It’s all about the viruses in Nalubaale. Click on the images below to see a bigger version.

Freedom Khumalo: Man this is an interesting ID. It really messes with how to evaluate trash value when the rez/play cost becomes a factor. He comes with the inbuilt ability to just kill all 0 cost cards (EoI, Pop Up, MVT, Mushin and Preemptive come to mind, Rashida and NGO technically but they’re already only 1 to trash) and deal with commonly played low cost cards like Scarcity. “Once per turn” and not “the first time each turn” gives you some nice flexibility. He really encourages getting those value single accesses in, especially on HQ. It’s also a really cool deckbuilding challenge because how many viruses are enough? How many are too many? The thing about going all in on viruses is that without Noise at some point you’re going to have to get some accesses, and a lot of virus cards don’t help with that. He’s definitely not the kind of ID you can just slot into an existing archetype. That said…what about God of War?

Freedom Khumalo: Crypto Anarchist Event (19)

1x Contaminate

3x I’ve Had Worse

3x Inject

1x Levy AR Lab Access 🦄 ●●●

3x Mars for Martians

2x Peace in Our Time ●●

1x Retrieval Run

2x Stimhack

3x Sure Gamble Hardware (3)

3x Obelus Resource (10)

3x Counter Surveillance

3x Dean Lister

3x Rogue Trading ●●●●● ●

1x Same Old Thing Icebreaker (9)

3x Aumakua ●●●

1x Black Orchestra

3x God of War

1x MKUltra

1x Paperclip Program (4)

1x Cache ●

3x Trypano

The gameplan: use God of War to build up virus counters every turn. Cache is used for Freedom value instead of money. Contaminate is for Aumakua or maybe weird Cache plays but probably isn’t necessary. Installing multiple Aumakuas at once might actually be a totally reasonable play to keep getting Freedom enablers. The standard Counter Surveillance/Mars For Martians play is a good way to access many many cards. Freedom and Aumakua give us additional ways to keep up the pressure and Trypano burns down some servers.

Trypano: New Parasite! Or is it? (it’s not). Let’s look at what this does better than Parasite: trash strength 6 or greater ICE without using Datasucker/Ice Carver, and be able to trash unrezzed ICE. Cool. Here’s what Parasite also did, apart from blowing stuff up:

Kill high cost, low strength ICE incredibly efficiently. Endless EULA is a pretty good ICE that would be utterly unplayable in a world with Parasite. Komainu and Kakugo are in a similar boat.

Bring ICE down into range of Mimic and Yog.0

Synergise with Datasucker to kill big ICE way faster

Get installed at instant speed off Clone Chip, Street Peddler and SMC (sometimes) to blow up really expensive ICE mid run. This is very important to Parasite being godly.

So basically all that Trypano has in common with Parasite is that it’s a 2-cost virus that kills ICE. Trypano does combo with Hivemind, Crypt, Virus Breeding Grounds and Contaminate (also in this pack). However, Parasite comboed with all those (not Crypt or Contaminate specifically, obviously) while also having strong synergies with a bunch of really good cards that you were already playing! There was nothing stopping you playing Parasite with Hivemind and Djinn but that was never a thing. The one thing that’s really new here is that we’re post Jackson and getting trashed ICE back is significantly harder. That could be a big point in Trypano’s favor.

Contaminate: The most immediately obvious use is on Aumakua post purge, and that’s a strong play. 1 influence too. In general it’s a good way to get back into the game if you’re using virus based breakers. Also very nice with Hivemind if you have a way to spend the counter on it or you get purged. Good choice for heavy virus based strategies to avoid just getting BTFO by a purge.

Embezzle: conspicuously not Legwork. Trashing stuff is good though I guess.

Slipstream: sometimes pretty good, like if they have a value asset server that’s one small ICE. Not sure that comes up often enough to warrant a slot though.

Laamb: First of all, what’s up with that art? Secondly, I kind of like the idea of this in that it fits into the Shaper sub theme (by which I mean Battering Ram) of just throwing money at a problem, no matter how inefficiently, until it goes away. This will technically get you through any piece of ICE but it’s gonna cost you. I guess you could combo it with Paperclip but I very much doubt that’s ever efficient.

Gebrselassie: The mechanic of breakers keeping strength has been around since core 1 and almost never does anything. This is unlikely to change that.

Compile: More support for the theoretical temporary program type of Wu. That means maybe it could fit into Pirate Hayley to get Grappling Hooks, I guess.

Logic Bomb: Very strong. This is close to the best bypass in the game (second to Femme I guess, maybe just better) with the downside that it doesn’t beat on-encounter effects and the obvious cost of losing your clicks which is extremely easy to play around. There are a lot of upsides for those. You can bypass any ICE, not just the innermost or outermost, which means you can’t play around it by putting a cheap ICE on the outside or whatever. You don’t have to commit to it at the outset of a run and can just have it sitting on the table until you need it. Could also import the Pirate package into Adam, maybe? Seems plausible. Also, godly flavor + art in general.

