Mumbad City Grid

Mumbad City Grid 3[credit]

Upgrade: Region
Trash: 3
Influence: 3

Whenever the Runner passes a piece of ice protecting this server, you may swap that ice with another piece of ice protecting this server.

Limit 1 region per server.

Illustrated by Zach Graves
Decklists with this card

Kala Ghoda (kg)

#14 • English
Startup Card Pool
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Printings
Kala Ghoda
Rulings
  • Updated 2017-05-01

    UFAQ [Damon Stone]

    The Runner passes a Wall of Static and uses Copycat to bounce to another Wall of Static on a different server. Can the Corp still use Mumbad City Grid to swap the original Wall of Static with another piece of ice protecting the original server?

    No. The Runner is no longer passing that Wall of Static, so Mumbad City Grid's trigger condition has expired.

    If a passed piece of ice protecting a server with Mumbad City Grid is uninstalled (e.g. Paper Wall, or via a card effect like False Echo), what happens?

    Nothing. The ice is no longer installed, and so Mumbad City Grid's trigger condition has expired. "Another piece of ice protecting this server" implies that both pieces of ice must be protecting the server in order for Mumbad City Grid to work.

    Do Susanoo-no-Mikoto and Mumbad City Grid work together?

    No. If the subroutine on Susanoo-no-Mikoto resolves, passing Susanoo-no-Mikoto is replaced with running on Archives, so Mumbad City Grid never triggers.

    During a run, the Runner passes a Wall of Static and then passes an Enigma. When the Runner passes the Enigma, the Corp uses Mumbad City Grid to swap the Enigma with the Wall of Static. Does the Runner now approach the server or continue past the Enigma into an approach with the Wall of Static again?

    The Runner approaches the server, as this is the next step of the run according to the Runner's position in the server.

    The Runner runs on a server protected by two pieces of ice. They pass a Wall of Static and then pass an Enigma. Can the Corp use Mumbad City Grid to swap the Enigma and the Wall of Static, and then use The Twins to force the Runner to encounter the Enigma again from the outer position?

    You can’t use The Twins after using Mumbad City Grid. Both effects have the same trigger condition, which means the Corp could theoretically choose to resolve them in either order, but if they choose to resolve Mumbad City Grid first and swap the Enigma to a different position, the Runner is now passing a different piece of ice (Wall of Static). So the trigger condition for The Twins has expired and that ability can’t be resolved.

    The Runner runs on a server protected by two pieces of ice. They pass a Wall of Static and then pass an Enigma. Can the Corp use The Twins to force the Runner to re-encounter the Enigma and then swap the Runner out to the outer position?

    The Corp can choose to resolve the ability on The Twins first, forcing another encounter with Enigma, and then use Mumbad City Grid to swap it with Wall of Static afterward, but the Runner will approach the server after all the Enigma encounters are completed, and will not have to encounter Wall of Static again.

Reviews

Riddle me this: when is a Quandary not a Quandary?

The answer is, "when it's the same goddamn Tollbooth that you've had to hit three times to get into this blasted server because of Mumbad City Grid."

Let's be very clear about what happens when you have Mumbad City Grid on a server:

  • The runner approaches the outermost piece of ice. The corp chooses to rez or not as normal. If they rez, the runner encounters the ice (triggering "on encounter" effects like Tollbooth, Data Raven, Quicksand, or Komainu). If an "end the run" effect happens during this encounter, the run is over and Mumbad City Grid does not fire.
  • If the corp doesn't rez, OR if the runner breaks the subroutines, OR if the subroutines fire but don't end the run, the runner has now passed a piece of ice. The Grid fires: the corp must immediately decide whether or not to swap the ice. The rezzed/unrezzed state of both pieces of ice is irrelevant. (This is also the trigger point for The Twins, provided the ice they just passed was rezzed.)
  • The runner may now jack out or continue the run, from their position one ice deep into the server. Swapping ice does not move their location.
  • If they continue the run, and there is another piece of ice, repeat.

What this means is that if you have a server with two unrezzed pieces of ice, and a rezzed Tollbooth on the outside, you can do this: runner encounters Tollbooth, breaks it, swap with next piece of ice, runner hits Tollbooth again, breaks it, swap with last piece of ice, runner hits Tollbooth a third time, breaks it, and you put the Tollbooth back on the outside of the server.

