I've played this card for a bit and wanted to share some observations. It's one of the more generically strong Anarch cards of the Red Sand cycle; it's just a good card and doesn't require a special self-damage or tag-me archetype. It's the new mini Vamp and much more fair in design.

What's Mining Accident good at? The bad pub from it makes running super efficient. In particular, the conspiracy breakers (Paperclip, Black Orchestra, MKUltra) are a solid breaker suite which benefit from bad pub. Bad pub contributes to install costs as well as break costs. Also, Blorchestra and MK have very high minimum expenditures; even the cheapest code gates and sentries cost 3. Cutting that down to 2 or 1 real s pays off quickly when making repeated runs.

MA is good early because a central is typically open and the corp cannot afford to lose 5; it opens them up to too many vulnerabilities (Medium, Account Siphon, etc.) & pushes them further away from IPO's play cost. Basically, being set behind your whole opening credit pool is cannot be endured on turn 2 or 3.

People will lean towards playing MA in Valencia because the words "bad publicity" appear on the Valencia ID. I don't think the card needs to stay there but the nice thing about Val is you expect to already have bad pub. Val is great for run-based tactics so cards like Dirty Laundry, Desperado, and Street Peddler (because you can install during a run) are a natural fit. Finally, without Blackmail, I don't see any corp bothering to play bad pub removal. It's just not worth the tech slots & there are far worse things to worry about.

When's MA bad? When the corp is rich & can just lose 5 without much harm, when it's late in the game & giving a bad pub isn't consequential, when all central servers are ICEd up & meeting its condition becomes expensive. It's bad quite often, which is why it's a balanced card.

I think the cheese bad pub spam strategies featuring Itinerant Protesters are going to be bad, interesting jank but not competitive. For one, Alice, Hacktivist, & Maw already attack corp hand sizemore effectively. Hack & Maw in particular are random discards which makes them quite valuable post-Jackson. For two, as I've learned playing against those cards, the correct move as corp is often to just empty your hand of useful cards & play in topdeck mode. It's not great but it's also not so bad that building a runner strategy around it is worthwhile.

It's criminal that this powerful but weirdly terrible card doesn't have a review. Let's rectify that!

Most of my thinking is contained in this prototype deck from around when the card was released. The breaker suite doesn't make sense anymore given the conspiracy breakers (which are auto-includes) but everything I discuss here is covered there, but with an accompanying decklist.

First off, Emptied Mind is a build around card. You don't just slap this in a deck because you might have no cards in grip and want to gain an advantage. You need to purposefully build a deck that gains the extra click consistently and plays around its disadvantages. So we have three questions:

1. Why do we want an extra click? What will we do with it?
2. How will we keep our grip empty consistently? There's a reason most of the time you're holding onto cards.
3. How will we survive damage? No cards in grip usually means ur ded m8.

Why an extra click?

In short: Magnum Opus. Whatever card that reads "click this a lot, gain an advantage." The other options are Professional Contacts and Laguna Velasco District—those are obvious nonbos with Emptied Mind. You need money to win, an extra 2 per turn is :ok_hand:

Joshua B., the most similar card, was played in Data Leak Reversal decks; EM doesn't make sense there. DLR decks almost never have an empty grip, they want tons of card draw.

How will we keep an empty grip?

There's actually a decent amount of support for this in Anarch. I'll laundry list without too much detail:

• The Noble Path
• Street Peddler
• Making an Entrance
• Paige Piper

The unifying factor of these cards is they let you avoid cards, even duplicates of cards you have installed, stick in grip. You can still get what you need but you don't have to hold it in hand—you can trash breakers, store resources on peddlers, and if something goes wrong start all over with Noble Path. Other interesting ideas:

• Express Delivery
• Bookmark
• Personal Workshop
• Earthrise Hotel (you can trigger EM before hotel so you gain & click with empty grip & then draw)

So there's actual, strong card draw for this archetype that can't keep cards in hand. These are mostly cards people play anyways that happen to support this weirdo archetype.

How will we survive damage?

Any installable that banks damage prevention is golden here. Guru Davinder is the most all purpose & his major downside (expense) is cancelled out by the EM-MOpus economy. I think Guru, which is quite honestly a bad card, is a perfect fit for EM decks.

Cards like Biometric Spoofing are OK but probably not powerful enough (you still straight up die to Snare!, for instance). Other cards are generally Shaper & you have to spend a lot of influence. Feedback Filter might be good but doesn't address meat damage.

You can also just YOLO if damage is ever super out of the meta. But random damage subs on playable ICE (e.g. Ichi 1.0, Fairchild 3.0, Cobra) are something to be wary of.

In Sum

Do you like turning Sweeps Week into a one credit self-Vamp? Is running through Komainu for free funny? Then you should build an Emptied Mind deck for sure. There's a decent tier three jank list here without a doubt. It's the best bad card in the game. Other than Akshara Sareen, of course.

