Spoilers plus Brain Cage in a 1MU console. This is priced like +2 hand size and/or 1-2 sabotages are a major benefit. Unless some crazy synergies get printed around brain damage or trashing your own cards at random, this looks kinda lousy for a console.

This card already has two reviews, but if you read either of them, let alone both, you'd probably be confused and slightly misled. Is this card unplayably bad? Or is it a great console for any Anarch? Well... neither.

This card is built for Esâ Afontov: Eco-Insurrectionist and Esa only, I have never seen this card show up in a competitive deck outside of Esa and I have never seen a competitve Esa deck that plays anything else in it's console slot. It is, without question, one of the most "hard-coded" console/runner pairs in standard.

For the average Anarch this is indeed Brain Cage + Spoilers + Akamatsu Mem Chip and that is not worth your console slot, almost anything else would be better, even importing a console like Aniccam or Hermes would be preferable to this.

For Esa however, it does many things

+2 Hand Size - let's you take 2 additional Core Damage, that's two more Running Hots or two more Finalities on top of your "regular" Core Damage budget. After all, since Esa treats hand size as a resource, it stands to reason that +2 Hand Size would be worth a lot

1 Esa trigger (bought and paid for) - That means 2 extra sabotage and one instance of card cycling as soon as you install it

1-2 (sometimes more against certain decks) Bonus Sabotage - Whenever an Agenda gets scored, you'll get an extra instance of Sabotage to boot, which will usually be at least once or twice a game

Cheap Infaction MU - with Begemot requiring 2 MU, having an cheap, zero-fuss source of extra memory is another nice bonus

Best case scenario this card is functionally bankrolling 2 Chastushka's worth of sabotage over the course of a game, half of which it triggers itself. That's... exactly what Esa needs.

Would Esa play Brain Cage if it was still in standard? Almost certainly. But in the context of the more limited cardpool, where your only other alternatives are cards like T400 Memory Diamond, Hippocampic Mechanocytes or Supercorridor, Marrow is simply the best option you have when building an Esa deck and that's why for the foreseeable future, this card will continue to be hard coded to Esa.

TLDR: Esâ Afontov's Console, and Esa doesn't like to share...

A great console for any anarch.

For a mere 2, you get :

1. 7 hand size, making you resilient to BOOM!.
2. Non interactive sabotage 1 when the corp score and agenda. While this would trigger about twice a game, it is a good counter to Sportsmetal: Go Big or Go Home, which use lots of 1 points agendas, possibly triggering this up to 5 times. This is a minor benefit, but it is still a good benefit.
3. +1 MU, to put one more program on your board.

And if you are Esâ Afontov: Eco-Insurrectionist, you get to draw a card an cause sabotage 2, great combo.

All in all, a very good console. I would rate it about as good as Keiko, if you are not using companion.

While the art really evoke the feel of cybernetic, the name does not seems to fit with the art or effect. Maybe I missed something.