Man, oh man. This is going to shake the meta up. A lot.

First things first. It's a 1-cost, 1-influence Connection with a trash ability. Off-Campus Geist loves the shit out of this card for that reason alone, especially given that Tech Trader is now a thing which exists. Throw in a couple Fall Guys and let the good times roll.

But that's just the surface. This card delivers a whole world of hurt to any deck running assets and upgrades.

Assuming that you're running HQ once in a while anyway (and of course you will be), it costs you a click and a credit to install this card. In return, it lets you trash a card without needing to run.

This already saves you a ton against glacier decks. Corp trying to run out an Adonis Campaign in their scoring remote? That's not happening. Being Blacklisted by Chronos Protocol? This guy will handle it. The existence of this card means that no asset is safe, no matter how much ice you put in front of it.

But there's more. Oh yes, there's more. The trashing is a paid ability. Instant speed. Which can be used in the middle of a run. Meaning that Caprice Nisei is dead as soon as she is rezzed, and Ash not long after. Meaning that you can kill that Dedicated Response Team before the Snare! tags you, saving your goshdarned life.

Of course, the card has to be rezzed. But if the corp is refusing to rez something, that's a victory by itself, and there's always Drive By in case you need something dead before you even see it, or if you can't afford the trash cost.

There is one regrettable thing about this card, though. A lot of two-word card names get abbreviated: ProCo, CyCy, Mopus, that sort of thing. And Political Operative has a rather unfortunate one.

Plop.

A lot of people aren't really liking this card, particularly with the one influence cost. As Zakalwe points out, if you're only making a run or two per turn, Net Celebrity pays off much faster. So what gives?

They're missing something significant. Bad publicity scales quadratically.

Bad publicity gives you a discount on every run you make. Increasing the amount of bad publicity you have means that you both save more per run, and runs are cheaper, letting you make more of them.

Consider this. The corp has a single Eli 1.0 protecting R&D, and you have a Corroder or Eater and a Keyhole. You just played a Day Job and have 10 credits and want to hammer R&D. How many times can you hit it before needing to click for credits?

0 bad pub: it costs you 4 each run, meaning you only get two runs (with 2 left over).
1 bad pub: now it's only 3 per run, so you can hit R&D three times (with 1 extra)
2 bad pub: At 2 per run, you can hit R&D five times before needing more funding.
3 bad pub: Ten credits at 1 per run is ten runs.
4+ bad pub: Running is free, bro. Unlimited Keyhole-ing.

Do you see what happens there? Going from 2 per run to 1 per run doubles the number of runs you can make.

This is where Corporate Scandal is strong--when you are just piling on bad publicity and walking through ICE like it isn't there. Obviously, this is strongest out of Valencia--she starts with one bad pub, which turns on Investigative Journalism, and then between Frame Job+Fan Site and Corporate Scandal you can get yourself to 3-4 bad publicity without much effort. More than that if they're running Hostile Takeover or illicit ice like Grim.

Of course, you need to have a way to make productive runs. Trashing assets is a good start: remember that you can use bad pub money during runs on unprotected servers to trash those Museums and Mumba Temples and Pālanā Agroplexes. Hitting HQ repeatedly with a Lamprey installed can be mean. Keyhole as I mentioned above. Or get something with instant-speed installs like Self-modifying Code, Clone Chip, Personal Workshop, or Savoir-faire and use bad pub during runs as your personal bankroll. Why not?

Really, the greatest downside to this card is that you can only play one current at a time, which means you have to choose between this and Itinerant Protesters. Which is better: having 3 bad pub and forcing the corp down to two cards in hand, or having 4 bad pub? Depends on the board state and the matchup, I guess.

The point is, don't knock it until you try it. Valencia has many more tricks up her sleeve than just Blackmail.

I have to comment on how freaking awesome the flavor on this card is. You are "recalling" thinking, feeling bioroids, with hopes and dreams, because they didn't live up to your expectations. Brutal. Most chilling flavor since Clone Retirement.

Anyway, the card itself. There are two ways to use this: you can either include it with cards specifically to trash them, or you can trash cards you were planning on getting rid of anyway.

The first plan is almost always a terrible idea. Even if you're trashing the in-faction Cybernetics Court, that still means you're spending two clicks and two cards for a net gain of 5. That's simply not good enough. The only card that could maybe justify it would be Sealed Vault; installing and recalling a Vault is effectively the same as playing two Hedge Funds but can be done from zero money.

