Hi Runners! RC here, with just a quick interruption before I hand you over to Akira - Community Week is now over, but if you missed any of the scoops, you can check out the content on the links below. Most of the podcasts and videos have links to the cards, but I definitely recommend watching and listening to them. Thank you once again to our fabulous bunch of content creators!

All the cards are also on NRDB - see what’s been revealed so far !

Over to you Akira...





Hello GameNET gamers! Today, we’re excited to reveal a new service for all our Martian fans: codename Bellona. Details are still coming in, but here’s what we have so far:







As you can see, accessing this content Earthside is going to need a booster relay, reasonably priced of course. Unfortunately, whenever these unsynced markets happen, it tends to lead to an increase in gold farming - let’s hope that this time is an exception.

Let’s talk about Bellona. It invites comparison with NAPD Contract, a powerful defensive 4/2 agenda from the game’s early days. However:



Bellona returns the investment made to advance it when it’s scored.

Bellona doesn’t double dip on its bad pub anti-synergy.

Bellona costs 5 credits to steal instead of 4.

Bellona is a 5/3!!

Bellona is yellow.



Five credits is huge, and as with NAPD the Runner can easily be taxed out of stealing it - or even better, they might steal it when they can’t afford to and break their econ for the rest of the game.



5/3s have always felt like a liability for the trade-off of either being defensive but blank (Degree Mill, Obokata Protocol), or giving powerful effects if scored (Hades Fragment, SSL Endorsement). Being defensive but also giving something back when scored is massive and really pushes the feel of 5/3s being the cornerstone of a deck.



Now on to Gold Farmer. Ice which doesn’t require a breaker to get through has historically been in a hit or miss area, with cards like Pop-up Window appearing in worlds-winning decks, but cards like Negotiator appearing in binders.



While Gold Farmer doesn’t need a breaker to get through, it will cost the Runner SIX CREDITS to cheat their way through it, which is twice the card’s rez cost - talk about pay to win.



But that’s not all: thanks to its intrinsic ability, even after finding a breaker for it, the Runner will be sapped an extra credit each time they break a subroutine, usually making them pay at least 4 to get through it, which is reaching Eli 1.0 levels of tax for its cost. Thanks to this, its 1 strength will rarely matter, except when countered with Chisel or similar cards.



Oh, and each subroutine - whether broken or paid through - will trigger GameNet’s ability.



Taking these taxing cards into GameNET, along with the faction’s already taxing gameplay, we can get a decklist that looks like this:



Identity: GameNET



Agenda

3x Bellona

1x Global Food Initiative 🦄 ●

1x Cyberdex Sandbox

3x Remastered Edition

Asset

3x NGO Front

3x Rashida Jaheem

Operation

1x Digital Rights Management

3x Hedge Fund

2x IPO

3x NAPD Cordon

2x Preemptive Action

1x SYNC Rerouting

Upgrade

2x Ash 2X3ZB9CY ●●●●

1x Red Herrings

1x Cyberdex Virus Suite



Barrier

1x Endless EULA

1x IP Block

3x Gold Famer

Code Gate

1x Archangel

3x Fairchild 2.0 ●●●●● ●

3x Slot Machine

2x Tollbooth

Sentry

3x Surveyor ●●●●● ●

1x Turnpike

1x Hydra



The idea of such a deck is to tax the Runner out of stealing anything, while GameNET’s ability keeps your credit totals topped up for rezzing the expensive ice the deck packs. An early Gold Farmer on a central server can deter runs while you set up, and once you have a remote with a Surveyor and a few extra pieces of ice on it, Bellona becomes impossible to obtain for all but the richest Runners.