Filters are more effective when HQ is large, especially against decks like: Cerebral Imaging: Infinite Frontiers Research Station Cybernetics Court A good combo with Fisk Investment Seminar and Laramy Fisk: Savvy Investor to fill up your opponent's HQ. In decks that "thicken" your opponent's HQ, Filters can be more effective than Legwork. @royaledle)

It's just past the dawn of the Elevation era (August 2025), and this card is a major player in one of the best decks right now, and since it's been 4 years since the last reviews, this card might be worth some re-assessment - a check up, to see how the Serum is working.

Jinteki has never enjoyed particularly great 3/2s, but without the heavily defensive 5/3s of yesteryear, a scoring pattern with 4 agendas has re-entered the red playbook. It's no longer fundamentally wrong to have 11 or more agendas, and this card sees play - though of course it's still 1 per deck.

One thing we saw in System Gateway was an idea that Jinteki sometimes throws their cards away for advantage, and in the sets since then we saw quite a few cards like that- and, at the time of writing, the most impactful of all, an ID that mirrors MaxX - where acceleration through filtered drawing is everything, but a lot of cards end up in the bin, by the Corp's own design. Including this card, which can give you an additional AU Co. counter if you choose. With the addition of Sabotage from the runner (amongst other tricks), that's a lot of scope for important cards to end up in Archives.

This changes Longevity Serum's place in the Jinteki ecosystem quite a bit - no longer is it a Spin Doctor that is worth points, instead this is a reset button, a renewal - a way of recouping some of the options you sacrificed for progress, returning to old ideas... or bringing back threats the Runner thought they dealt with. The runner can have trashed all 3 copies of a kill card, but if you score this, should you wish it you can bring all 3 murder cards back, and return the runner to the cycle of suffering.

There's one last card worth mentioning with this agenda, possibly saving the best till last - Moon Pool. Because Longevity Serum is a 3/2, you can install it, install Moon Pool, and if you have 2 agendas between HQ or Archives, you can advance and score this, shuffling back a total of 5 cards, at least 2 of which are agendas - an absolutely massive swing.

As a Limit 1 Per Deck agenda, Longevity Serum will always have a fundamental weakness, but its strength shouldn't be ignored - it's not a blank by any means

Flavor Review: The phrase “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” expresses doubt at any offer of getting something for nothing. According to Wikipedia, the phrase, which is at least as old as the 1930s, originally referred to the then-common practice of bars offering a free lunch to entice people to come and spend their money drinking. Fascinating.

Still, what does that have to do with the card? This card essentially is, after all, money for nothing. You pay $0 and get $3, or you have a “get-out-of-jail free” card when getting tagged. The flavor kind of seems like a contradiction with the function.

However - and I am just tickled pink by this - the flavor refers to the idea of opportunity cost. In economics, opportunity cost is what opportunities you’ve lost (or “paid”) by choosing one thing over another. If I work an unpaid internship, I am paying the opportunity cost of wages I could have earned if I took a paid job. If I stay out late to party with my friends on a weeknight, I pay the opportunity cost of lost sleep before work the next day. Even choosing to go the bar and get a free lunch involves paying the opportunity cost of spending your time and money at the bar instead of at home with your family.

The idea here is that choosing either of the two options on the card involves paying the opportunity cost of losing the other. That’s why the art shows a hand poised to make one of two choices, and why the flavor text says to “consider all your options.” Neat!

Cards like this with subtle ideas at the heart of their flavor is one thing that makes me love Netrunner.

Include this in your list with much draw and many small programs (looking at you, Anarchs) and you may be able to thwart the brutal Touch-ups --> End of the Line / Measured Response combo from which your old friend cannot protect you. Especially good for Seb, who usually would like to end his turn with a single tag without ending up dead. Also good for Topan: Ormas Leader, as their ability lets them install it for exactly zero credits (also possibly triggering their other support cards), and covers the discrepancy between their many programs and their console only providing one extra RAM.

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