Who here likes Daily Casts? I do. It's a solid economy card. This is better. Let's compare:

Turn 1 (installation): Daily Casts -3, Crowdfunding: +0.

Turn 2 (1st drip): Daily Casts: -1, Crowdfunding: +1.

Turn 3 (2nd drip): Daily Casts +1, Crowdfunding: +2.

Turn 4 (3rd drip): Daily Casts +3, Crowdfunding +3, +1 card.

Turn 5 (4th drip): Daily Casts +5.

Pretty similar end result (difference being 1 card versus 2 credits the following turn), but Crowdfunding is positive the entire time. And it comes back.

501
Super solid for criminals who want to go fast, since it is free to install and replaces itself. Too bad it has 3 influence so probably not playable out of faction —
Too bad you say? I say too good! It's about time Criminals get their good cards costed correctly with regards to influence. —
One side note: the fact that Crowd Funding comes back after 3 successful runs in a single turn combos very well with a post-purge turn spent charging up an Aumakua via multiple runs on Archives or an undefended remote. —
Definitely agreed with BlackCherries. With a lower influence cost, this would just create another Aumakua: powering up the already-stronger factions more than boosting Criminal. Absolutely in love with this card. —
Imp

Imp

In addition to the straightforward uses of Imp (trashing expensive things for free and trashing operations), Imp can be used as a poor man's Film Critic. Against, for example, Obokata Protocol, you can trash it in the remote and pick it up later in Archives when you are ready for it. Against The Future Perfect, you can play the Psi game, lose, then trash it (or win and steal.) Against Punitive Counterstrike, you can delay the steal by trashing the agenda, waiting until you can beat the following trace or just straight win from points first. You can trash any agenda because the window to trash occurs before the window to steal.

Imp does not, however, avoid any on-access punishment just as trashing an ambush does not prevent its negative effects. Casting Call/TGTBT will still tag you, Quantum Predictive Model will still jump into the Corp's score area if you're tagged, City Works Project will still do meat damage, and Explode-a-palooza will still give the Corp credits, whereas Film Critic avoids these effects. And you still have to steal the agenda from Archives to take its points (assuming the Corp doesn't recur it back with Preemptive Action or Archived Memories.)

501

NEXT Sapphire is difficult to evaluate because its power depends on a lot of variables:

  • Obviously: How many NEXT Ice do you have rezzed? If this is your only one, it's an okay facecheck penalty, whereas if you've already rezzed another it can be brutal. But if you have other NEXT Ice rezzed, they know you're probably running NEXT Sapphire, and it won't be much of a surprise.
  • Do you actually want to draw cards? In CI the answer is almost certainly yes, but in other decks it's not as clear, and the first subroutine might be pointless.
  • Do you have cards in Archives to bring back? If this is turn 1 and you didn't get to play e.g. Hedge Fund, the second sub isn't going to do anything. On the other hand late-game it could bring back several Biotic Labors or something else that's game-deciding.
  • Are there cards in your hand you want to get rid of? If this is a run on HQ then this is very relevant, as you can bury excess agendas you don't want to have stolen. If this is a run on R&D, it could let you decrease the agenda density in R&D. But maybe you want to keep all your cards!

The nice thing is how these synergize. If all of them fire, or even just both the first and the last, the downsides for the first and last subroutines negate each other, and Sapphire lets you adjust your hand quite nicely. Oh, and there's always The Twins (plus probably Helheim Servers) for an "infinite" combo to trigger all of the subroutines an arbitrary number of times. (Helheim to make it unbreakable, then recursively using The Twins and another copy of NEXT Sapphire in HQ/Archives, probably playing this out of CI.)

HOWEVER, there are downsides to NEXT Sapphire that are not obvious at first.

The primary weakness: Usually one of the subroutines is fairly harmless, especially to let fire repeatedly. If you're running HQ, letting them draw cards could populate their hand with more agendas to steal. If you're running R&D, letting them shuffle cards back into R&D is probably fine, and usually doing it more than once is redundant. Alternatively, letting them draw cards might be irrelevant if you just want to flood HQ. (So ideally play this in a deck that always wants to draw.) Or maybe you don't care if they take any of their trashed cards back for some reason.

The subtle flaw: As the rules stand today (April 2018), the third subroutine is mandatory. Sure, you may choose to shuffle 0 cards from HQ into R&D, but that still shuffles R&D. For example, when Jackson Howard was around, you could choose to use him to "shuffle 0 cards in", just to shuffle R&D, as per this ruling. That was great when you had control over the effect, but now it makes NEXT Sapphire a very dangerous piece of ice to put on R&D, or potentially on the outside of a server, since it gives the runner the power to shuffle R&D, whether that's to see a fresh card off the top or because they want to stop you from drawing something they've seen.

501
I would just like to comment on the shuffle - it plays havoc with runners who like to Index RandD :) —

I think the main weakness it has it's that it's subs aren't THAT bad for the Runner, so it's basically a 4-rez 2-str code gate the Runner can sometimes ignore. Maybe the designers meant it to be just a support for other NEXT ICE?

LLDS Energy Regulator lets you prevent the trash for 3. With multiple Acacia out and lots of virus token generation, this can get out of hand very quickly.

Regardless, you need to have an outlet for the money you make. Gaining 6 for them purging your Aumakua doesn't help much if that's your only way in. However, pair it with other virus counter generation and classic breakers like Paperclip/Black Orchestra/MKUltra and you can use the credits to rebuild your counter pool (probably by making successful runs), making the purge moot, or at least buy you enough credits to breach their remote while you build them up some other way.

501
Important to note the synergy here with the virus breakers suite - Yusuf, Musaazi, and the decoder. Once those are all out along with Freedom, we'll really see how powerful Acacia can be. —

Post-rotation/Core 2.0 this card got much better. We've been spoiled with the card draw engine of Jackson Howard for a long time. There are far fewer options for card draw now. This one also happens to get you money and has a very high trash cost.

The only other good card draw engine at the moment is the HB clearance suite, but that's a lot clunkier if you're not playing HB, or more specifically Cerebral Imaging: Infinite Frontiers. You're much more likely to draw more than you can use with the latter two clearances, and the first doesn't really help overdraw. With Illegal Arms Factory, the cards drip in slowly. On top of that, the clearances cost more influence outside of HB.

If you're trying to go fast, this can be a great engine to keep you going. If the runner decides to trash it, you probably come out ahead - it replaced itself and net cost you at most 2, while costing the runner 6 plus anything it cost to get in the server.

However, a brutal counter to this card is Imp. It completely ignores the high trash cost yet nets the runner the coveted Bad Publicity. So, pay attention to your meta.

501
Speaking of postrotation... Imp is from the first pack of Genesis. Currently, I don't think there is a card that lets the runner completely ignore trash costs. Just bad pub or Scrubber, which both isn't enough to pay the 6 creds unless you really go over the top with it. —
Imp is reprinted in Revised Core! There is also Paricia , which also is here to stay. —
Oops, my bad. —
If you make two runs a turn you'll break even after three turns for trashing IAF. It gives you a discount on future trashes, extra money to run centrals, creds to install with smc, all once a run, not once a turn. Plus you deny the corp one card and one credit a turn. Trashing illegal arms is a pretty good call for any runner with the credits to do so. —
Yup, that bad publicity adds up quickly. Hence why you need to either protect IAF, go fast enough that the BP doesn't add up, or discourage making frequent runs. —