The nice thing about economy cards like this one is that it should be possible to objectively work out how they compare to other economy cards you might be using. So here's my take on this one.

Friend of a Friend is clearly intended to be used alongside Sebastião Souza Pessoa: Activist Organizer, or "Seb" as the chat on jinteki.net has taken to calling him. So I'm going to do the math primarily on the basis that you have Seb on your side, either as your identity or via DJ Fenris. The basic problem with doing Seb math is that the economy comes in two halves: first you tag yourself, and then you untag yourself, to end up with some net gain; but the problem is that the tagging and untagging cards are usually different, so in order to work out how good a card is economically, you need to somehow split up the gain between the two cards and decide which one is responsible.

However, there's a reasonably convincing way to work this out. If you have an untagger but not a tagger, the untagger is losing a lot of value and is mostly useless (e.g. if you play Friend of a Friend and then use its untag ability whilst not actually tagged, you have spent , , 3 to gain 5, i.e. two clicks to gain two credits, and might as well have just clicked for credits instead) – as such, we can assume that the untaggers are useless except when tagged. If you have a tagger but not an untagger, then assuming you don't want to float the tag (because 1. it is dangerous and 2. doing that turns off most of Seb's support cards), you will have to remove the tag manually, spending , 2 to use the basic action. So the obvious way to work out the value of the untagging card is to see how much more it gains than the basic untagging action – any gain above that must be coming from the tagging card instead. Let's see how this reasoning applies to Friend of a Friend's two abilities.

The untag ability

First, let's look at the untag ability. Taking the , 3 it takes to install this card into account, using this ability means that we have spent , , 3 to gain , 2, 5 (i.e. an untag and 5 credits). That's a net trade of the card and a click for 4 credits, an economic trade that most Netrunner players are very familiar with – it's a Sure Gamble! In other words, if you play this card planning to use its first ability, you are in effect saying "I am going to temporarily go down 3, but the next time I would remove a tag, my 3 will get refunded and I will get the gain of a Sure Gamble on top of that".

How valuable is this? Well, a Sure Gamble is incredibly valuable (arguably the best economic card in the game that hasn't been banned). Going down on credits temporarily in order to get a Sure Gamble worth of value is also pretty common (if you're rich enough, the delay in gaining the credits usually ends up not mattering); Daily Casts gives one more credit but on a 4-turn delay, and while the delay means it isn't quite as good as Sure Gamble, it's still considered a staple that is run in a wide range of Runner decks. So for the untag ability to be good, basically all that is required is that your deck won't go too long without needing to remove a tag.

One caveat with this ability is that it can compete with other untagging abilities. For example, if you are using Networking as your primary way to remove tags, rather than the basic action, then the cost of a tag needs to be evaluated at , 1 rather than , 2 – that makes this ability into an Easy Mark rather than a Sure Gamble, which generally isn't worth it.

The tag ability

What about the ability to tag yourself? Well, if you don't have a way to get positive side effects from the tag, it's pretty terrible: counting the cost to untag, you're spending the card and , , , 3, 2 to gain 9, i.e. 3 clicks and a card for 4 credits, which is actually a loss rather than a gain (both cards and clicks are more valuable than credits). This is why Friend of a Friend is clearly intended to be a Seb card: Seb will trigger when the tag is gained, and that trigger provides additional value.

We can calculate the value of a Seb trigger the same way we calculated the value of an untag, by seeing how much better it is than the equivalent basic action. In this case, installing a card from grip usually costs , and Seb provides a 2 discount on the install – so as long as you have an appropriate connection in hand, the value of the Seb trigger is , 2. This happens to be the same as the value of a basic-action untag, so effectively, what's happening here is that when you have Seb's ability available, taking your first tag doesn't matter at all; the resources you would spend on installing the connection are the same as the resources you would spend on removing the tag.