What about if you happen to be playing high-trash cost cards already, which you want to get rid of? Eve Campaign is one of the obvious answers, but because you have to trash it while there are 2 still on it you're really only gaining 3. If you're playing Cerebral Imaging, Cybernetics Court is a good fallback for if you run low on money, then you can Recall it to get the same effect plus one.

But really where this is useful is in dealing with Executives: The Board, for example, or Director Haas. If they start to look unsafe you can always Recall them, putting them safely in Archives while you pick up a hefty sum from their high trash cost.

In either case, you can get more bang for your cardboard buck when you include things that increase trash costs. The three ways to increase trash costs at the moment are Encryption Protocol, Oaktown Grid, and Industrial Genomics. Again, though, you don't want to be putting in cards to increase trash costs just in case you draw your Product Recalls at the right time, but if you're already running IG and can spare the influence for some Sealed Vaults and Product Recalls (or six other HB cards), you could make some serious cash.

Here's the thing about Jinteki. Some of the time they're trying to kill you. And sometimes they just want you to suffer.

Sure, you have a few cards with the potential for a kill: Cortex Lock, Ronin, Snare!. But you also have a lot of cards that, while they hurt the runner, are unlikely to actually kill them. Psychic Field, Shock!, Komainu, Shi.Kyū, House of Knives, Fetal AI, Hokusai Grid.

The "Thousand Cuts" archetype wants the runner to bleed. It forces the runner to realize that they're going to lose somewhere around a third of the cards in their deck over the course of a game. Any tightly-wound strategy player with combo pieces that have to be held in hand, or anything that used cards as fuel (cough Faust cough Aesop cough Apex cough MaxX) is going to find themselves with very little left in their stack to work with.

This is where Harvester comes in. Forcing the runner to draw up to and past their maximum hand size means you are going to have a tough time killing them. But, if the runner was already at max hand size when they hit it, that means that SIX CARDS are going to get thrown in the garbage. SIX. That's 13% of a normal size runner deck.

Of course, that does mean that the runner can churn through their deck faster to find exactly what they need. And this is where your other net damage becomes really useful. See, against a thousand-cuts deck, a wise runner will hold their less useful cards in hand as a buffer so that suprise Snare! hurts less. But if you've just been Harvested, that isn't an option.

But this only matters if the runner is at max hand size when they hit Harvester. If the runner can absorb one of the subroutines without discarding, it doesn't look so great. As a result, Harvester does best in a deck that does brain damage or otherwise limits hand size. Pālanā Agroplex will also help you keep their hands full.

Conversely, if you're in a meta with a lot of Brain Chip, it's probably going to help the runner more than it hurts them. Definitely don't run Harvester and Mental Health Clinic in the same deck.

Ho man. The second piece of consumer-grade hardware is here, and it's just as exciting as Ramujan-reliant 550 BMI was disappointing.

First thing, and this is VERY IMPORTANT: while NetChip lets you use a huge-ass rig full of massive programs, it does not technically give you extra memory. That means you can't throw down six NetChips and get a huge Sage or Overmind. You can host them on it but the actual empty MU has to come from somewhere else.

The next important thing to note is that while, in theory, you could hold 36 MU worth of programs on a full setup of six Net Chips, the largest two programs in the game right now (Endless Hunger and Hyperdriver) only cost 3 or 4 each. You're also never going to install more than one Endless Hunger at once, and Hyperdriver is a temporary program.

So really, your NetChips are going to be providing, at best, 2 MU each. That's pretty reasonable: a lot of useful programs cost two memory. For example: Magnum Opus, Keyhole, Garrote, Morning Star, Sneakdoor Beta, Sage. Many of these haven't seen much play because that 2 MU cost was just so expensive--and when's the last time you saw someone run Battering Ram or Collective Consciousness?

A realistic estimate for your NetChip usage is that even if you install all of them, you're only going to be able to host 9-10 MU worth of programs on them. Plus your starting 4MU, and 1 or 2 more from your console, and you're looking to be able to fit about 16 MU of programs into your rig.

So now you have to ask yourself two questions. The first question is: do I really need 16 MU? That's an obscene amount. Truly disgusting. Runners have developed to run lean and mean; before Maya, the Shaper console of choice was Astrolabe, because 5 MU was more than enough in most cases. Past a certain point, extra MU is just wasted space.

Because if you're not really using that much more, you have to ask the second question: should I just run Akamatsu Mem Chip instead? It's the same install cost, one less influence, and because you aren't hosting anything the order in which you play your programs doesn't matter. If you get three Akamatsu Mem Chip and a Maya installed, you have 9 MU, which is still pretty impressive.

But if you're of the opinion that bigger is always better, give NetChip a try. You won't be disappointed.