Analysis By: Hoobajoo

Geostrategic Research and Neothermal Development Laboratories

That acronym is pretty great, isn’t it? Almost as good as this ID is! I’m shocked, SHOCKED, that I seem to be the only person that rates this higher than the Core ID. And at face value, you might think like that: after all, BABW typically will give you five extra credits, maybe less maybe more, and it doesn’t come with a Bad Publicity or a lower influence count. But critically, very critically, this money comes on turn ZERO. BABW might give you six credits later, on a good day, but GRNDL gives them to you right from the start! You hit the ground running, and don’t stop until you’ve crossed the finish line. And come on, you’re Weyland, were you really not going to take bad pub at some point?

Let’s talk about that, actually. Much of my love for a reckless, speedy Weyland came when I realized that given a long enough time frame, the runner WILL win. And not because of decking, but the corp’s economy is either single-shot operations or trashable assets. This means that the runner has a much more secure, bluntly powerful economy, so the corp can’t wait, and once a rig is fully built, a good runner can cut through anything. So I resolved to win before the runner COULD build a rig! Bad publicity is meaningless in this deck; before a runner can get through your 3-ICE remote, it doesn’t matter how many fake credits they can’t spend, and once they can, well, you’ve lost no matter how many bad pub they have.

I really can’t overstate the power of those five credits. Of course it lets you easily run Restructure, which BABW finds significantly more clunky. It makes an early flatline threat much harder for the runner to play around. And maybe most importantly of all, it lets you score your first agenda probably a turn earlier. Given how well all of Weyland’s agendas snowball into one another and build tempo, this is a big impact. The fact that all those initial credits come not only at once, but irrespective of your draw, means GRNDL performs more consistently than BABW, which is often dead in the water if it doesn’t get a couple transactions.

The only knock against it really is the lower influence. I know Lucas said they could have made GRNDL have 12 influence, but I disagree; that would be an objective power-up to Weyland without giving up space for it’s tagging package. As it stands, it is a legitimate trade off, but one I am glad to make for the extra power and consistency GRNDL promises. This influence gap will become less of an issue as the game goes on, and if Weyland ever gets it’s own card draw effect or tagging operation, it’s game over, man. Game over.