This means that in the scenario where we have Seb, along with a connection that costs at least 2 and that we actually want to install, the effective trade made by the second ability is to trade the card and , , 3 for 9. Again, this is a recognisable card, Lucky Find. It's hard to gather data on just how good Lucky Find is as an economic card; it isn't widely played, most likely due to its influence cost (2 universal influence is a lot for an economy card), and thus it's hard to get an idea of just how valuable a Lucky Find is. I think most methods of counting it put it approximately on the level of Sure Gamble, though.

As a sanity check, we can compare two Friends of a Friend to the Sure Gamble + Lucky Find combination:

  • If you play Sure Gamble and Lucky Find and manually install a 2 connection, you have spent ++ and 5+3+2 to gain a total of 9+9 and an install. This is a net trade of and the 2 event cards to gain 8 and an install.
  • If you play two Friends of a Friend, using one to tag yourself and one to untag yourself, and installing a 2 connection with the resulting Seb trigger, you have spent +++ and 3+3 to gain 5+9 and an install. Again, this is a net trade of and the 2 resource cards to gain 8 and an install.

This produces the expected result, that the gains are equal, which has made me reasonably confident that the calculations are correct.

Comparison and conclusions

There's a nice symmetry between the two abilities on Friend of a Friend. The untag is very comparable to Sure Gamble (but useful only if you need an untag), but gets worse if you have alternative untagging methods. The tag ability is very comparable to Lucky Find (but useful only if you have Seb and a connection that you want to install), and gets better if you have alternative untagging methods (because then you get to clear the tag more cheaply). This means that which ability you end up using will depend primarily on what else is in your deck. Conceptually, using the tag ability is "better" than using the untag ability – they start out comparable even when untagging with the basic action, but the tag ability gets better as your deck gains more methods of cheaply untagging. However, Seb decks often have lots of other sources of tags, and to get value from the Seb triggers, each tag needs to be paired with a connection to install (and duplicates are useful only if the connection is useful in duplicates) – in practice, it's fairly common to not have enough usefully installable connections to make the tag ability worth it (even in decks that are running 20+ connections). As such, this card normally seems to be used for the untag rather than the tag in practice (although because you don't have to choose which ability to use until you actually use it, if you do end up with a glut of connections you would like to install, then it's definitely correct to use the tagging side of this card to help you get value from installing them). It's not like there's a "right" or "wrong" side of the card – it's more that the correct side varies with the circumstances, and either will give you similar amounts of value when the appropriate situation comes up, but one situation is more likely to come up than the other.

There is one other reason to run this card in Seb – although the fact hasn't been mentioned so far this review, Friend of a Friend is itself a connection that costs at least 2. One real problem with Seb decks is getting enough installable connections to be able to keep getting value from the Seb triggers (and in turn, effectively removing the downside from your abilities that tag yourself). Something of a threat to that style of deck is that either you don't play enough connections to make the tagging abilities usable, or else you have to resort to mediocre connections like Scrubber, that probably wouldn't be in your deck otherwise, in order to give the ability something to install (and doing that makes all your tagging cards worse because the Seb trigger is no longer providing its full value). If your deck is trying to take substantial advantage of Seb triggers, then Friend of a Friend should be very strongly considered as a 3-of because it goes into an "economy slot" but, unlike the economic cards you would likely be using instead, also helps increase your density of usefully installable connections and thus reduces the chance that you might end up gaining a tag whilst having nothing to install with it.

What if you aren't using Seb? In that case, the tag ability is basically worthless, and the untag ability useful only if 1. you got enough value when self-inflicting a tag to compensate even without the Seb trigger, or 2. you were tagged unwillingly/unexpectedly and now need to clear it. The former situation would be weird (although it could happen if you were running Thunder Art Gallery and Rogue Trading in a non-Seb deck). The latter situation probably depends on what the Corp is doing, and thus it would mean this would be a tech card – but you don't generally want your tech card against tags to clear exactly one tag, because you generally get tagged more than that in a game, and dedicating many slots to cards that aren't useful in all matchups is typically a losing strategy.

