Public Support

Public Support 2[credit]

Asset
Trash: 4
Influence: 3

Place 3 power counters on Public Support when it is rezzed. When there are no power counters left on Public Support, add it to your score area as an agenda worth 1 agenda point.

When your turn begins, remove 1 power counter from Public Support.

Illustrated by Wenjuinn Png
Decklists with this card

System Core 2019 (sc19)

#129 • English
Startup Card Pool
Standard Card Pool
Standard Ban List (show history)
Rulings

No rulings yet for this card.

Reviews

Just as it takes 3 turns to cook up, appreciation of this card comes in 3 stages:

  • Stage 1: Lizzy Mills you look damn fine in that dress. TAKE MY MONEY!
  • Stage 2: Alright sweet, I'm gonna combo this with like, so many cards. Free Archer? Free Corporate Town? Hell yeah! Let's glaze on some Gagarin Deep Space and Paywall Implementation for good measure, and oh! oh! oh my god...(giggles uncontrollably) I'm gonna play Encryption Protocol with it...ahahaha...
  • Stage 3: I know you're amazing, Public Support, but I lose 70% of the games I play with you. It's probably some Netrunner conspiracy, and has nothing to do with you, but I'm going to have to put you back in the binder just to be safe. It's over :'(

This card just seems so good on paper, but often flops in execution. At 3 influence, we can safely assume it won't be splashed anywhere, and as an asset that doesn't help you at all for 3 turns, it's most likely to be seen in Gagarin, where the runner will have to pay a hefty 5 to it (more if you can ice it up a bit). As a "worst-case scenario", that actually seems...great, right? Tax them pretty hard, and just keep doing whatever it was you were doing.

As mentioned earlier, it can be forfeited to enable Corporate Town (asset + Gagarin = good) and Archer, both of which have historically been difficult to play in Gagarin because the best food for those has always been Hostile Takeover, and bad pub is pretty crippling to your ID ability.

Even just used for points it looks sexy. Weyland has excellent 2-pointers in Project Atlas and Oaktown Renovation, usually polished off by some NAPD Contracts and Hostile Takeovers for an easy 7th point. Having a way to cap off 6 points without having to score 2 more is always nice, and unlike Hostile Takeover, runners can't steal this for a similarly easy 7th point.

After this glowing praise, it's difficult to nail down why exactly this card just isn't that great. A lot of it comes down to deck-space issues. Why don't all Haas decks run Domestic Sleepers, if it's basically a guaranteed agenda point? Because clogging your deck with slow agendas that don't count towards your deck's minimum just usually isn't worth it when you could have more ice, more econ, or more nasty combo cards that really make you a threat like fast advance or flatline packages.

Look again at what it does. If they trash it naked:

  • You spent 2 and 2 to tax them 1 and 5
  • So in terms of net gain, you might think of this as an operation that costs 0 and reads "The runner loses 3."
  • It's not even as good as that, though, since it's an asset, so it doesn't happen on demand. In fact, if they can afford to give you the point, then it doesn't happen at all. The runner gets to choose what's better for them.

If you decide you want it and let it cook up in your scoring remote:

  • You can't score agendas for 3 turns
  • You give the runner a huge time window to set up their board and generate money
  • Your hand may start to clog with other cards (like agendas) that you want to install in that remote

Neither of those sounds particularly appealing. The real best-case scenario is probably somewhere in between, where you can afford to throw Public Support in an extra remote with a piece of taxing ice on it (preferably one that's already been rezzed). The problem with this is that it's not easy to play a horizontal ID and also have enough ice for not just your centrals (which are your biggest weakness) and your scoring remotes, but also your extra remotes too.

There's no single thing that makes Public Support bad, and it is by no means unplayable. But neither is it a competitive card, in my opinion, once you gather up all the little things that make it problematic. If you can pilot a deck to first place in a major tournament with this card, I'll eat my hat.

(Data and Destiny era)
Why are you spending 2$click? —
@oconner0 : as long as the Corp doesn't rez it, the Runner won't feel the urge to trash it. —
I think he was trying to insert the click symbol, and the formatting left it as the $ symbol. But it's 1 click to draw the card, 1 click to pay it (yes, drawing effectively costs a click, even if it's your automatic draw). —
Personally, I think that Public Support falls into the growing category of semi-taxing Weyland assets that cannot be suffered to live. Because there is an (albeit minor) credit swing in the corp's favor this card opens up a potential SEA Source window. I don't think that this card necessarily has a place in all scorcy Weyland decks, but certainly it can be used as a tool to bait the runner into making a run that causes them more monetary pain than it does the corp. —
I love Public Support because it combos beautifully in Gagarin and with Team Sponsorship, meaning that if you want to trash it, it has every means to come right back. —
I've been using this card since it was released and my experience with it has been amazing. My opponents mostly just ignore it. But even when they do run it, it helps create scoring windows for me. I agree with pretty much everything you said about it. I've just had a good time with it. Could be the meta. I think it's a card that requires good timing and reading of the board state. It's not a card you throw down as soon as it hits your hand. —
I've played against someone who splashed this in Industrial Genomics, and now I never want to play them again. —
Question: When I remove the last counter on PS and have a active Team Sponsorship: does TS trigger? —
No because you don't "score" it but "add" it, there is a difference, same would go for Quantum Predictive Model(if acessed by the runner with a tag ofc) —

Public Support's a card that seems on paper like it should work out SUPER well. So why is it so mediocre in practice?

The idea of "agenda points that the Runner can't score" is amazing. And in fact, when you get a card that actually DOES that (oh hello, 15 Minutes), it's as amazing as you hoped this would be. But Public Support isn't an agenda the runner can't score, it's just a trashable asset. It doesn't earn you money, it doesn't advance your position in the game, it just scores you points if the runner ignores it. For that benefit, you have to protect it the same way you would a 5/3 agenda.

Now, this isn't to say that it's completely worthless; it's absolutely not. You're wasting a Runner click and 4 bucks, nothing to sneeze at. But you're also spending a click and 2c to do so. For most decks, asset slots can be filled with a card that has a much better opportunity cost.

Public Support is one of those cards that makes the new ANR player flip out when you first see it, then come back down to earth when you realize that it isn't quite as generally useful as it seemed. It still has its niche; put it into a Gagarin deck on an Expo Grid and it will create expensive must-run situations that you can leverage for huge position advancement. But the specialized requirements make it a "gimmick" card rather than an auto-include, even for Weyland.

(Data and Destiny era)
953
You forgot to mention one of the best parts: you can sacrifice it to Archer and Corporate Town. It's not just that the runner is letting you have a point by ignoring it; the runner is also enabling some of you best weapons too. Also being at 6 points means the runner HAS to deal with it, and if it's sitting in a scary 3 ice server... or if you have multiple of them out and rezzed. I think there is a lot of nuance to this card that your review skims over. —
I disagree, because that's not really relevant to the way I'm juding the value of the card. 1-point agendas can also be sac'd to Archer and Corporate town. The reasons this is a poor asset slot (in most decks) are not affected by the fact that it's worth an agenda point of the runner lets you score it. This is the same reason that Domestic Sleepers is not an autoinclude in HB decks. —