Maker vs Sensei: Two Positional ice that add "end the run" to other ice in the server make for a natural comparison.

Let's start with the easy -- how they are the same, also called why they both fail to get included in decks.

So in both cases, we're going to assume a good set up in an effort to give these the best possible light while burning them in effagy. Imagine Marker or Sensei in front of Excalibur. It's a Str 3 Mythic -- the fewer tools exist in the game break this card mythics than barriers or sentries etc and AIs tend to be either expensive, unwieldy or both. For example, it costs 2 cards for the well-loved Faust and there’s a good bet that Alpha won’t cut it here (except that it can break Marker or Sensei...). As far as unbreakable ICE, this falls just short of the power of Mother Goddess with no other unrezzed ICE.

But if you really want in and you don't have an easy to find AI breaker that will do the job, you have to break the marker or the sensei. And for marker, every decode can do the trick. Sensei... every decoder but 1 unless you have 2 Datasucker tokens.

Now where they differ...

If they have anything that breaks a code gate, clearly Marker fails to Sensei here in every case (except for D4v1d, but even then)... Higher strength by enough to get past Yog.0 is nothing to sneeze at.

If they have nothing that breaks a code gate (and still no AI breaker), either it's early game or the person you are playing against is unprepared, but Marker works better because it gets the same job done for 3 credits cheaper. Not free, because of the 1 cost of install, but almost free in that you can rez even while broke. Of course in both cases, they never hit Excalibur. They jack out voluntarily first. Meaning Excalibur did nothing more than you would had gotten from a Lotus Field -- costs 4 instead of 3+1 for the marker, but is Yog immune and doesn't take two cards in the right order to get it done.

But as bad as Sensei was, it amazes me they felt that reprinting it only worse would help.

Now I hate being all cloudy and grey. Here's the one place where Marker actually can function. Marker is a possible choice in a meta were Yog isn't loved and you are already planning on using cheap taxing ice that is porous due to traces. Marker over Hunter is a 2 server to have fully installed and rezzed. Garrote costs 4to break all of Hunter that way. There it is. Your cornercase: 4 to break every time they run and only 2 of yours to set it up. Me… I’d still rather pay four for a Lotus Field. I’m boring like that.

When you think of what this card is for -- safely drawing a new hand of cards -- it really means it saves you from agenda flood without having a risky archives. It allows you to survive in a heavy Laramy Fisk: Savvy Investor/Fisk Investment Seminar meta where you find yourself with 10 card hands just a little too often. It lefts you save cards you want for later while getting new cards now -- perhaps giving you time to set up the combo you put the other cards in your deck for. Or is lets you recover gracefully after a Lily Lockwell or Panic Button is used to flood HQ to hide agendas among the chaff still in R&D.

But it doesn't give you time to USE the your cards. And if you want to make use of any of your 5 new cards you can't really make use of any of the one you had before. That's the real cost of the Double in this case. Double means you are now stuck making a choice: Do I need to use ANY 1 of the cards I have now or do I want to make sure I can use ANY 1 of the 5 cards I will draw?

Note, if you are just using this to draw cards in your deck you may want to swap out for Anonymous Tip so you have more clicks to use the cards. This is not just Quality Time for corp, and you really wouldn't want it if that's all it did.

Note:
At the time of this review, Weyland has 11 of the 31 Barriers... Check here for updates not including Wendigo or anything you have Sub Boosted.

So with Weyland Consortium: Building a Better World having a rep as the Money faction via cards like Beanstalk Royalties, Paywall Implementation, and Caduceus and a reputation as the Barrier faction with cards like Ice Wall, Hadrian's Wall, or Spiderweb, of course this Agenda makes sense, right?

So, if you are new and look at this you might think, This is what Weyland should be doing! Except... no.
So why not?

1 Barriers are often feel weak. Yeah, that's why I want to give them a +1, right? Not exactly. Lets use the "fixed strength breakers to show why. Mimic means that making a Sentry Str 4 takes a Datasucker token, or similar methods, to break. Yog.0 is stronger than mimic, in the sense that breaking a subroutine is free, but still needs those tokens. Morning Star is more expensive to install, but even if Weyland has score three of this Agenda, Spider web costs 1 to get through.

2 Same idea but from the most efficient breakers you can find... Torch is expensive in influence and installation, but is only slightly less expensive than Corroder against ice with higher Str than 2. Garrote is still more costly than Corroder, but costs exactly the same to use. That means Corroder is going to be seen more -- simply put it's more efficient for runners to break a barrier.

3 But the money, I mean isn't that worth it? How many barriers do you want rezzed in a game? Unless you are playing a deep glacier, the kind where you want to use 5/3's of 9/6's, you don't want a lot of 3/1's laying around. If you are playing those big boys, then likely you have better agenda sources of money... like those same agendas. So you want 4 or 5 for a risky one pop that only works that well if you have waited at least to mid game, or do you want some serious bank? And if you are playing with smaller agendas, you aren't going to make your money back here. It's a red herring. And not one out of NBN.

