My first thought when reading her ability was, "Wow, that seems fun". And my second thought was, "That's way too powerful". But on examining the list of cards that use power counters, I realized that there is nothing game breaking (with the possible exception of her console). But my first thought holds true, there are some fun and interesting ideas to try.

First things first: her ability can trigger only once per turn and runs almost never occur on the Corps turn, so you'll only be generating a set amount of power counters. Interestingly, her ability occurs at the start of an R&D run, not on success. Spending a click to simply run into an Ice Wall may be worth it occasionally, but the real value comes from getting a power counter while doing something you need to do anyway. Successfully running and accessing R&D and/or putting on a brave face for instance. One important note about power counters: unlike virus counters, the Corp has no way to influence them, at least not yet.

Back to the list. Some of the cards are anti-synergetic, power counters are bad for these cards. But usually more is better. In my mind only about half the cards there are worth considering. I'll highlight a few of them below. (I may add more once more cards are revealed from Midnight Sun). You'll probably want to pick only one to focus her ability on.

Chatterjee University - I tried using this card years ago, but it just took too long to charge. And it's unfortunate that it can only target programs. While still janky, I think the extra power counters from the Captain could make this worth trying again. You'll need to get it out really early though which probably means it'd be a 3x.

District 99 - Any kind of recursion is welcome. You get your favorite tools back and it can save you from running out of cards vs Jinteki. However, this card has always been super clunky outside of MaxX and the influence is prohibitive. You could try it with the Captain but you'd need to include other ways of charging it up too.

Earthrise Hotel - This is one of the strongest options in the current pool. It's already a good card especially with support. But if you are running R&D anyway, you can keep this charged indefinitely, netting you a free two cards every turn!

Endurance - She's called Captain for a reason and this is it. Her console is a friggin' boat! And it's a super strong console at that. The install cost is high (though new Rigging Up helps a lot), but it's power rivals that of Sunny's Security Nexus (a console I despise). Once it's installed, you can face-check any ICE confident you probably will be fine. It's like a rechargeable Boomerang that you only have to install once and can be used on any ICE. I'm confident I won't like this console either when playing as the Corp.

Kasi String - Who doesn't want free game winning points? Charge this up in as little as two turns.

Mind's Eye - This is the interaction I'm most excited about. While probably not as good as her own console mentioned above, it's ability is not to be ignored and it's install cost is much lower. In Captain decks, for every three successful R&D runs on separate turns, you get two free R&D accesses! These accesses can be augmented by cards such as eXer or Nyashia or both.

Nyashia - Mentioned above, this card couples nicely with Mind's Eye. You're only going to be able to keep one of them charged with any efficiency. I'd tend to charge Mind's Eye and keep this as a three-time use R&D Interface. But you could try focusing on this.

The Turning Wheel - This is already a good card, helping you get those multi-accesses on both R&D and HQ. Getting it charged faster is always welcome.

Temple of the Liberated Mind - Once installed and used once, you could keep this charged with Padma's ability, getting one extra click each turn. This is definitely a better option than Upya.

Some lesser choices (in my mind) include Revolver, Takobi and Puffer. I think Captain Endurance is going to be a force to be reckoned with going forward. I actually hope they add a counter. Something akin to Macrophage, which counters viruses while not being worthless without them in play. Or maybe an agenda that clears power counters on scoring.

This is as much a game essay as a review, so strap yourselves in if you are up to it! Otherwise, skip ahead to the last two paragraphs for my suggestions.

Overview

Padma is undeniably weak, seeing almost no play, even at the peak strength of Shapers she was consistently beaten out by Lat, Arissana or Kit. This review will explain why she’s weak, how she could’ve been better designed and how she still can.

ID abilities can generally be thought in terms of 3 factors: payoff, play-pattern and deck-building requirements. What kind of cards do you need to include in your deck, what sort of play-pattern do you need to pursue to trigger your ability, and what is the reward for doing so?

Generalists

Speaking anecdotally, the most widely played IDs tend to have generalistic payoffs with lenient requirements.

Take Hoshiko for example, she gives you card draw and credits, something almost every deck can benefit from, while only requiring you to touch cards every other turn. Thus she can work with almost anything, Reg Anarch, Mulch, ICE destruction, etc., all can benefit from money and cards, and all want to run at least occasionally.

Lat is similar, almost all Shaper decks can benefit from clickless card draw and matching hand-size with the corporation requires almost nothing of you in deck-building and doesn’t greatly restrict your play pattern. Thus Lat can be played with a variety of archetypes, in the days of Endurance and Rezeki, he was the face of control shaper, in the days of Trick Shot and Deep Dive, he was the ID of choice, and when Aesop’s Pawnshop/Coalescence was the best engine, he could still slot in just fine.

Combo

By contrast, combo IDs tend to see relatively little play (unless their combo is busted), and be extremely confined to their specific play pattern.

Tāo, for instance, almost only ever uses Hermes, because the synergy with his ability is too great and he is currently best served by the Conduit/Aeneas engine, because he usually has to tunnel on a single server that he continually weakens in hopes of finding another agenda in time to snowball further. However, when properly locked out, he lacks the lateral options available to other IDs, he’s limited by being unable to reliably choose when and even if agendas will be scored or stolen and his ability does little against asset decks that play few ICE and combo kill decks that don’t plan to score out at all.

Similarly, Mercury usually runs few, if any, icebreakers and relies almost exclusively on finite, bypass tools to “cheat” their way through not just some of the corporation’s ICE, but all of the corporation's ICE. They then plan to win off a critical mass of multi-access supported by tools like The Twinning, “Pretty”, or WAKE Implant. But, much like Tao, they lack the flexible and strategic tools to control the flow of the game should they get unlucky, or get locked out.

