I like it on paper. In practice, it's tricky to use.

Archer Food

The slice of the color pie includes having benefits for small agendas. It has since the beginning: see Archer. Archer gets significantly worse if you're pitching 2- or 3-pt agendas. We see that mechanic again in cards like Corporate Town, and fuel for agenda-forfeiting in things like Public Support.

Size Matters

The inherent drawbacks of having lots of small agendas are:

1. Your agenda density goes way up, so the runner is more likely to steal agendas from central servers
2. Your advancement-cost-to-point ratio goes way up

There are probably not a lot of great ways to offset #1. The Board was designed to help with that, but trashing it gives the runner an extra 2 pts and can pretty much lose the game for you.

As for #2, I'm saying it costs more money to score out with a lot of 3-for-1's than a few 5-for-3's.

Let's say your HB deck has a total of 9 agendas: seven 2pt and two 3pt agendas. To score, say, 2 ABTs and 1 GFI, you will spend 11 advancing those agendas.

In a PE deck, you might have 14 agendas: eight 1-pt agendas and six 2-pt, for example. If you were to score out (you should try, if only to pressure the runner), it might look like 3x House of Knives, 1x Chronos Project, 1x Clone Retirement, and 1x Philotic Entanglement. That's 17 (Yes, there could be other agendas like Fetals and Medicals involved, but I think this example still illustrates my point).

It's also why rush decks love Hostile Takeover - that net 5 gain helps to offset the additional advancement cost.

That's where Stock Buy-Back comes into play - it helps to offset that drawback of having lots of small agendas when constructing your deck. 2 stolen agendas (i.e. 2-4 points) nets 5, which is not bad. 3 stolen agendas (i.e. 3-6 points) nets 8 for a , which is awesome.

Easier Said than Done

In practice, SBB is hard to use because the runner needs to have stolen some points to be worthwhile. You don't want to see it in your opening hand. What if you see 2 of them early? Do you just leave out some agendas for them to steal so your Stocks rise? It feels like a Diversified Portfolio or Peak Efficiency in that it's worse than Hedge Fund early and better than it later. So I think SBB is actually pretty specialized.

Try Me

I would try this in an Argus rush deck with at least ~14 agendas and 3 Snare!s. Don't ice up R&D early while you focus on scoring out some points, and the 2-3 agendas they steal in the meantime will actually boost your net worth. Then you sell your stocks and use that money to Midseasons them before blowing their shit up.

This plays very well with any deck that has small agendas and/or negative-point agendas like News Team and Nightmare Archive. When the runner has at least 2 agendas and/or fake agendas, which will probably be most of the game, this is cheaper than a Hedge Fund and has more upside.

It's most obviously useful in Thule/Sportsmetal and PE. HB has Nightmare Archives and cards like Djupstad Grid and Big Deal which you might slot in rich builds. PE is cash-poor and can win long games. It has many cards that can convert cash into damage (Anemone, Snare, Reaper Function) or taxing ice or into forcing runs that the runner cannot afford yet (Dr. Keeling).

It's less useful in Weyland which has efficient and fast cards but generally not great cards or ID support for winning a long game.

Most corps can recur ~4-6 cards depending on how many Spin Doctors they find. This is a much better target for recursion than most economic cards. A 4th copy of Hedge Fund only adds $2-3 to your deck's economic potential. An additional copy of Stock Buyback adds something like $6-10 (assuming the runner will probably have 3-4 agendas in their score area by the time you can find the recurred copy).

It's a terminal, which makes it harder to combo with Hard-Hitting News (or Big Deal) but otherwise is not too awkward. Most of the decks that need this card do not need a huge spike to do something this turn but rather need a huge amount of money floating around.

The art is beautiful. The most obvious approach to this card would have been more boring (a bunch of investors hashing out a business deal).

"A stock dropping sharply is bad for shareholders, but not necessarily bad for the company." The only way a company is generating money from a dropping stock price is if it is secretly shorting itself. Cons to secretly shorting yourself: your shareholders didn't become The Board by NOT setting people on fire that tried to rob them. Pros: robbing your shareholders seems less likely to get you murdered from orbit than drowning millions of Californians for the insurance money? It's not uncharted territory for Weyland.