Adding a review as there isn't one at the time of writing.

It can be difficult to give good constructive feedback because I love this game, these cards and everything I'm about to say comes from a place of love and wanting to help the designers. This card... sucks. It's probably one of the worst cards released in Liberation and sees a proportional amount of play to that power level.

The runner can just run through this, like, without breakers... with very minimal drawbacks. If you're wondering how here are some options:

• click 1: draw, click 2: draw, click 3: run through Piranhas like wasn't even there
• click 1: use Dr. Nuka Vrolyck, click 2: run through Piranhas like it wasn't even there
• click 1: play Diesel, click 2: run through Piranhas like it wasn't even there
• click 1: play Steelskin Scarring, click 2: run through Piranhas like it wasn't even there
• click 1: use Verbal Plasticity, click 2: run through Piranhas like wasn't even there
• start of turn: Earthrise Hotel triggers, click 1: run through Piranhas like wasn't even there
• last turn: play The Class Act, click 1: run through Piranhas like wasn't even there
• better yet, have a Stoneship Chart Room installed and you can face-check this ICE and still get through it

(You can also use a Botulus or Boomerang or Physarum Entangler or almost any other form of ICE cheating if you don't want to take any damage and all these options will get you in without any problems (unlike some other strong ICE like Anansi, Cloud Eater or Hammer that have special text)

This is absolutely hilarious, this card is Diviner (which is already a very weak card), yet more than twice as expensive and somehow even less consistent at ending the run. Just to be kind, the Corp then gifts the Runner a Bad Publicity to help them run through all the rest of their ICE more cheaply because why not?

This card does less damage than an Anemone, draws the Corp a card as though that's somehow worth the cost and then sits around twiddling its thumbs as the Runner moves past it, I don't know how you could have designed a less scary version of Piranhas.

Its sister program, Valentão (keep in mind the numbers are identical only the subroutine text differs), at least makes some sense, it's pretty reasonable to assume that a Weyland player would have more money than the Runner (though some Shapers will give the Corp a run for it's money, no pun intended). Even without the first two subroutines firing, the third has a legitimate threat of ending the run anyway. Let all the subroutines fire and Valentão triggers a 4-credit swing and probably bounces the runner out. If they want to get in, they have to break it, and if they are already going to interface, they might as well fully break it, and that's where these two cards shine.

• 5 credits for Unity even with 3 Icebreakers installed (even if you somehow have 4 Icebreakers installed it still costs 4 credits to break fully)
• 5 credits for Buzzsaw, and that's with K2CP Turbine support
• 5 credits for Lobisomem (which is the most expensive Decoder in Standard at the time of writing)
• 4 / 8 credits for Euler (depending on if this is the turn it was installed)
• 7/9 credits for Shibboleth (depending on the threat level)
• 8 credits for Cat's Cradle

AI does a little better:

• Audrey v2 can break it for 2 cards and 2 virus counters, or only 1 virus counter if you only need to break the pseudo-ETR sub and don't care about the corp getting a little money
• Slap Vandal interfaces neatly and can get away with only breaking the pseudo-ETR sub
• Aumakua does the worst of the 3, requiring 6 virus counters and still needing to pay up to 3 credits to fully break

That being said, against the vast majority of breaker suites, these two pieces of ICE will cost the runner a hefty sum, or require quite a bit of set-up to deal with, thanks to their amazing rez cost-to-strength ratio. The only problem is that while the runner often needs to break Valentão to get in, you'd have to mind control the Runner to convince them they're locked out by a Piranhas.

The fatal flaw of this card, of course, is to assume that credits and cards are comparable, in many ways, they are for purposes of card draw or economy calculations (i.e. Wildcat Strike or Predictive Planogram), but where credits can be stacked unlimitedly, cards usually top out at 5 in hand. This makes getting yourself as many cards as the Corp, substantially easier than getting as many credits because the Corp can't generate a hand-size lead in the same way they can create a credit lead. To achieve a hand-size lead in Faction you'd either have to play Superconducting Hub, which is a pretty bad 3/1 agenda on its own, or use something like Spin Doctor to trigger card draw mid-run, which, is hardly the best use for such a powerful card.

