"Well you see, when a Maker's Eye and an Overclock love each other very much..."

This might seem at first like kind of a janky in-between or situational card, but it does so much for you. It's credit value, multiaccess, and click compression, all at the same time. Whether you're trying to break out of prison, keep up with asset spam tempo, or just hammer R&D with high-value runs, this card has got your back. I'll even sometimes play it when there's no remote to run, and it's still great value then (although it's obviously most efficiently used when you get value out of the second run as well).

The biggest limitation it has is that you have to run R&D first, so if you're not prepared to deal with the outermost ice there, it's effectively turned off. But most of the time, that's not going to be the case. If you play Shaper and your rig uses credits during runs, you should probably be slotting this card.

Corp: Surely three Archers and a Valentao is enough to score behind, right? You only have 5 credits and you don't even have anything on the table...

Runner: shakes spraypaint can with intent

Although it's a bit situational, in the right deck, this card is incredible. With a Poison Vial, a Slap Vandal or charged Botulus somewhere on the board, and a few credits, you can effortlessly run through a 3-deep remote piled high with big ice for the winning agenda steal (or key asset trash). If you instead use Rigging Up to get down the Poison Vial and have the Slap Vandal in hand as Arissana (or spend a click to pre-emptively install it on the first ice before running), you can even go 4-deep. Although it's a one-time trick, ask Criminals how effective those can be. This is best at getting into a remote late-game that the Corp can't imagine you can break out of nowhere (which is also when they're most likely to put an agenda in it).

Even if you don't have the opportunity to maximize it on a big server, Spree can be situationally useful in just repositioning your installed Trojans without having to do Simulchip flickers, saving you precious resources, and preserving accumulated Botulus counters.

I wouldn't slot this in a deck running regular breakers hoping to get giant Kyuban value; as funny as it would be to surf a Flux Capacitor down an ice stack for big charge value on a Cataloguer or Amelia Earhart or something, it's surely not worth the deck slot.

Lobisomem, being a program, is a Runner card. However, I think it's much more insightful to give a review of this card from the Corp's point of view (especially as, although I've played both sides of the matchup, I've spent rather more time playing against this card than playing with it).

Probably the most common way that Runners use Lobisomem is as part of a Lobisomem / Orca / Spark of Inspiration build, which is effectively a combination of cards that define the deck they appear in. Lobisomem has pretty good numbers once it comes down onto the table, which means that your barriers and code gates are being broken for fewer credits than usual. However, there's lots of counterplay available to the deck:

• Setting up Lobisomem + Orca is kind-of slow. If a deck is relying on Spark of Inspiration to get its breakers out, they effectively have to get ⅔ of the way through their deck to find their second Spark of Inspiration, which even with Shaper levels of draw power is hard to achieve in the early game, and it is often possible to race out a lot of agenda points before they get there. As such, one approach is to try to rush, forcing the opponent to take risky runs without a full set of breakers in order to slow you down. Your deck is likely to have plenty of ways to stop a Runner who has only Orca, but it can be helpful to include a way to punish a run with only Lobisomem; three of the four main factions have good ways to do this in-faction ( Saisentan (or Cloud Eater), Ballista or Stavka, Lycian Multi-Munition (or Rototurret)). NBN struggles a bit more, with Jua not helping as much as you'd like – if you are struggling with Lobisomem + Orca builds, you could either splash for a spiky out-of-faction sentry or use Owl, which is fine for this purpose.

• If playing against a Spark of Inspiration build, that really limits the Runner's opportunities to use utility and backup programs (because it increases the chance that Spark will hit the wrong program). One notable place this happens is with Ika, which means that the Runner doesn't have an alternative way to mitigate a spiky sentry early on, and helps make the rushing strategy in the previous paragraph more viable. Even more notably, it prevents them filling their deck full of Muse and Coalescence, meaning that Aesop’s Pawnshop is much harder to power; this means that their late-game economy is likely to be somewhat weaker than that of a typical Shaper – and that in turn increases their "effective break costs". For example, Lobisomem breaks Attini for 5, whereas Euler costs 7; but the Runner using Euler probably has a stronger economy and so the 7 that they're spending hurts them less than the 5 spent by the Lobisomem user. Alternatively, a Shaper who isn't using Lobisomem gets to use support programs to reduce break costs; Buzzsaw breaks Attini for 8, but spends only 2 if it's out alongside a K2CP Turbine. So in the late game, Lobisomem isn't going to be breaking more efficiently than the alternative possibilities.

• Lobisomem's break costs actually aren't very good for breaking code gates late-game compared to a more normal breaker build. One great comparison is with Unity: in a standard fracter + decoder + killer build, Unity breaks almost all code gates as or more cheaply than Lobisomem does (the only currently legal exceptions are NEXT Sapphire, Enigma and Virtual Service Agent). Its break costs are somewhat better at breaking barriers – decoders tend to be more efficient than fracters are, especially for Shapers – and Orca's break costs are also very good. But even then, ICE like Brân 1.0 are still able to tax a Lobisomem (with Brân costing 5), and it seems to be fairly viable for a glacier deck to tax Lobisomem out of making frequent runs in the late-game.

