Marrow

♦ Marrow 2[credit]

Hardware: Console - Cybernetic

Influence: 2

+1[memory unit]

You get +3 maximum hand size.

When you install this hardware, suffer 1 core damage.

Whenever the Corp scores an agenda, sabotage 1. (The Corp trashes 1 card of their choice from HQ or the top of R&D.)

Limit 1 console per player.

Illustrated by Martin de Diego Sádaba
Decklists with this card

Midnight Sun (ms)

#6 • English
Startup Card Pool
Standard Card Pool
Standard Ban List (show history)
Printings
Rulings

No rulings yet for this card.

Reviews

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.

(Midnight Sun Booster Pack era)

Feels like it's meant to combo with Esâ Afontov: Eco-Insurrectionist, but yeah, I'd rather have a Brain Cage too. Maybe Esa wants both?

Yeah, if you're ALL IN on Esa and think the game will go like 8+ turns, having both Brain Cage and Marrow feels like it might work. I don't have a good handle on how many Esa triggers I should be aiming for. Most brain damage cards aren't exceptionally good.

Marrow, Brain Cage, Light the Fire!, Running Hot. Is anything else worth considering? Is anything else even still legal?

Ah... Begemot and Ghosttongue. Hrm.

Definitely feels like I'm slotting mediocre cards just to trigger Esâ. I don't want any of those cards in my deck except LtF.

Ghosttongue looks excellent. Light the Fire is a lot of work if you're mainly using it for 2 sabotage. If you're not getting a lot of value out of trashing all of the cards in a server, Chastushka feels more efficient if you can swing a run on HQ.

It's super early but my hunch is that Esa's highest and best use is adding 6-10 sabotage onto an Augustina deck. I don't think these 6-10 need to happen early and it's okay if it takes a while to find the cards that cause them.

Okay, I've come around. I was testing an Esa virus deck and I think you got it exactly right. Sabotage starts out just okay, but the 16th sabotage is worth a whole lot more than the first.

I'm testing in Startup and it's quite powerful. I'm not generally sold on Ghosttongue, which seems like a worse Prepaid VoicePAD, but in Esa, definitely. And Begemot is a beast, especially with Pelangi... more synergy with Avgustina Ivanovskaya and The Nihilist.

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...

(Elevation era)

"a best case of '2 Chastushkas', from the Cybernetic and On-Score abilities, plus the +2 max hand size", for just two credits, is a great way to look at it!

I actually tried to play this outside of Esa, but the decks never really worked out. My line of thought was that the extra hand size mitigates the core damage from #

Zenit Chip JZ-2MJ, a good draw tool, and Ghosttongue, a good eco tool, in Tremolo decks. Well, that neither worked for my Steve nor for my Hosh xD

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.

(Midnight Sun era)
4892

Nice review (as your reviews are, I read them and I like them). About the art I think it's an internal view that this console is... in your spine so with this you're really have the BMI inside of you. I think it evokes great power but also the core damage that you have to suffer in order to, well, substitute your spine. It's a bit like spinal modem