4 OK so it's not as good as the Jinteki one... uh what was it called? Yeah Portals is junk too. That's why you don't see it either. But you are right It's better than this!

Now, the card isn't worthless. It's just that for all the agendas you can use there are currently 12 1-point agenda's you could be using, and simply put that means this one has to have something more than, "Eh, it's ok." to beat out Posted Bounty, Profiteering, and Gila Hands Arcology.

Two ways to look at this card: "MONEY! Woot!" and "Hey, Corp, waste money and clicks on Ice, ok?"

As a reusable "2 for 1 " card, you can look at this as a way for getting a little extra money per click, once per turn. It works well with other "sucessful run" cards. Particularly if you have Desperado and a John Masanori installed and use a Dirty Laundry, this card can really punish a corp who doesn't want to Ice up remotes and archives. For Archives, Datasucker also adds to it, and if you know you will be running every turn you can even throw in a Grifter got more cash... but that might be taking it a little far. Even without the dirty laundry, in the "MONEY! Woot!" theory, this is a "1 click for 4 credits, a card, and a datasucker token or two." Click compression at it's finest.

So the corp sees this and says, "I better put something over Archives, even if it's just a Pup or a Caduceus to cut that down to 2 credits, a card, and some tokens." That's one fewer ICE to protect somewhere else, 1 fewer card in HQ, and a 1-3 credits for the Rez. Against horizontal decks (except RP) that like to have 2 or 3 bare remotes, this can be a major pain. You don't want to ice up all of those assets, but gosh, if you don't this stupid runner just waltzes over me with amazing money and maybe even some card draw compressed into 1 click.

Sounds good, right? So why isn't this the Jackson Howard of runners?

Well influence. 3 influence means it is a little expensive outside of . That means it doesn't quite make sense in Shaper or Anarch. (Although the Shaper are getting a similar card, but for draws instead of credits soon.)

Also dead draws. You can't use two of these to get 4 credits in one click by themselves. So unless you are running twice on two different servers, the second one is not all that helpful.

And that brings up the set up time. Just this one card... run and don't access my stuff. Whatever... it's two credits. Until you start getting a few other cards, all you are doing is making sure my SEA Source will work when I draw it. So while you find John and Desppy and everything else, I'll just be over here scoring agendas... loser.

And lastly Glaciers! When my corp idea is to set up huge servers with 3 or 4 ice each anyway (I'm looking at you RP, Torchwood, and Foundry) then let the runner put out cards that replace their expensive trip through my server with 2 creds... ha!

I have noticed 3 informal categories of traces:

1) Subroutines you pay through. IE Burke Bugs against a broke corp, Ichi 1.0 against your Sunny Lebeau deck, Hunter particuarly when you have New Angeles City Hall already installed or have a free click. This card can be worth almost nothing in a case like that. "I see Hunter will cost me 2 and a ... no matter how high the trace."

2) Subroutines you use breakers for. IE If you have out Mimic, you might as well use the bad pub to break Muckraker or Knight on a Checkpoint is a lot cheaper than the trace. Similarly as long as you are already paying for Viktor 2.0's end the run, what is one credit more for the brain damage trace? Catagory 1 can become 2 when you have cards like Primary Transmission Dish out if the runner is pretty sure that it's going to cost them more to beat the trace than just break the ice. In other words, it's a threat of "I will make this trace expensive," not actually credits that you will use a lot. This can be a pretty good tax on the runner. Or it can be a way to go broke for the corp. A lot of tracer ICE has bad pub with it which ruins your ability to tax or is only expensive to break because of high strengths. And you did need to click and 2 cred to use the three credits, so you better hope you have more than one use or you basically clicked for a credit and discarded a card.

3) Traces that aren't subroutines. Ash 2X3ZB9CY or SEA Source. Decks that run these cards, run them as major parts of strategy. Three extra credits for a trace like this at the cost of two and a click to install... again until the second usage, this is basically a way to threaten, not a card to help with econ the way other reoccurring credits like Cloak and PPVP are.

You might think, well, even if it ends up only making back it's cost to install and rez, that's still ok, right? Except there are enough things a runner can do to make you need to protect your asset. Commonly used cards like Security Testing, Dirty Laundry, and Desperado can mean you need to ICE up your remotes... or simply accept a 6 credit swing from 1 click followed by 3 credits on other turns.

There are ways to mitigate the cost -- Executive Boot Camp or License Acquisition or even just getting a card from NEH, but wouldn't you rather use those on a Daily Business Show or a PAD Campaign? In the end, this card is better than Net Police and that's it's big claim to fame.