IPO is substantially better than Restructure, which is the obvious comparison. At just 2 cheaper, it's far easier to play this in the early game. A first turn of ICE-ICE-credit sets up for a turn 2 of credit-credit-IPO, or you can ICE, Hedge Fund, IPO on your first turn out of every ID (instead of just HB ETF & BABW). It's amazing what a slightly cheaper play cost will do for a card.

The terminal restriction is notable. It means you can't burst up in credits to land a Midseason Replacements, Hard-Hitting News, or SEA Source. Still, decks that care about a credit advantage will probably want to play IPO for its sheer efficiency. Think of all the turns you needed to go "credit-credit-Restructure"—the prohibitive play cost made it already a terminal in some situation.

IPO is one of the most playable, least exciting cards out of Terminal Directive. For a short while before rotation, we'll have more operation economy than ever in the game, boosting IDs like Palana Foods, BABW, & New Angeles Sol.

While people are right to be skeptical of this card's value, there are scenarios where it has merit. If glacier becomes a more common archetype after the MWL 1.2 hit that Rumor Mill took, then the value of this card increases. Its upsides:

• combined with effects that force ICE to be installed repeatedly or incentize multiple ICE servers, the credit drain can be real
• it stacks so lucky draws where you see multiples early quickly become oppressive
• increased cost as opposed to "corp loses 1" is important since a poor corp cannot install ICE without first clicking for credits (e.g. think of a Pop-up Window or Vanilla that the corp wants to put at the outermost position)
• corp credits are more valuable than runner credits; Vamp trades credits at a rate worse than one-for-one but is a powerful effect in Netrunner. NE is similar; even if you've spent about 4 installing NE, if it drains the corp for that much it's paid off OK since runners have persistent econ cards like Kati & MOpus while the corp has to rely on trashable assets for persistent econ

There are several effects which increase the value of Network Exchange: False Echo, Inside Job, Leela Patel, Rielle "Kit" Peddler, DDoS. All of these cards push the corp towards multi-ICE servers. If you're not running some effect like this however, NE is unlikely to provide enough value. Here are a couple prototype lists that look to maximize the value:

• Control Leela
• MOpus Kit (Rebirth from Kate)

To be clear: I'm not saying these are strong decks, there are definitely better options for both IDs, but these are the sort of lists that maximize NE's value by forcing multiple ICE servers, slowing down the corp, and building to a strong late game.

Its downsides:

• must be seen early to have an impact, dead card in the late game
• expensive in terms of influence & install cost for the effect
• useless in matchups where the corp rarely double ICEs servers (e.g. asset spam)

On the whole, even in lists built to maximize its value, there are typically cards that accomplish a similar credit drain more consistently, such as Vamp and (less so) Exploit. Given that Vamp is the same influence, easier to both tutor (Planned Assault) & recur (Same Old Thing), it's hard to justify the effort needed to build around NE.

Color Pie Post Scriptum: I think this card is in Shaper for balance and not theme reasons. It would be problematic in Criminal or Anarch and likely a lot more playable since it could be more easily combined with effects like Leela, Inside Job, Vamp, Reina, etc.

Obelus adds to the long list of playable Anarch consoles. Some of interesting aspects of the card:

• the increased hand size means you can go tag-me against kill decks & simply draw up to an enormous number of cards, good against Midseason Replacements & Hard-Hitting News. Importantly, one Hard-Hitting gives you enough hand size to survive BOOM!
• the hand size ability is not actually that usable…because the best tagging decks are NBN & they have a card called Sweeps Week that you're turning into the best card in the game as your hand size grows
• the successful run clause has so much nuance going on:
  • if you do an access replacement effect on R&D or HQ (e.g. Security Testing, Account Siphon), the trigger fizzles & you don't get to draw on any further successful runs
  • you have to draw the cards, it is not a "may" ability
  • "draw 1 card for each card you accessed" includes upgrades so defensive upgrades on R&D or HQ turn single accesses into "draw two" opportunities

The obvious synergies with Obelus are the Anarch viruses that scale the number of accesses with every successful run: Medium and Nerve Agent. If you hit a central server three times in a row, you'll only draw the first time, but then the next turn you're threatening to pull a fistful of cards and access a bunch. It's an extremely powerful effect that's mitigated by the set up: you have to be able to access a bunch of cards (e.g. be winning already), Obelus' 4 cost is nothing to shrug off, & just one MU isn't that great either in a faction that's notoriously strapped for memory, so much so that MemStrips is a card that's seen play.

Overall I think this card has two incredibly interesting abilities that are somewhat hard to take advantage of. In the right deck, Obelus is very powerful, but it's nowhere near as general-purpose as Turntable or Grimoire, which will likely continue to be the go-to console choices for Anarch.