So the overall conclusion: if you aren't using a strategy based around tagging yourself for a benefit and then clearing the tags, this card isn't appropriate for your deck. However, if you're using Seb, it's pretty much an auto-include; depending on which half of your deck you're drawing, it will fill in the other half as either a Sure Gamble or Lucky Find, whilst also providing a usefully installable connection to help make sure that the Seb triggers aren't wasted. I would strongly suggest including three even if you're using Seb out of faction (via DJ Fenris ) – it's only one dot of influence each, and a card that solves this many problems for the deck is probably going to be better than the economy operation or resource you would have included instead.

So after over a decade of being one of the worst standalone icebreakers in the game, and widely ridiculed as a terrible card, Wyrm ended up being seriously used in a tournament-winning Eternal deck.

Wyrm's primary downside is that it is incredibly, incredibly expensive to use it to accomplish anything. However, this turns out to be its only significant downside; if you truly have enough credits to afford anything, then Wyrm turns out to be one of the best available options to spend them on. As such, it turns out that if you can set up an infinite credit combo (not just large, but infinite) – so that money truly is no concern at all – then Wyrm becomes the best icebreaker in the game (being able to break almost all ICE with no resources spent other than credits – the only exceptions are anti-AI ICE like Swordsman and anti-strength-reduction ICE like Self-Adapting Code Wall).

The conditions in which Wyrm is good are thus incredibly obscure; until recently, the known infinite-Runner-credits combos involved heavy use of efficient and generic icebreakers anyway, so it made sense to use those to do your icebreaking post-combo rather than using a separate payoff card. However, the deck that won the Eternal portion of Crown of Servers was using a different and newly discovered infinite credit combo (which subsequently got banned due to being far too powerful and consistent), and the icebreakers it was "naturally" running weren't very good at actually getting through ICE even with infinite credits, so Wyrm it was.

With the combo banned, Wyrm is likely to drop back into obscurity for a while. But the next time an infinite-credit combo slips past the playtesters, it'll be there, waiting, ready to help you with the payoff.

Well, I'm obligated to ask--what was the infinite credit generation combo?

If you have 2 deva in hand you can swap it indefinetly. That can load idefinetly a technical writer. That usually cost you 2 credits. but you can use sherezade that is going to refill you 1 credit and the event in the groove that is going to refill you the other credit.

It's surprising that a card as metagame-defining as Audacity hasn't received a review, other than an early on-release review that failed to anticipate how the card would be used. So here's my attempt to bring the reviews up to date.

First, the way Audacity is typically used in practice: it's used in decks that contain 3/2 agendas as a method of fast-advancing those agendas. Install agenda, advance, Audacity, score. (Doing it that way around means that if the Runner has some way to sneak a Clot onto the table, they have to use it after the second click, before you use Audacity, so you don't have to spend the operation or trash the grip.)

Fast-advancing agendas is normally either a) expensive (e.g. Biotic Labor costs 7 to fast-advance your typical 3/2), or b) situational (e.g. Trick of Light costs only 2, but you will need to find two advancement counters lying around somewhere). Audacity is neither expensive nor situational. The cost for the advancement as a whole is 1, and the only time it doesn't work (assuming you have an Audacity and a 3/2 agenda) is if you have fewer than two other cards in hand (something that is rare against most decks – it is usual for Corp decks to have 4–6 cards in hand at the start of their turn). As such, short of Clot or dedicated HQ-trashing (typically by Freedom, Esâ, Alice or Maw), it is basically impossible for the Runner to stop an Audacity score working. This is one of the most reliable – possibly the most reliable – means of fast-advancing an agenda ever printed.