That's just cruel. Just pure meanness. A triple-Tollbooth server is the closest thing to impenetrable the game currently has, and you don't even need to rez more than one. A triple-Komainu can easily get up to 10+ subroutines before they make it in--remember, it's the same piece of ICE being encountered again during the same run. Quicksand accumulates counters at triple the normal rate.

Of course, if the runner breaks the Tollbooth once and jacks out, you now have the Tollbooth as the middle piece of ice; then, the next time they run the server, they only have to deal with Tollbooth twice (plus the chump piece of ice on the outside). Unless, of course, you happen to be running Tenma Line, a criminally undervalued card.

Mumbad City Grid is the first piece towards a new kind of Jinteki glacier; when the economic ID of Pālanā Foods comes out in the next pack, we might see a rival a to the legacy of Replicating Perfection arrive in the meta.

(Kala Ghoda era)
4801
This could find a home in an IG deck, on a central bouncing Quicksand for increased tax. Or Komainu for hilarity. Even with a Mimic out, that's a ridiculous tax. It does make me wonder how something like Femme works with this - you're Femme'ing the rezzed ICE, not the position it's in. I would think that were you to move a Femme'd ICE that was just bypassed, they could Femme it again. —
Grail! —
What is the rez window for Mumbai City Grid here? Can you rez after the runner breaks the final sub on the first ICE, and then force them to re-encounter? —
The rez window is the same as Caprice Nisei (and usually Markus Batty) - it must be rezzed in the ICE approach rez window, because the next rez window is after the ice has been passed. Also, this would be fun in Blue Sun. When they jack out, you just bounce the ice and put it back in front. The ultimate glacier. The influence is a bit brutal, but that's what Project Atlas tokens are for, right? —
It can, IIRC, also work with the Twins, but the twins need to fir first, the Mumbad City Grid - hit Tollbooth 5 ti —
So with Komainu you would have lets say 5 subs the first time, but would have 10 the second because the original 5 are for the remainder of the run and you encounter it again, adding 5 more subs? —
In a vein with the Komainu comment, can I assume that any advancement counters on a piece of ice would move with it? Ice/Fire walls? —

When I first saw this card, I saw potential, I saw a deck, one that I wanted to build and I wanted to play.

I'd tried to make a Mumbad City Grid Grail Ice Deck before it was even released, I've been trying until I started writing this. Sure there have been plenty of games where this has turned a server with little more than a Galahad and two junk ice into a 15 subroutine unbreakable monstrosity, and given a Komainu more subroutines than the runner had cards left in their deck.

But it was too slow, Parasites and Cutlery were running rampant. The ice I needed for that beautiful remote server was needed to seal the holes that kept forming over R&D, achieving the installation of the 3+ ice needed to make the remote was nigh on impossible.

Just as I was starting to feel that the deck was tuned well enough to be able to cope with it, and as Dumblefork took a huge hit from the new most wanted list...

A card that is far easier to satisfy, has a much more potent effect, renders parasites little more than a tickle, and costs nothing to rez was released.

Sandburg.

Sandburg essentially does everything this ever wanted to do, only far more easily, and far more effectively.

My deck has run faster and more effective since I tore out it's still beating heart, and replaced it with cold, hard, unloving cash.

But it's not the deck I wanted to build...

It's not the deck I wanted to play...

It's not my deck anymore...

Mumbad City Grid was never quite fast enough to properly reach it's potential, and now... it probably never will be.

(23 Seconds era)
274
Rumor Mill gets Sandburg but not this card. Rumor mill will prob be pretty popular. Your card's time will come. —
You are correct, though it still does not solve the problem of how slow it is to set up, since the meta-game has been full of fast decks, and hasn't shown any sign of slowing down since before I started playing properly nearly two years ago, and Rumour Mill looks like it will destroy most glacier decks for the forseeable future, Jinteki especially, with their reliance on Caprice and Batty. I will admit that this review is a major overreaction, but regardless the truth is that it was consistently too slow to set up, and Hayley and Geist decks have significantly more inevitability than this provides. —