Midground/Archetype Players

Most IDs fall somewhere in the middle and their playability is determined by how much value their ability can generate relative to how easy it is to fire said ability, as well as how good the cards in the archetype they belong to are.

Arissana is generally considered a good example, here, we can see the three components, Arissana requires Trojan synergies in deck-building, which lends her to a unique, trojan-centric archetype best played with her ID, she requires you to run often, something that is not-hard for aggressive runners and rewards you with clickless installs at a minimum, or game saving counter-play in a pinch (reactively installing a Hush, Slap Vandal, Botulus or Physarum Entangler can be game-saving). These reactive installs also enable her to be more aggressive with her runs, which is important for a high-tempo, run-based ID.

Padma is similar in theory, she requires you to include cards that can be charged in the deck building stage, and thus should be the best ID for any power-counter centric Archetype. Her play-pattern requires making regular runs, not unlike Arissana or Hoshiko in theory. And the pay-off is the power counters themselves, which have variable returns but can often be used for some amount of card-draw (Dr. Nuka Vrolyck), credits (Coalescence), multi-access (Cataloguer, WAKE, Twinning), breakers (Revolver, Propeller, Lobisomem) or utility (Hippocampic Mechanocytes, Poison Vial, Amelia Earhart). All in all, this seems fine, the biggest catch is that unlike these other IDs, Padma’s ability only fires when you run R&D.

The Problem with Padma

This is a bigger problem than you might initially think, locking your ability into a single server is a crushing limitation because of the counterplay it opens up to the corp. Against the other aforementioned, run-based IDs corporations would need to ICE up every server, a multiplicatively more difficult requirement than icing up just a single server. Because if you heavily ICE up one server against say, Arissana or Hoshiko, they can simply pivot and attack the new weakest server while still getting value from their ability. Whereas once R&D becomes unrunably expensive, should Padma pivot away from it, she is now playing with a blank ID box, a horrible situation to be in.

Furthermore, because her ID lacks in built protection like Arissana has, Padma is vulnerable to bad facechecks on R&D should she try to run into a facedown piece of ICE on turn one. She’s especially vulnerable, even when compared to conventional run-based decks like Criminal that try to force rezzes before they’ve installed any cards because Padma needs at least one card installed to use her ability on, simply increasing the number of potentially tempo-negative face-checks she could make.

There's a very good reason that ID design has moved away from server-specific abilities over its history, FFG era netrunner often included ID abilities that targeted a specific server like Gabriel Santiago, Steve Cambridge, Akiko Nisei or Silhouette. But NSG broadly recognized, correctly in my opinion, that these limitations are best placed on specific cards, not fundamental IDs, and you can see the fruits of these learnings in modern ID design. Zahya's ability works on HQ or R&D, as does Mercury's, Sable has to run a specific central server, but that server changes from turn to turn, so you can never truly know where to place ICE to lock her out for good. The decision to ignore all of these learnings when it comes to Padma and limit her ability to only work when running R&D confounds me as I can't see a good reason to place this limitation. It's like if Arissana could only install Trojans on ICE protecting R&D with her ability, or if Hoshiko only got to flip if she accessed cards in Archives, it just wouldn't make any sense and would be extraordinarily constrictive.

The Solution

My opinion, now more than ever, that we've had a good chance to see how Padma operates in the standard meta, is that Padma’s ability should read “The first time each turn you make a successful run, Charge 1 of your installed cards.”

This would make Padma’s gameplay so much cleaner and smoother at every stage of the game. On turn one, Icing up R&D is no longer so debilitating, because she can still run HQ and get a risk-free power counter. Even once HQ and R&D get iced up, you can still run Archives for a safe supply of power-counters, equivalent to clicking for 2 credits with Coalescence or 2 cards with Nuka, or preemptively charging up your multi-access for once you find your breakers.

In the mid-game, where you need to run the remote to keep the corporation in check, you can still generate an incidental power-counter to refund you some of the cost. If you need to sweep HQ on an important turn, you still get a power counter, if you need to run Archives to keep Jinteki honest or flush out a Spin Doctor, you still get a power counter. Even in the late game, where you might want to run R&D to close things out, you can still get a power counter, only generating that power counter once the run is successful, is a minor downside, but if anything, this is fairer than getting one when the run begins. Not to mention the fact that this reworded ability makes orthogonal game-plans like assets much more playable for her.

Ultimately, it would enable a far more "natural" style of Netrunner, one that incidentally rewards you for making the kinds of good runs you would want to make anyway, rather than attempting to force you into this awkward play pattern of "tunneling" on R&D.

How to Achieve it

I know why NSG does not do functional errata, but I want to propose an alternative solution to this problem. Create a Booster Pack, with maybe only 5 or so cards, such as this reworded version of Padma, reword Daeg to say something more like “The first time this game you install a card named Daeg and whenever an agenda is scored or stolen, you may Charge 1 of your installed cards.” Tweak the numbers on Nanuq or Tunnel Vision to give Shapers or Criminals a new playable AI, reprint Virtuoso but with 2 Memory instead of just 1, and maybe reprint Nanisivik Grid but make it unique. Call the whole thing the “Borealis Reprint Booster Pack” and give everybody who buys the next standard release cycle a copy of this booster pack, free of charge, that way you can easily disseminate these reprinted versions to everybody who is still into Netrunner (plus worst case scenario people can just proxy the new versions from print-and-play).

I strongly believe the Charge mechanic is underutilized and with the Borealis cycle recently released and not rotating for years to come, I think there’s a strong argument to be made that these underplayed or banned cards deserve a second chance while they’re still young. Just don’t reprint the Boat lol, I think this version of Padma would still be good without it :D