. Sometimes they've been okay. But they're competing for deck slots with 3/2s, and while many 3/2s have rotated out (ding dong the witch is dead) the Projects are still kicking. A 4/2 agenda, therefore, needs to offer some compensation if it's stolen (like Explode-a-palooza) or some benefit if you score it (like Corporate Sales Team).

NEXT Wave 2 gives you...a brain damage. One. If you have NEXT Ice rezzed. That part's easy, honestly.

Or, it would be, if NEXT Bronze hadn't rotated out. Seriously, the whole point of NEXT ice is to be cheap, abundant, and self-reinforcing, so losing the only 2-cost ice in the suite is a bit of a punch in the genitals.

So instead of having easy fodder, you're now trying to work with NEXT Silver, which is alright, NEXT Opal, which is pretty much just bad, and NEXT Gold, which super expensive.

The core problem here is that doing 1 point of brain damage, by itself, isn't going to win you the game. It makes any future flatline easier, but only NEXT Gold has that potential in the required ice mix you have to run for this card. You could pair it with other brain damaging (or pseudo-brain damage like Self-Destruct Chips) to choke the runner's hand down. But generally, brain damage isn't a win condition.

So, to make this card work, you have to run an ice suite that isn't very good, score an agenda that could've been a Project Vitruvius, in pursuit of a win condition that doesn't really exist.

All I have to say, is that the next NEXT ice had better be good if this is going to see play post-rotation.

On the corp side, the economics here are pretty clear. Let's assume, for now, that the runner doesn't want to trash their stuff.

• If the runner has 1 card of a given type installed, there's no point in playing this, since it costs you +2 and you only get back 2.

• If they have 2 cards of a given type, you are spending +2 and getting back 4. That means, you're spending a card and a click to get 2 credits. That's worse than a Beanstalk Royalties.

• If they have 3 cards of a given type, now it looks okay. You're gaining a net +4, which is the same as a Hedge Fund, with only a two credit investment instead of five.

Anything above that, and this card starts to look really good, offering a significant amount of burst economy for a very low investment.

But, there are two catches. The first is that the runner has to have at least 3 cards of the same type installed for this to be worth playing, and realistically you're hoping for 4. In the late game, this is easy--most runner have at least a killer, a fracter, and a decoder, and unless they're running hardcore event econ they probably have a handful of resources as well. But this means that Biased Reporting can't fire until the late game, which is a disaster if you get it in an early hand and have to patiently wait.

The second catch is the option for the runner to trash their stuff. Now, most of the time, the runner isn't going to want to trash a card for 1. That's a pretty bad deal, especially if the cards in question are their key breakers or economy cards. But, trashing a card to gain AND deny the corp 2? Suddenly, that's a 3-credit swing, and more importantly, it keeps the corp poor. In the extreme case, the runner could clear their entire board, making this card a 2% loss for the corp instead of a gain.

This means that Biased Reporting is never going to be the card that enables a last-ditch effort. If you are sitting on 2 credits and just need a couple more to win, then unless you can bluff the runner out super hard, it's game over.

Overall, not a bad card, and against decks that go all-in on a particular type of gear (Off-Campus Apartment decks, or basically any Hayley deck) it can be an insane value. But it seems like a card you run as a 1-of or 2-of, to reduce the risk of drawing it at a bad time or in a bad matchup.