• If the Runner doesn't have some alternative way to charge Lobisomem, it is possible to entirely lock it out of barrier-breaking by depleting the counters. This is especially notable when the Runner is trying to stop a rush – if you try to rush out an agenda behind an " End the run." barrier, and the Runner manages to install Lobisomem early and use it to stop the rush, they get the agenda, but now they have no counters and cannot charge it until they break a code gate – and nothing is forcing you to rez a code gate, you can just leave yours unrezzed (other than any Afshar you may have on HQ) until they install another Lobisomem (or reinstall the same Lobisomem) to get the counter back. Against most IDs, you can also just use a strategy of ensuring that the Runner can't make a profit on counters by not installing or not rezzing code gates and (to play around Orca) ensuring that every rezzed sentry has a barrier before it. These ICE layouts are weird and often inefficient, but when the Runner has no backup breakers (and they often don't), they can lock the Runner out entirely and lead to an automatic win.

  There are two Runner IDs that can help to avoid this problem. Padma gets a free charge on every turn she runs R&D, which makes a full lockout much harder. One possibility would be to put a spiky barrier on the outside of R&D (and Boto may have been printed this set precisely to help with that – Ivik is also a possibility but is not ideal for use in a strategy that involves intentionally not rezzing code gates!) However, glacier decks may prefer to simply try to tax Padma's credits rather than her counters (she normally isn't a particularly rich Runner). Kit is impossible to lock out from gaining the counters, and is probably the most viable ID for Lobisomem. However, given that her ID ability is in turn entirely countered by the commonly run Tributary, you effectively have a situation in which the Runner's ID ability is entirely being used on powering Lobisomem, which should give you a significant economic advantage (especially as Kit normally preferred to use a decoder that breaks more efficiently than Lobisomem does, back before Tributary was printed, and struggled even then).

All this reasoning makes me think that the build involving Spark of Inspiration and Orca is probably the wrong way to play Lobisomem. But in that case, it struggles to find a reason to exist – it doesn't fit well into a traditional breaker suite because, whilst being good (if expensive to install) as a fracter, it is not particularly good as a decoder (and yet you have to use it as your decoder in order to get the barrier breaks to work), so it only really helps break-cost-wise against Corps which are primarily running barriers rather than code gates, at which point it is at risk of running out of counters (and even then, builds like Cleaver + K2CP Turbine are cheaper).

In short, Lobisomem is a bit of a mystery – no matter how the Runner tries to build it, the Corp seems to have substantial counterplay, especially if they build their deck with the possibility of maybe having to counter a Lobisomem in mind (but even if they don't). Playing against it does require paying attention to what the Runner is doing, though, and arranging your ICE to compensate. It also leads to a weird reversal of the normal flow of Netrunner play; in most matchups the Runner has the advantage in the early and late game, and the Corp in the midgame, but Lobisomem reverses that (being strongest in the midgame and giving the Corp the advantage at the start and end of the game).

All this is probably good for the game – one complaint I've had about Netrunner for a while is that although the Runner has to pay attention to what the Corp is doing and tailor their strategy accordingly, the reverse is less true for many Corp decks, with only the now-rotated Apocalypse creating significantly different play patterns – but cards like Lobisomem and Jeitinho are helping to change that, which is a good thing. However, if you do play around the Lobisomem – and it can often be obvious when the Runner is attempting that build – it doesn't seem like it's particularly strong or difficult to play against, and may in fact just be an outright bad card.

This combos well with Cybersand Harvesters. I use it in my A Teia dual glacier deck. I use a scoring and econ glacier setups. The combo is to have Tatu-Bola in hand and one in the middle of the glacier. Put Vovo Ozeti in the scoring server and have your Cybersand in the remote. Then use Anoetic Void and Nisei MK II to ETR and force them to keep rerunning.

This works really well on game point to ensure you have the econ to fend off a runner and force them to break as many subs as you can. With the perfect setup You can eek out 6c per run which doesn't sound like a ton but getting 12 credits off the first 2 runs will pay for the final run where you've stashed Cloudeater. You can rez and pay for another Anoetic off the first 2 cycles.

I've found this also messes with runner math. If you keep cycling in the Tatu-Bola then drop in something else really expensive it can make them assume this next run is probalby the Tatu-Bola again.

Overall the ice is generally good (as per the other review here and it can gear check and give you a little econ through the early parts of the game. The times you can setup a cool cycling combo is just some icing on the cake.

A very interesting 3/5. I'm always a big fan of the agendas that give you something when scored or stolen, cause you always get at least part of your ability even when losing. Basalt Spire is all about recursion, giving you the ability to recur two cards on two separate turns, at the cost of trashing a card from RnD. It's tailor made for Nuvem SA: Law of the Land, for they might know the top card of RnD from their ability and if they can trash it, and the trashing an RnD card triggers their ID ability for 2 creds. For everyone else, that's mostly an added cost, and a risky one because if you knock an agenda into archives, you're not gonna be able to recur it with Basalt til the next turn due to the once per turn restriction. I think in Nuvem it's a very solid agenda that combines with your ID ability intentionally, for others there might be better choices, though there's not a ton of agenda recursion out there, so it may still be worth it. It also gives me a proper evil villain lair from which to plot my schemes, which I think is very important in any deck.