Don't let that 'T' in the background fool you--Bryan has his offices at Titan, but he's a GRNDL man through and through. Yes, there's a lot of fancy tricks involving various cards with 'Account' in their name, or you can try taxing out the runner and hoping you can get them below 6 credits so that Bryan can work his magic. But that eats deck space, and more importantly takes time. But you get one turn in every game where Bryan Stinson is 100% guaranteed to be able to work his financial magic--your very first turn of the game. You can play a transaction, play Bryan, and then replay your transaction, and say go. It stands to reason, then, that you want to make that turn as big as possible.

Enter GRNDL. While most corps have to settle for Hedge Fund, bringing them up to a 'mere' 17 credits (or 19 in the case of Building a Better World), GRNDL starts with enough credits to immediately Restructure, which becomes truly absurd with Bryan Stinson, catapulting you to 28 credits on turn one. That is a LUDICROUS pile of money that that the runner cannot hope to match--even the powerful Temüjin Contract is only going to get them to 21, and that's if they do nothing but install it and run. The best the runner can do is double Account Siphon, in which case they have made a conscious decision to float tags against GRNDL, and what happens next is just going to improve the average IQ of New Angeles residents.

Now that you are filthy stinkin' rich, the runner is trapped, even though you have no board to speak of, because the spectre of being Midseasoned for roughly infinity looms large over them. You can install a naked agenda, turn it face up to show the runner that this is indeed an agenda and not a trap, double advance it and ship turn, and the runner will have no choice but to let you score it (which, this being GRNDL, is probably just going to result in you getting even richer). They can run Stinson, but unless they're Whizzard, trashing him is just going to put them even further behind economically, and you'll be able to comfortably maintain your lead the old-fashioned way. And if they try to build up their rig, they either have to stay above 5 credits and watch you score out as they set up, or they can concede that your bank account statement is just going to read"Yes", and that they will be nailed the instant they steal points.

This plan isn't foolproof--it requires you to have Stinson and a good transaction in your opener, Film Critic continues to exist, and if the deck stacks against you and you don't see your kill cards. But that's all going to feel very distant indeed when you're busy buying the entire Cayman Islands.

Poor Exile. Poor, poor Exile. On the face of it, his ability is actually pretty decent--click compression is always nice, and drawing cards is nothing to sneeze at. Plus, installing programs from the heap is a powerful Shaper tool that you'll want to make use of anyways--just look at Clone Chip!

That is, unfortunately, where Exile's problems start. Installing programs from the heap is strong. Which means that there's not actually that many ways to do it: in-faction you have Clone Chip, Test Run, and Exile's own signature card, Scavenge. They're all good, but because that's all there is, your ability reads: "Over the course of the game, draw maybe nine cards". Still nice, but that's just not enough for you to want to pick him over any other Shaper. So we're going to have to go deeper.

Out of faction, we find an astounding two cards that install programs from the heap: Retrieval Run, which is two influence and really awkwards besides, and Pawn, which only recurs other Caïssa programs--but that includes other Pawns. What you can do, then, with Deep Red as your console, is continuously loop Pawns. If they have a one-ICE central sitting around, every run you make nets you a free draw, a credit off of Scheherazade, and another counter on all of your Technical Writers. That's pretty darn good! But boy, that's a lot of red cards...

Which unfortunately brings us to our next problem: Exile has no influence. Sure, it may say he's got the standard 15, but the Clone Chips are absolutely mandatory. And then you're importing all of the pieces of the Street Chess engine, which given that you probably want three Deep Red and a full suite of Pawns, and a single Scheherazade, is another 7 influence. So now you've got all of 5 influence to play with--and one of those pips is likely going to Lady. Still, 4 pips to play with isn't nothing, right?

Except that now we're running into another problem: actually taking advantage of all of our heap installs. Refreshing Lady is a nice trick, but we can't really go full Dog Mode with Cuj.0 and Rex--after all, we don't have the influence. Bouncing a Cyber-Cypher with a Scavenge is a good trick, but what we really need is some way to trash programs for value--well, Aesop runs a Pawnshop for a reason, right? And Cache is a card you'll happily recur again and again, and then sell off! Excellent! Now we just need to import a card or two for our breaker suite, and... sorry, what's that you say? We only have one influence left? And we still don't have a sentry breaker? Uh-oh. Could this be Creeper's time to shine? (No. No, it is really kind of not--8 credits to break an Ichi 1.0, oh boy!). Those four points from the NAPD are really hurting right now.

Of course, you could abandon any part of this engine, but that just brings you back around to your first problem: why are you playing Exile in the first place? You've had to jump through about twenty hoops, and now what you've got to show for it is an admittedly pretty strong engine, a point of link, and a breaker suite that you only had about two free influence for. Now, the deck is quite fun, don't get me wrong. It can and does win games! But at the end of the day, you're playing Exile because you want to play Exile (maybe out of love for that collared shirt plus hoodie combo), not because Exile is a competitive option. But hey, even if he's garbage-tier, at least he's in his element, right?

Something that might not be immediately apparent is that Notoriety is a card that primarily serves to reward early aggression. A typical aggressive runner (like Ken Tenma) is looking to run early and often, maximizing their accesses before servers get really taxing. They can use tools like Account Siphon and Emergency Shutdown to keep the Corp off balance, but ultimately they're under pressure to win before their window closes--they're burning through burst economy resources instead of building them up, so once it's gone it's gone. So as they reach the end of their window, they start getting desperate with their accesses, because if the game comes down to trying to run a server with Caprice, Marcus "End The Run" Batty, and a waiting Nisei counter, they've already lost.

Having Notoriety in your deck is an incredible release valve for that pressure. When you know where your 7th point is coming from, you can afford to play a bit more patiently. You rush to 6, and now you can stop and breathe a little bit. Maybe you pick off some assets to get the corp to invest ICE in remotes, maybe you dig for that last Lucky Find, maybe you just count up what you're going to need and click for credits. Because you know exactly what accesses you need, you don't need to play guessing games. You have your goal of "Accumulate X credits, then run three times in a row", and that's all you need to pay attention to.

A slower runner deck, such as Sunny, Kate, or Geist can run Notoriety, but they really don't need to--they're already working to hitting a critical mass where the corp simply can't keep them out of their scoring servers. They already have the breathing space that Notoriety provides.