I think this card is a sleeper. The fact that it's a 4/2 that isn't Nisei MK II makes it easy to discount, but it has a lot of upsides. First of all, it's 5 cards, which is a good boost to your economy. The reveal effect is slightly annoying, and clearly only there to create a slightly artificial-feeling synergy with the Hyoubu Institute: Absolute Clarity, but you can live with it. The counter mechanic means you can pull the cards as you need them. It's not Corporate Sales Team, but it's still a significant pace advantage.

Then there's the shenanigans. As Ip87 has already pointed out, you can use this to trap the top of R&D on demand. It's not really a 'mind games' effect though, as you can fire it in the window after the runner has committed to accessing. I actually think that Jinteki trap decks would be more fun with lower variance, and this supports a move in that direction. It's more 'if I have a trap in HQ, the runner will hit it', with a consolation prize of ensuring the top of R&D is safe even if you fire speculatively and draw drunk. You can also use it to clean/trap HQ in a similar way, although given that the only place you can 'hide' agendas is on top of R&D that's often not going to be a flawless plan. I guess you could argue that's where the mind games come in. Or you could just drop an Anansi over R&D.

Another very notable synergy with this card is Political Dealings. By firing it on the runner's last click, you can stack an agenda on top of your deck to set up a reliable fast advance. This makes PolDeals a much more viable card, as you can drop it among your shell game servers and rez it only when you know the fast advance is on. This makes it comparable to a Biotic Labor, except that now the runner has to spend resources trashing it.

All of this means that Flower Sermon belongs in an entirely different deck to Nisei. Sermon gives you pace, while Nisei supports a slow, grindy game. Sermon helps with fast advance trickes while Nisei wants you to play a bunch of ice. That means that arguably, the agendas Sermon is actually up against are Fetal AI and Project Yagi-Uda. The first may be better if you're doubling down on death and don't see yourself scoring agendas that can't be never-advanced. The latter has its own, more obvious synergy with fast advance and shell games - simply being a 3/2.

This makes Flower Sermon a bit of a puzzle. It's not as good as Nisei in the Jinteki decks that are currently thought of as strong. That's why I think it's a sleeper. It will need a slightly novel deck archetype to succeed. I hope someone works it out.

Yep. Totally gonna use this to drop Snare! on top of RnD. Or any deck ambush, really. One could use four counters just filtering and playing mind games, but as long as there is one counter left, RnD looks awfully dangerous. And, if the runner believes you are up to just that, that also indicates that HQ is dangerous. With Jinteki: Replicating Perfection back in the mix, this could be a lot of fun. Is it Nisei MK II? No, the design is promising. I am glad to see Nisei following up on Reign and Reverie's mind-game swap mechanics, because they always seem so cool, but lack enough punch in practice.

Let's say that, for whatever reason, you decided to make a Jinteki rush deck. (Saraswati is a good choice, due to saving a click every time you install an agenda; rush decks can sometimes live or die by their economy, and saving clicks gives you time to play the economic operations.)

In previous formats, the way to make a rush deck's economy work would be to fill your deck full of economic 4/2 agendas: Corporate Sales Team, Cyberdex Sandbox, Offworld Office, that sort of thing. (3/2s don't generally provide meaningful amounts of economy, with the exception of Luminal Transubstantiation which is not legal in Jinteki; and 5/x agendas are too hard to score for a rush deck.) Unfortunately, Corporate Sales Team has rotated, and Cyberdex Sandbox has been banned, leving a bit of a gap in the typical rush deck's agenda suite. As such, rush decks have to resort to scraping the bottom of the barrel for agenda economy somewhat, perhaps even resorting to marginal choices like Timely Public Release because "at least it saves a click installing ICE".

Trying to fill this void for a Jinteki rush deck, I decided to try out Flower Sermon, and was blown away by just how much it helps out the typical rush deck. This happens for two main reasons:

• The agenda gives a direct economic benefit, in that it allows you to clicklessly draw cards. Drawing cards by click is something that a rush deck frequently has to do (because you want to get the agendas into hand before the opponents can set up, and also need to draw into ICE and economy operations). So the agenda is effectively saving on those clicks.

  The relatively free card draw is also pretty helpful for Jinteki rush decks in particular, as it helps to support certain cards that they would likely be running anyway – Hansei Review for their economy, and Anoetic Void to delay the Runner by the last vital couple of clicks (it is far from unheard of for the Runner to find their last critical icebreaker halfway through the turn before you score the 7th point, so having a clickless way to fuel Anoetic Void can make the difference between a win and a loss).

• The agenda also gives a fairly large indirect economic benefit: it helps to protect the top of R&D, because you can use an agenda counter to put a useless card there (or even a Snare!, and you can do that once the Runner is already committed to accessing). This means that once you have scored a Flower Sermon, R&D needs less protection than it usually would, and so it effectively saves you money because you don't have to rez (or even install) as much ICE there as you normally would. This effect probably isn't quite up there with Offworld Office, but it isn't that much worse, and it's definitely better than the currently available alternatives for economic agendas.

  It's worth noting that this protection works even against the new Cataloguer (you place an untrashable card on top of R&D after the Runner rearranges it). It doesn't work against Stargate, but Cataloguer is much more popular at the moment – often replacing Stargate – and that's helping to make Flower Sermon better than it previously was.

This means that Flower Sermon is probably better-positioned for rush decks nowadays than it has been at any time since it was printed. It's no longer facing as much competition from other agendas, with most of the good economic agendas being rotated or banned. It's also facing a more friendly line-up of cards from the Runner side than in previous formats. If you decide to play a Jinteki rush deck in the current metagame, it should definitely form part of your agenda suite – it has been one of the best-performing agendas in my testing (along with the obvious Offworld Office).

The remaining question, of course, is "should I really be playing a Jinteki rush deck anyway?". I don't have a great answer to that one – other styles of Jinteki decks are more popular at the moment, and probably for good reason. But in my testing, it at least hasn't been completely hopeless; even with an untuned list, it seems to outperform most of the other casual Corp decks I've been trying out (although I suspect it won't hold up in a proper tournament), and it's a good way to get a lot of games in quickly. Still, if we ever end up in a metagame favouring rush (which looks like it might actually happen, given the popularity of somewhat clunky Shaper decks at the moment), Jinteki rush seems to be an interesting alternative to Weyland rush, and if it's viable, Flower Sermon will be a major part of the reason why.