Public Service Announcement: When playing Leela, almost whenever Inside Job is played, it is worthwhile rezzing the outermost piece of ice.

I've been playing her for months and people seem to keep missing this: it's the one thing which I keep hoping Corps miss. And they do! It's the "trash their assets" of beating Leela. That is all.

THE Jinteki card.

This does everything a Megacorp could want to Runner scum. It tags, it takes away most of their hand, and it punishes random accesses. Random accesses, let us not forget, are a runner's major path to victory.

I was playing as Personal Evolution last week, and the runner asked me how many credits I have: I gestured to the four tokens and said "Snare! credits". It's what we were both thinking. A Jinteki kill deck has one of three amounts of credits: less than four (so they can't fire Snare!), at least four (so they can fire snare!), or nine or more (so they can get account siphoned but still afford to fire Snare!). Some corporate economists would argue that nine actually means "Komainu+Snare!" or that the credit total "eight" exists as double-Snare!, but there's mostly academic difference between that and nine.

Just by existing, whether or not it's played, this card warps the way a Jinteki game goes. (It also sees a fair amount of play in Weyland, to enable Scorched Earth kills -- some Jinteki decks run said house-destruction entirely as a means of punishing Snare! tags. A few horizontal Near-Earth Hub decks have been known to play it too. Because the point of snare! is this: it's a surprise.)

A simple, elegant and most of all fun piece of design, this adds so much to the game. But, you may be thinking "this is fun, but only for the corp". And that, dear reader, is where you're wrong. Snare! in the pool leads to wonderful moments of relief when that card you accessed isn't a Snare!

It lets the runner experience the feeling, generally reserved for the corp, of losing to an unlucky R&D access. It gets installed in an iced-up remote, and gets revealed like a bad punchline. It allows for really great moments of bluffing and double-bluffing, intricate interplay to accessing cards which may or may not be Snare!s and which runners may or may not be able to afford to not check. It's the major reasons you don't run last click. And of course, as a runner, there's no greater feeling than trashing an unfired Snare! for free.

It adds a ton of fun swingy variance in the game, which can be heightened with play skill.

One of the best and most important cards in the game. Just don't rez it or you're doing it wrong.

Clone Retirement's in an odd spot. It's one of the long term mini-cycle of 2-advancement agendas (with Hostile Takeover, Breaking News and Domestic Sleepers -- yes, that last one's a bit of stretch). And, I must say, writing circa Order and Chaos, I have to wonder just how much Clot is going to hurt Hostile Takeover. Because the best thing about these agendas is they're inherently score-from-hand-able (barring The Source or Chakana trickery. There's no way the Corp loses clicks, right?).

On one hand, the Jinteki decks that most want to score small agendas quickly (Black Tree "Death by a thousand cuts) really don't care about Bad Publicity, (or indeed, the runner's econ in general) which negates the downside: but these decks tend to want to play out a lot of agendas, which makes the 2-cost thing a bit less useful. Sure, there's scenarios where such a deck could be too scared to play anything face-down, but want to fast advance the last few cards ... but it's hard to imagine that in such a situation they'd have strongly enough defended centrals to survive, and even they did, it's such a small corner case as to make it not worthwhile.

But the major Jinteki decks which do care about Bad Pub (mostly taxing White Tree builds) tend to be defended enough to not want or need to score from hand -- which makes the downside of losing this from centrals (and if this is getting stolen anywhere apart from centrals, you're doing it very wrong) even worse.

The one deck where this does get played at the moment is Tennin-Trick of Light Fast Advance decks ... where again, bad pub is a bad thing, and the tension of this design shines through. It really is a nice design in a cool spot.

What is interesting will be to see just how good Valencia becomes, and how much she makes Bad Publicity a thing to worry about. I can't imagine Blackmail recursion posing a serious threat to RP decks, let alone PE, but if pesky hacks start scything their way through their glaciers, they'll take notice. But if Itinerant Protesters becomes a thing, every single Jinteki player is going to have to really seriously consider packing a couple of these. Which can help, or it can make it worse...

This is a lot better than just shuffling R&D, with multi-access.

Unlike a Keyhole-esque shuffle effect, this gives you access to X cards you haven't seen before, guaranteed. If you've seen 4 agenda-free cards in a 20 card R&D, you get access to 4 of 16 cards you've not seen before, not 4 of a random 20.

And, more importantly, either the Corp is not going to see these cards soon, or the Corp has tried to get rid of them. It's sort of a reverse R&D-lock (because, let's be clear, you're almost certainly getting them with some element of R&D lock if you're using this).

Seeing card the corp isn't going to see can be helpful. If you happen to see a Scorched Earth or other high-influence card, a la Biotic Labour, you're going to get a bit of idea about deck construction.

Obviously, the existence of Jackson Howard makes this worse, but unlike this card, Jackson won't be around forever. (And, really, who don't like the idea of killing a Jackson from the top of R&D and another from the bottom? Trashing cards from the bottom has utility, particularly if you are facing shuffle effects. )

An excellent niche card, that seems like it might be the Anarch equivalent of Escher: something to run a one-of which is of occasional, but devastating, use. (Only a bit more powerful.)

While Mass Install can provide a powerful tempo boost, it is important for all good runners to remember that this card, much like Diesel, is rarely ever worth using with the ever-popular Same Old Thing.