This is a card with a clear intent, but unworkable execution.

See, the idea behind this card to let it act as a release valve or a reset button. Let's say you're in the all-too-familiar position of having a hand full of agendas. If you can score the Retreat, those agendas go back in R&D, taking the pressure off HQ for one turn. Then, you can either trickle back up to full hand size while making money, or you can spend one click to refill your hand instantly. If you're Titan, or score a Genetic Resequencing, you can ever do it twice!

That's a fine goal, with a reasonable amount of usefulness. Except...it's tied to a 5/3, the hardest-to-score agenda size (with some exceptions).

If you're flooded with agendas, that's usually because you haven't secured a remote server yet. And if you haven't secured a remote, then how are you going to buy yourself enough time to get five whole advancements on this agenda? It becomes a catch-22: if you can score Executive Retreat, you probably don't want to, and if you need to score Executive Retreat you probably can't.

We can probably cut Lukas and the other devs some slack, here--after all, this was only the second data pack ever. They were still learning the ins and outs of the game. And so when it became clear that this card wasn't working, they essentially rereleased it as Corporate Shuffle. If you need to shuffle, you can do so on demand now, instead of needing to try to score when you're already under the gun.

There is one good thing to come out of this card, though, and that is the hilarious deck of the same name by bionicsheep, which turns our favorite game of terrorists and digital conspiracies into a daytime romance reality TV show.

DaVinci is what happens when a Shaper tries to run like a Criminal.

See, DaVinci is most similar to Desperado. If you make 5 successful runs with Desperado, you get 5 credits. If you get 5 successful runs with DaVinci, you get to install a 5-cost card from your grip for free. That's sort of the same thing, right?

Well...sort of. There are a lot of differences that make DaVinci a unique animal.

First, DaVinci is not permanent. Desperado makes you a credit a run, forever. DaVinci stops adding value either after you use it, or when you start earning power counters you're never going to use. If you use DaVinci to install a Liberated Account, then every run after the sixth gave you no additional value. The upper limit of value you can get from DaVinci is the most expensive installable card in your deck.

Second, DaVinci is not unique, or a console. You can easily have several DaVincis working at once, earning you several "credits" every run, and can still have a console alongside it. You could even be running two DaVincis and a Desperado at the same time. In fact, you probably should.

Third, DaVinci doesn't give you liquid credits. With Desperado, the credits you get from your early runs can be spent on your later runs. DaVinci gives you nothing until it pays out, and you can't go half-and-half with it; you must have the full install cost in power counters. It could be really frustrating to have 5 credits and 5 power counters, and still be unable to install the Garrote you really need.

Fourth, DaVinci gives you an instant-speed install. This is valuable on its own. You can run R&D with three counters on a DaVinci, and both a Medium and a Mimic in hand, dropping the killer if you need it and the Medium if you only see code gates and barriers. It also allows you to activate Hayley on the corp's turn. It improves the overall economy of the card, since the click you used to install DaVinci is the same click you would have used to install the other card.

DaVinci works best in an ID and a deck built for speed and stacking up "successful run" triggers. It would make a fine addition to the "Andy-sucker-rado-testing" build, but you could also make it work out of an aggressive anarch like Reina or Quetzal, or Kate in-faction, although I'm not sure if Kate's discount applies when using DaVinci. Feel free to experiment--it is a trash effect, which Geist likes, and it lets you install cards from 0 credits, which Nasir greatly enjoys. Just keep it out of Iain, and you'll probably do fine.

Rabbit Hole: for when you absolutely, positively, need 3 right this second.

If you put in 3x Rabbit Hole (which is easy, even out-of-faction, due to the 1 influence cost) then you will find the first one quite early; you have about a 50% chance of seeing at least one in your first 9 cards (in a 45 card deck). Then, for 6 and one click to install, you should typically be able to pull them all from your deck at once, unless you got unlucky and have two in your opening hand.

This is the most efficient way to get three link in the game. Playing three Access to Globalsec costs you three cards, three clicks to install, and three credits, and that's assuming you can even find all three before the end of the game. Dyson Mem Chip is the same way, although you're getting some along the way. But that's still very, very slow, and if your gameplan relies on being linked to the max, it simply won't cut it.

But...why? Who on earth needs that much link strength?

For a long time, the answer was "pretty much nobody". A number of runners (Kate, Ed, Andy, and "Geist") start off with one link, and a single Dyson Mem Chip would put you in range to get free money from Underworld Contact and free MU from cloud breakers. On top of that, most decks didn't really run traces. You might see a few here and there, particularly in kill decks due to Midseason Replacements, SEA Source, or Punitive Counterstrike, but tracer ICE wasn't too popular. Notable exceptions to this were Data Raven and Ichi 1.0, but in both cases the trace was pretty secondary, and pretty weak anyway.

But Data and Destiny has two things which will change this up. The first is a huge boost to tracer ICE, in the form of the agenda Improved Tracers and the current Surveillance Sweep. With these two cards active, a lot of ignored ICE has the potential to become really dangerous; three of the four snake ICE (Viper, Caduceus, Uroboros) become really gross for someone without link, as do all the Zodiac ICE (Gemini, Taurus, Sagittarius, and Virgo). This meta shift might be enough to make link worthwhile on it's own.

