This is undeniably the strongest of Sunny's breaker suite, and I expect to see it in many, many other decks.

Before the release of Shrike, there wasn't a really strong choice for a universal, inexpensive killer that could efficiently break weak multisub sentries (Errand Boy, Komainu), strong single-sub sentries (Cortex Lock, Susanoo-No-Mikoto) and the great granddaddy sentry, the high-strength, multi-sub Archer. Faerie and Shiv are single-use, Mimic is fixed-strength, Garrote is too expensive and an MU hog, Dagger and Switchblade require stealth, and Ninja or Creeper are just generally terrible.

Shrike has none of those problems. It's a reasonable install cost, and either 1 or 0 MU depending on your link. One base strength is a bit low, but the 2-for-3 boost means that it can boost to higher levels decently efficiently. And the 2-for-all subroutine break helps compensate. All this, in a reasonable 2 influence package.

What this means is that if you have a rig of Corroder, Gordian Blade, and GS Shrike M2, the only thing preventing you from getting into a server is your credit pool, and with a Magnum Opus and/or Multithreaders that will not be a problem.

Shrike and Multithreader are the key cards which will make big-rig Shaper come back with a vengeance. We've already seen the first draft of this new paradigm with Feisty's Theory of Simplicity, and I expect other theorycrafters will take advantage of the late-game inevitability this breaker provides.

Nisei Division is just not very good.

There, I said it. But it's worth discussing why it's not very good, and thinking about maybe what it would need to become decent.

Any discussion of Nisei Division needs to start with a discussion of the psi game. Each player secretly and simultaneously spends 0, 1, or 2 credits. I'm going to repeat that, with added emphasis: each player secretly and simultaneously spends 0, 1, or 2 credits. This is crucial to the function of the game--the players are not simply choosing random numbers, because in Netrunner, every single credit matters.

So, spending less money is better than spending more money, all other things being equal. At the same time, though, the benefits of winning the psi game (or the penalty for losing) is typically so huge that it is worth the extra cost, if it works. This leads us to a strange situation, something vaguely similar to the Battle of Wits scene from The Princess Bride, with one crucial distinction--the corp has to make the values different, which is much easier than making the runner's task of making the values the same, giving an edge to the corp.

However. In some cases, the runner might be able to trigger the psi game repeatedly, or the penalty for losing might not be particularly severe--taking 1 brain damage from a Cerebral Cast, losing an early run to Snowflake, or letting the corp hold onto The Future Perfect when they don't have a scoring remote are all places where the runner can afford to lose the psi game. In this situation, an experienced runner will almost always bid 0--if the corp bids 0, they win, and if the corp spends 1 or 2 credits, they've at least forced the corp to burn resources.

This is where Nisei Division is theoretically advantageous. Now, instead of losing 2, 1, or 0 credits from a psi game, the corp might lose 1, break even, or gain 1 credit. Suddenly, the "always bid 0" runner tactic doesn't work, because the corp can always spend 1 (because they get it back), winning the psi game without cost. Betting randomly makes some sense now-- Nisei Division will break even in credits in the long term, while the runner will lose a credit per game on average.

This means that Nisei can afford to play a lot more psi game cards. Snowflake? Put in three of them. Cerebral Cast? Why not, put in a couple. Clairvoyant Monitor? No, that one is still pretty much terrible, leave it in the binder next to Bullfrog. And of course, the classic Jinteki cards The Future Perfect. Caprice Nisei, and Marcus Batty.

The problem is that this doesn't lead to any sort of real strategy. Cerebral Cast needs Scorched Earth to make both the brain damage and tag painful, but Caprice Nisei does nothing to help a kill strategy. Even if they break it every time, Snowflake is just a slightly cheaper Wall of Static, and there's not much point in using Marcus Batty to trigger an "end the run, maybe" subroutine. And because there aren't enough psi game cards to fill a deck, any Nisei Division deck will need to start pulling in cards that would fit better in Personal Evolution or Replicating Perfection--and at that point you might as well just play one of those IDs instead.

For Nisei Division to be able to stand up as a decent ID, there need to be more psi game cards, cards which trigger psi games more than once, and they need to have some internal synergy. That could happen--but I sincerely hope it does not, because reducing the outcome of every match to "who plays psi games better" would be a sad thing to happen to this game.

This is by far the least popular card in the stealth suite. And that's a crying shame, because it's really not a bad card.

Compare it to the gold standard of fracters, Corroder. Corroder installs for two, boosts for one, breaks for one, and has a base strength of two.

If you don't have any stealth credits, BlacKat installs for four and boosts for two, which is gross...but it has a base strength of three, which helps to offset this slightly. If you're breaking a barrier with strength 4 or less, BlacKat gets you through at the same cost as Corroder, or even 1 cheaper if you happen to be breaking something with a strength of exactly 3.

But barriers have high strength, that's sort of the point--what they lack in punishing subroutines, they make up for in stopping power. And as soon as you start seeing Fire Walls or bigger, BlacKat starts to hurt badly for any runner without stealth credits.

