Mass Commercialization

Mass Commercialization 0[credit]

Operation: Transaction
Influence: 0

Gain 2[credit] for each card with at least 1 advancement token on it.

Illustrated by Mark Molnar
Decklists with this card

Blood and Water (baw)

#80 • English
Startup Card Pool
Standard Card Pool
Standard Ban List (show history)
Rulings
  • Updated 2017-06-23

    ANCUR UFAQ [Michael Boggs]

    If Tennin Institute has placed an advancement token on a Runner card, does that increase the credits gained from Mass Commercialization?

    Yes.

Reviews

This card was good on release. Advancing ICE always had a cost and felt pretty slow but Mass Commercialization helped recoup these costs.

However, latest innovations in ICE advancement make this card a bit too good. SSO Industries: Fueling Innovation started the ball by advancing ICE for free, hence under a few conditions (having a face up agenda rezzed, only advancing one ICE per turn).

Then NISEI turned the dial by Wall to Wall, which places an advancement counter on a card per turn for free. Again, no need to waste money or time to advance ICE and Mass Comm becomes pure profit. You can always trash Wall to Wall I guess.

Now things have gone out of hands with Weyland Consortium: Built to Last. You now get money for advancing ICE the first time (still losing the click, but that's better than clicking for credits), AND you get loads of credits from Mass Comm.

The cycle is complete: you can now have cake AND eat cake. Being able to go from 0 to 10+ credits (I'm being conservative) in glacier with this card is game changing. It supports grindy Weyland Government Takeover decks which are the worst to play again. Is it time to reconsider this card?

It is pretty fun in PE traps decks through...

(System Update 2021 era)
192

This was a prescient review. Mass Commercialization recently got banned, for pretty much exactly the reasons you described. I've been considering going to the banned cards and writing reviews explaining why they're banned, but in this case, the explanation review was there already.

This card is very good! As noted by Silv, if there are just two advanced cards on the table, this becomes better than Hedge Fund. But in the right deck it can make ludicrous amounts of money. Let's take a minute to compare to its obvious cousin Commercialization.

The problem with Commercialization is not that it only gives 1 per advancement token. It wouldn't be terribly hard to get four or more tokens on a card, therefore making this better than Hedge Fund. The problem is two-fold. If you are placing a bunch of tokens on a single piece of ICE, the runner is going to be pretty wary of it. He or she may just try to avoid the ICE altogether. The second problem is that you are putting all your eggs in one basket. If the right piece of Cutlery or a well timed Forged Activation Order strikes, then that whole investment is gone. Mass Commercialization avoids both these problems while also doubling the gain. Then too, it is influence free, so Tennin can spend their 15 elsewhere.

This card obviously finds a place in any Tennin, Because We Built It, or Builder of Nations deck. But it may well be good enough to influence the construction of other Weyland decks. You might consider including more advance-able ICE in your Building a Better World deck. Advance just two ICE and you'll get 5 with a play cost of 0. Remember too that the tokens to not have to be on ICE. Traps and agendas count too (and runner cards if you are playing as Tennin).

Now if you want to go all in with this card, there are several cards to consider adding as well. This includes, but is not limited to: Anson Rose, Space Camp, Satellite Grid, Shipment from Kaguya, Trick of Light, and Matrix Analyzer.

(Blood and Water era)
Builder is also a nice one. If the runner has reason to breaking its subs it becomes a quite taxing 4str/2sub code gate for 2 cred. —

Once you have two cards with advancement tokens on them Mass Commercialization becomes a better Hedge Fund (0 vs 5 to activate). If you have three cards with advancement tokens on them Mass Commercialization beats Restructure and IPO (6 vs 5 gain, not to mention the massive difference in activation cost).

There aren't many cards with the sheer level of economic efficiency that Mass Commercialization can attain and with so few drawbacks. The flip side is that Mass Commercialization doesn't work unless you advance a lot of cards. Few decks actually have more than one or two cards with advancement tokens on them.

There are two big exceptions: Weyland Consortium: Builder of Nations and Tennin Institute: The Secrets Within decks. BoN is obvious, its strategy relies on putting a one or more tokens on at least one piece of ice in every important server to make the runner bleed or scared (preferably both). BoN tends to rather quickly reach the critical 2 cards-with-tokens threshold necessary to make Mass Commercialization useful and BoN decks tend to have the infrastructure (Anson Rose, Space Camp, Shipment from Kaguya) to put tokens on a lot of cards.

Tennin is a little less direct but it has the potential to put a lot of tokens everywhere, even on cards that can't be advanced such as Desperado. Mass Commercialization can be a good option to make some money while waiting for a scoring window.

Because each card only generates at most 2 per Mass Commercialization it's hard to get enough cards with tokens to justify inclusion in most decks. From a game design perspective that's a good thing. It makes Mass Commercialization a powerful but uncommon occurance, not an overpowered staple.

Having three operations in your deck that make money is obviously not enough. It's therefore good that Mass Commercialization works excellently both by the soon-to-be-retired Jackson Howard and replacements like Preemptive Action. Oh, and Bryan Stinson works as well (though playing Stinson on a zero cost operation just feels a little wasteful).

(Blood and Water era)
393
It might be an uncommon occurance, but it's completely bonkers if the deck is built for it. Red Planet Couriers + Government Takeover combo deck would probably still play it, even if it was 2c cost instead of 0c. —