The second D&D change is the introduction of Sunny Lebeau: Security Specialist, with her cards Security Nexus and Security Chip. These cards make link more valuable against any matchup--if you can efficiently beat a trace 5, you get a free Inside Job every turn, and the Chip gives your breakers the strength they need to chew through just about anything. Sunny starts off with two link, and the Nexus makes three; but to really capitalize on the Nexus and the Chip, you want as much link as you can get. Rabbit Hole fits that niche nicely.

Way, way back in the bad old days of the Core Set, tagging served essentially one purpose: Scorched Earth. The logic there was simple. If you can cause the runner to float one tag, just one, while you have a Scorch in hand, you can win the game. And so strategies emerged, which focused on getting the runner to have that one tag. Snare! would force them to decide between drawing up, or clearing the tag. SEA Source meant that, with an economic advantage, you could one-two punch your way to victory.

Runners learned this, of course. They figured out that every turn they floated tags was a turn they risked annihilation. So, they cleared tags. And because most corps were only able to stick one tag at a time, this meant that runners came in two states: tag-free, and dead.

Midseason Replacements, released in the first cycle, shook this up a bit. Now, there was a way to absolutely smother the runner in tags, all at once. This, incidentally, made Psychographics a secondary option to exploit tags, especially alongside Project Beale (which was released in the same pack as Midseasons). So, now runners could come in three states: tag-free, dead by Scorched Earth, or buried in tags and rapidly losing the game.

But again, runners adapted. Since they might not be able to clear the tags off to dodge the Scorch, they started using Plascrete Carapace and later I've Had Worse to eke out a few more turns of life. They built stronger economies, or used Vamp, to keep the corp just far enough behind to make Midseasons unviable. And then the corps pushed back again; Traffic Accident and Punitive Counterstrike could burn through protection, and decks like When the Flash Wears Yellow made economy their goal.

But, fundamentally, it was the same tagging dynamic. Corp decks were looking to either stick just one tag, or to pull Midseason Replacements and overload the runner. And in that meta, Big Brother was a terrible card. It couldn't help you enable Scorch, and once you pulled off a Midseason Replacements saying "take two more" way supremely underwhelming.

The times they are a-changing, though. As more NBN cards were released over the Lunar and SanSan cycles, and with the spoiled Data and Destiny coming swiftly up, we are going to see a shift towards a third kind of deck; the tags-as-tax deck. These decks will not try to Scorched Earth or PsychoBeale. Instead, they will simply pressure the runner with a steady flow of tagging cards: News Team, Casting Call, TGTBT, Bernice Mai, and many new pieces of tracer ICE.

At the cost of one and 2 (or 3, with one side of SYNC) each, the runner might find themselves going bankrupt, backsliding every time they try to do something productive. And it's just so, so easy to give in and stop clearing them off...and that's when they spring the traps. Closed Accounts. Pachinko. Information Overload. The All-Seeing I. Shoot the Moon. Quantum Predictive Model. The other side of SYNC. And many more. None of these cards ends the game outright...but damn, do they make the runner's life hard.

It is in this deck archetype that I believe Big Brother will find its niche. Runners will typically clear one tag...but three? Especially against SYNC, that's a huge tempo loss. And as soon as they give up, they're looking at all the nastiness NBN can throw at them.

I once read that the fundamental runner strategy could be written down as "Draw cards, get breakers, get money, run." There are exceptions, Noisemill decks being the most common deviant, but most runners follow this general pattern.

Drug Dealer helps one of these steps at the expense of another. Drug Dealer draws you cards, but costs you money. And it does so at the base rate of equivalency; 1 = 1 = 1 card drawn. So why would this be a good thing?

Well, simply put, it's easier to turn cards into money than it is to turn money into cards. Take the simplest example, Sure Gamble. If you have a Gamble in hand, then the next time you would spend a click for a credit you can instead spend a click for a gain of 4. This means that the mere act of drawing a Sure Gamble is essentially worth 3. So if Drug Dealer gives you a Sure Gamble, he's paid off for that turn and the next two.

But, you need money to run, and drawing cards doesn't help that. (Unless you're playing Faust, of course.) If you're spending all your Sure Gambles and Daily Casts just keeping up with your dealer, then you're never going to have the money you need to actually install breakers and get in when you need to.

Meaning that if Data Dealer is your draw solution, you need to have a lot more economy in your deck, for two reasons. The first is consistency in your draws. If you've got 9 econ cards in a 45 card deck, you will see some money every fifth card on average...but you might have a dry spell of 7 or 8 non-econ cards in a row, and with Drug Dealer keeping you broke the corp has ample time to score out. Going up to 12 or more econ cards helps keep dry spells short.

The other reason is that a lot of economy in Netrunner is impermanent. Event-based econ is single use, and Daily Casts, Armitage Codebusting, and Liberated Account all run out eventually. If these are your economy, then there are only so many credits you can efficiently gain, and many of those are going to get burned to Drug Dealer. So you either need to run a lot more of it, or fall back on stable, long-term investments like Magnum Opus, Kati Jones, Desperado, Underworld Contact, or Data Folding.

A few closing thoughts:

• Drug Dealer is a connection, and if you have enough other connections you can make use of Calling in Favors or double down on the draw with Off-Campus Apartment.
• It's not unique: you can potentially be having a three /three card swing each round.
• At only 1 influence, it's easy to move into other factions, although Shapers already have plenty of options.
• If you are running broke (with Faust, for example) then you can cheat the dealers out of their money.
• Drug Dealer CAN cause you to lose the game if you overdraw your deck. If you're afraid of this, you should plan to use Aesop's Pawnshop or Chop Bot 3000 to remove them before this becomes a problem.