With stealth credits, the kitty does become quite efficient. A Dyson Fractal Generator fueling a Corroder saves you one normal credit per turn--marginal at best. But on BlacKat, that same DFG will save you 3 per turn--either you spend the credit to break all the subs on Spiderweb, or you spend 1 stealth + 1 nonstealth where previously you would have paid 4 non-stealth credits.

One stealth credit makes NEXT Silver trivial. Two credits makes Hadrian's Wall reasonable, and three gets you through Heimdall 2.0 only 2 real credits. And if you can get up to 4 stealth credits, even an outside Curtain Wall will fall for only 5 out-of-pocket credits.

This is the problem, though. Getting to that many stealth credits means you cannot rely on Cloak and Ghost Runner alone--you have to use Dyson Fractal Generators if you want to be able to get through two big barriers in the same run. If you're not running Anarch, that kills influence at a truly alarming rate--3x DFG and 2x BlacKat is your entire influence package. And that's really, really hard to justify, when Corroder is only two, and is about as good most of the time.

This card is misleading. It looks small. It is not. It is big, in all the ways a breaker can be "big".

It is big in set-up time. Unlike its counterpart Dagger, it requires a minimum of two stealth credits to function. If the corp puts two sentries on the same server (say, Swordsman in front of Cortex Lock) it requires a massive FOUR stealth credits to get in.

This means that simply running Cloak and Ghost Runner isn't enough, at least not long-term. You are going to have to put in Silencers. Which brings us to the next element of bigness-influence. If you import three Cloaks into Criminal, that will already run you 6 influence, and if you try to add Lockpick and Refractor to the mix you can rapidly lose control. On the other hand, if you try to put even just one Switchblade and two Silencers into Shaper, that's 8 influence. And in either case, you still haven't yet splashed for a fracter (either Corroder or BlacKat).

But lets say you pull it off, you get your Cloaks and Silencers running so you're firing your Switchblade every turn. Then we see the last way that Switchblade is big--it absolutely murders ICE. Two stealth credits lets you break every sentry in the game (except for Janus 1.0, which needs three). Compare that to another "big" breaker, Garrote. It costs Garrote 4 to break Tsurugi and 8 to break Archer. If you phrase that as "two or four clicks on a Magnum Opus", it becomes immediately obvious how much of a challeng these pieces of ICE are to that breaker. But if you have two Cloaks, you can break that Archer every single turn without ever needing to click for credits.

Wait, though. A challenger approaches--the first stealth breaker ever, Dagger. Dagger is in a smaller weight class; it's medium, not big. It only needs one stealth credit to break most ICE in the game, meaning you only need one Cloak to be able to start checking ICE safely. It's in Shaper, meaning you don't need to spend influence if you're playing stealth out of that faction. And, in exchange, it's not as efficient, still operating on a pay-per-subroutine and +5/stealth strength boost instead of +7/stealth.

These inefficiencies only come into play in two places, though. The first is against ice with 3 or more subroutines. Most runners would agree that 1 stealth credit is worth at least 3 non-stealth credits, so it holds its own or breaks even with Switchblade on any ice with 3 subs or less. The other place is against ICE with exactly 6 or 7 strength--places where Dagger needs a double-boost and Switchblade needs only one. The intersection of these two points is Archer--it costs Dagger four non-stealth credits more than Switchblade to get through.

It's a tradeoff, and not one with a universal answer. Maybe Dagger's faster setup lets you snag the Astro off R&D that would have lost you the game. But maybe that extra cost on Archer keeps you out long enough that you can't steal The Cleaners, or doing so makes you broke enough for Midseason Replacements to tear you apart.

This is a card with a clear intent, but unworkable execution.

See, the idea behind this card to let it act as a release valve or a reset button. Let's say you're in the all-too-familiar position of having a hand full of agendas. If you can score the Retreat, those agendas go back in R&D, taking the pressure off HQ for one turn. Then, you can either trickle back up to full hand size while making money, or you can spend one click to refill your hand instantly. If you're Titan, or score a Genetic Resequencing, you can ever do it twice!

That's a fine goal, with a reasonable amount of usefulness. Except...it's tied to a 5/3, the hardest-to-score agenda size (with some exceptions).

If you're flooded with agendas, that's usually because you haven't secured a remote server yet. And if you haven't secured a remote, then how are you going to buy yourself enough time to get five whole advancements on this agenda? It becomes a catch-22: if you can score Executive Retreat, you probably don't want to, and if you need to score Executive Retreat you probably can't.

We can probably cut Lukas and the other devs some slack, here--after all, this was only the second data pack ever. They were still learning the ins and outs of the game. And so when it became clear that this card wasn't working, they essentially rereleased it as Corporate Shuffle. If you need to shuffle, you can do so on demand now, instead of needing to try to score when you're already under the gun.

There is one good thing to come out of this card, though, and that is the hilarious deck of the same name by bionicsheep, which turns our favorite game of terrorists and digital conspiracies into a daytime romance reality TV show.