Jackpot! More like “Easy Mark but somehow worse!”, but that’s less catchy.

Remote Enforcement: This is a really good agenda in the right deck, which I’m pretty sure could be either a rushy OR glacier-style build. The best way to analyse it, I think, is to compare it to Corporate Sales Team. If you were to slot this into an average HB deck, ICE cost would typically top out at 6 with Fairchild 3.0, maybe 8 with a Tollbooth. So this would be less raw econ than CST in those cases, but you get all that money up front. You also get one click of install value, plus the value of searching your deck which is hard to quantify since the effect exists in Levy University but is unplayable.

More importantly than the econ though is that this sets you up to score the next agenda, which will let you close out the game before the credit differential with CST would matter. Another way to get value off this is just to run one or two pieces of huge ICE – Heimdall 2.0, Fairchild (the big one), Tithonium and Sherlock 2.0 all come to mind (no free Archers sadly, this doesn’t ignore additional costs). This route adds a lot of variance (you definitely don’t want to draw Heimdall 2.0 in your opening hand) but also way more blowout potential. In fact, the more I look at this the more it starts to look like (an undoubtedly much weaker) purple Nisei Mk. II in that it gives you tools to chain agendas aggressively. Could be a major boost to the faction. I’d try it in this:

Asa Group: Security Through Vigilance Agenda (9) 3x Project Vitruvius

3x Remote Enforcement

3x SSL Endorsement Asset (6)

3x NGO Front

3x Rashida Jaheem Upgrade (7)

3x Ash 2X3ZB9CY

3x Bio Vault ●●●●● ●

1x Bryan Stinson ●●● Operation (9)

1x Biotic Labor

3x Hedge Fund

3x IPO

2x Ultraviolet Clearance Barrier (5)

3x Endless EULA ●●●●● ●

2x Vanilla Code Gate (8)

1x Enigma

1x Fairchild

2x Fairchild 2.0

3x Fairchild 3.0 🦄

1x Turing Sentry (4)

2x Architect

2x Ichi 1.0 Other (1)

1x Loki

The gameplan: rush hard and make a taxing remote. Remote Enforcement gets you either a mega Fairchild or one of your solid 6 cost taxing ICE. Use the remote to keep scoring more stuff.

Kamali 1.0: A glimpse into the future of HB, where every single card will have the words “brain damage” printed on it. Actually pretty annoying to break if you’re not on Mimic, but is it 6 credits worth of annoying? Probably not. Disgusting facecheck though I guess.

Warden Fatuma: Potentially quite interesting. Currently the most played Bioroids are Fairchilds 2 and 3 and Ichi 1.0. This ups their facecheck potential pretty reasonably but doesn’t actually change breaker maths much, particularly with the conspiracy breakers. Also works in a click-draining type of HB. Might be worth trying?

Viral Weaponization: a lot of people are going to go to great lengths to try and get kills with this. Seems…hard. Unfortunately it does fit into gross grinder decks like PU and IG.

Envelope: Wall of Thorns’ little brother is apparently an envelope. That’s not how ICE biology works, FFG.

Mwanza City Grid: I kind of love this card just for the total disregard for Netrunner norms it implies. Just having the confidence to say “yes, R&D does contain an unreasonable number of Snares and Obokatas” is really cool. 3 additional cards! That’s so many! Come to think of it maybe it’s not even bad in Punitive Palana or something? They get a Bacterial Programming, you get 8 extra credits to kill them with. I mean most of the time it’ll lose you the game but it’s so funny the rest of the time. It’s one influence too so maybe it’s actually good in Haarpsichord with Hard Hitting News to follow up.

Standard Procedure: I’m fairly sure this is insane. Events tend to stick in the hand and if Scarcity of Resources has been live for a while you can generally make the read that there are resources in there. Find the Truth is also currently very popular. It seems really rare that this will be less than “pay 0, gain 4” and very often will be “pay 0, gain 6+”, plus the slight hand reveal advantage. Obviously the “successful run” clause makes it less appealing but otherwise it’d be absolutely bonkers turn 1. Over the next little while I’m going to start keeping an eye on my hand as Runner and trying to figure out likely Standard Procedure calls. I think this has potential to straight up replace IPO in faction.

Intake: Better than Tempus. Trace 4 is not insignificant. Still not great.

Masvingo: pretty decent, solidly taxing. Worthwhile with SSO and Oduduwa, not worth advancing on its own merits.

Overseer Matrix: It’s like a protective upgrade for your protective upgrades! There’s a fairly popular shell for Argus that involves using lots of Prisecs, Forced Connections and whatnot to grind the Runner out and this fits right in. Worth noting that it’s absolutely disgusting with MVT. In CTM it’d be ridiculous although thankfully the 4 influence makes that pretty untenable.

See you next month for Kampala Ascendent!