It would have made so much more sense for this card to be put in literally any other faction too, put it in Weyland and they can try and synergize it with The Outfit: Family Owned and Operated and Regulatory Capture without needing to pay 3 influence per copy to import it.

Put it in Haas-Bioroid and they can synergize it with Haas-Bioroid: Precision Design to make it much easier to have a higher number of cards in hand, or with Thule Subsea: Safety Below, which can also make it easier though in the opposite direction by decreasing the maximum hand size of the runner rather than increasing your own.

And of course, there's Jinteki, by combining this card with additional forms of damage you can more reliably keep the runner out, if you put this card at the root of a server with other net-damage cards on top of it, then there is an inherent synergy. Piranhas is made harder to cheat through by the net damage on top of it, and the net damage dealing ICE on top of it are made less porous by the fact there's a Piranhas after them.

But NBN has almost no way to fully utilize this card, perhaps you can generate an extra credit from Your Digital Life, but is that really enough? And pricing it at 3 Influence just makes it so much more cumbersome to import this card into any other faction who might try and do something cool with it.

The idea of Code Gates having "conditional" end-the-run effects while Barriers have "hard" end-the-run effects helps differentiate Code Gates from just seeming like a "Barrier+" (like Enigma or Hortum for example) and makes them more fascinating and complex to play around on the part of both players and I'm interested to see more cards designed in this space. But, Piranhas is just a swing and a miss that is not worth its price.

However, the fact that it also gives the Corporation Bad-Publicity is really strange and I'm not even sure Valentão warrants the bad publicity considering how potentially porous these ICE can be in the wrong situation. Illicit ICE is usually meant to be terrifying and incredibly threatening to runner, hence the stigma associated with it, compare Trebuchet which can trash any installed runner card, including expensive programs or pieces of hardware that would otherwise be hard to trash. Even older now rotated cards like Bulwark end the run dramatically, and take out a program while it's at it. Shinobi has a real chance of killing the runner off of a bad face-check, and Fenris does core damage, which used to be a rarity.

I find the current design philosophy regarding bad publicity confounding, HB ICE like Hákarl 1.0 or Jaguarundi can do core damage off of a bad face check and while Bloop or Tyr have more warning or counterplay (needing a pre-rezzed Harmonic or being able to click-through it) they can still do lasting damage to the runner yet are not illicit. Similarly, Saisentan is infamous for its ability to flatline the runner out of nowhere and while a Cloud Eater won't flatline the runner it can do a heap of damage, wreck the runners board state and bury them in tags if it fires yet both seem to fly under the radar while two conditional ETR Code Gates that do a grand total of 1 net damage are apparently intolerable to the public. Something doesn't add up here.

The tag sub-condition is even stranger, usually, you'll have gone to great lengths to land a tag, and want to use it for something valuable like Hypoxia or End of the Line, simply rezzing a moderately powerful piece of ICE is hardly the peak potential a tag has to offer. So letting you remove a tag instead of taking a bad-publicity usually only matters in the odd game against a tag-me runner. But tag-me is rare, and once again, the potential ways to punish a tag-me runner are far more serious than this. Frankly, if you are playing this piece of ICE, you should be ready and willing to take the Bad Publicity.

Beyond these practical mechanics considerations, this wasn't quite what I was expecting for such an iconic cultural icon as Piranhas. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but perhaps something that did more damage the fewer cards you had in hand, like an ICE version of Blood in the Water that's used as a finisher. Something that starts with 7 "do 1 net damage" subroutines and has one fewer subroutines for each card in hand for example. Or maybe some kind of ICE, where you can include 6 copies in the deck and it tutors other copies of itself out onto the board when you do net damage with it, like, the first Piranhas draws blood and then that attracts the rest. Or something that represents attracting other Piranhas by allowing you to rearrange your ICE behind the Piranhas if it does damage, or allowing you to move the Piranhas behind another piece of ICE when that ICE does damage, or allowing you to force the runner to encounter Piranhas when they after they take net damage or so many other cool possibilities.

TLDR: A rather weak card that sees very little play in the current meta because it can be so easily circumvented and provides very little actual taxing power despite its superficially large numbers.