Wall of Thorns returns, with cost reduction twist, playing off Jinteki's Code Gate theme.

Wall of Thorns was of course, never a strong card, being very expensive for what it did, and ice has only gotten stronger and cheaper since the original core set.

You have to rez quite a lot of ice to bring this down to 5 credits, which is probably where this would need to reach to be "good", but realistically you want it to be even cheaper for it to really be a payoff for an ice, especially since it won't be able to pay off early.

So, this clearly wants you running a fair amount of ice, and quite a few code gates for this to work, and going that way means you probably want more taxing than gearcheck; so what's about for it? Let's see what's in Startup to go with it.

• Diviner - This ice is probably the single best code gate in these sets. Cheap, taxing, and can end the run.
• Hafrún - Comboey ice that lets you mess with what breakers the runner can use.
• Lotus Field - Oh no. Looks like there's probably just not enough code gates in startup for this to really work.

As for bigger Standard's card pool... bigger card pools also tend to mean having big good ice does less for you.

... It's not bad. But don't expect this to be some star card.

Does nothing on it's own, and is even pretty inefficient at doing that.

Obviously intended to be used with Yusuf and Freedom Khumalo: Crypto-Anarchist as they let you actually use these counters. If you do, the payoff isn't actually that bad, as it could bring the virus counter cost of running HQ or R&D repeatedly pretty low.

However, at present, there's not really much that lets you capitalise on that, as there's not much multiaccess that rewards repeatedly running the same server with Medium and Keyhole rotated. As such, you probably don't really want to be running a high value server more than once a turn, or even every turn most of the time, making Virus Breeding Ground quite possibly a better option, saving you MU to install other cards, helping mitigate the downside of being purged, and letting you accumulate virus counters without needing to spend them on running a specific server.

Oh, and it's comparison to Security Testing, though not totally fair, is pretty atrocious.

Calibration Testing is SanSan City Grid done right.

It's suitably costed, both to rez and trash, unlike SanSan's ungodly 5 credit trash cost, and being single use means that you can't just windmill agendas like you could with SanSan.

Regardless, this is genuinely strong, and expect that most NBN decks, be it CTM, Sol, or NEH, will run 3x of these bad boys to score out effectively vs a runner that fails to trash these.

Whether thrown out in the open among PAD Campaigns, or behind a couple of nasty taxing ice, the runner has to respect the threat this card poses... especially since they can be stacked to score bigger agendas, or score out from under the nose of a Shaper who's a little too pushy with when they are willing to grab Clot.

God dangit, another IG card.

Anyway, the comparison to make here, is of course to Preemptive Action. Sure, this shuffles an extra card back, but it bins two cards first, and costs an extra credit! With the only real saving grace being that it isn't Terminal.

So, clearly, to make this worth using you need to make both the self mill, and the recursion useful; which basically means Breached Dome, which means you are either playing IG, or Potatoes, where the real benefit is probably that you get to effectively run 6 preemptives to make your grind-fest last even longer!

... Why does this card say "unrezzed"?

Now for the more complete examination because of the 200 character minimum:

Three credits is expensive, and it doesn't let you swap rezzed ice, making it largely useless, as excluding derez effects, Reshape swaps one unknown layer of defence, that you presumably have yet to let the corp rez, for another unknown piece of ice, that you have no reason to think is going to be any cheaper to break; let alone be enough cheaper that you are going to get the money back for playing this card, let alone including it in your deck.

This probably worked on all ice in early testing, but either was misprinted, or was nerfed and didn't get tested properly after the nerf.