One of the places in which Audacity has been observed showing up, therefore, is in decks which a) might plausibly reach 5 or 6 points with the result of the game still being in doubt, and b) contain 3/2 agendas. It doesn't have to be a fast-advance deck. It doesn't even have to be in Weyland. Frequently this might be just as a 1-of, but it is fairly likely to be drawn before the game reaches 5 points, and it can usually be safely left in hand until that point, helping to blunt HQ accesses (it can't be trashed with the basic action, so only Runners with dedicated anti-operation cards will be able to get rid of it). From that point onwards, the game becomes much easier for the Corp, because there is no longer a need to protect 3/2 agendas in any server other than R&D – if they draw a 3/2, they will just score it and win the game, not caring about the downside because the game is already over. If the Corp can protect R&D at that point, having up to 8 agenda points (up to 14 in Weyland!) effectively removed from the Runner's reach – whilst instantly winning the Corp the game if they are ever drawn – is a huge advantage, frequently game-winning (especially against Criminals). If a deck naturally contains multiple 3/2 agendas, the "1-of Audacity to win from 5 points" is an easy way to improve the win rate of any deck that can afford 4 Weyland influence (and is something that I need to bear in mind when building Weyland decks).

Despite being very strong as a 1-of, Audacity has also been seen as a 3-of, becoming not just metagame-defining but metagame-warping – it turns out that the downside on it actually isn't all that bad in one type of dedicated fast advance deck, the sort that uses only minimal ICE defences, draws lots of cards, and tries to score agendas as soon as they're drawn (in the understanding that any agendas not immediately scored are likely to be lost). When HQ is just as open as Archives, and you're aiming to draw five cards a turn anyway, does it really matter if you're discarding cards from your hand? Audacity has thus become a common sight in Sportsmetal, despite being 4 influence and out of faction – it provides a way to get the 3/2 agendas (which are the ones you really care about in that deck) out of your hand and into your score area whilst only needing one specific card despite the agenda, and the deck is typically quite happy to have random 3/1s stolen. (Before Project Vacheron was banned, it was also typically fine with having the 5/3s stolen, because it was planning to win before the agenda points mattered.) This had a major influence on what it meant to be a tournament-viable Runner deck – you somehow had to be able to stop the Sportsmetal fast advance deck (using either R&D lock or Clot) before it won, and because it won so quickly, this meant you needed to include both appropriate cards versus fast advance, and also enough searching/drawing power in your deck to actually find them in time.

Due to bans (quite a lot of bans at this point!) and the rotation of Dedication Ceremony (the other meta-defining Weyland fast-advance card), there is probably no longer a sufficient critical mass of viable fast-advance cards for the "12 influence" heyday of Audacity to terrorise the tournament scene (although who knows, that deck has a tendency to resurface no matter how hard you try to get rid of it, and even as recently as last week Audacity has been observed as a 12-influence splash even in Jinteki – who knows whether it will catch on). But it still works just fine as a 1-of for finishing games, and there's no reason why you can't still include multiple copies of it if you need a cheap, reliable fast-advance card in your deck full of 3/2s. (This makes me wonder whether it might be viable if you have critical 3/1s you need to score – I'm imagining an NBN deck going turn 1 AR-Enhanced Security, advance, Audacity, score. Probably this is just jank rather than something that's remotely viable, but the power level of Audacity is high enough that I can't be sure, and that's scary.) I expect it to exist in some number in many of the top Weyland decks right up to the point that it rotates out (and/or gets banned), and wouldn't be surprised to even see it show up out-of-faction from time to time.

Tree Line is one of the best barriers printed recently. If you're looking for a barrier to keep the Runner out – as opposed to simply being a gear check, or something used to gain economic advantage and pull off combos, or something intended primarily to delay the Runner a click and waste one run's worth of credits – then Tree Line is probably your best choice in the current metagame.

First off, this ICE's basic statistics are very good. Normally, mid-sized barriers are strength 3, cost 3, and have some minor upside: Maskirovka, Klevetnik, Masvingo. (The original of course was Wall of Static, but ICE is slightly better than that nowadays. Palisade is also an interesting comparison.) Tree Line has strength 4, which makes it 1 more taxing than your typical mid-sized barrier; it also costs 1 more to rez, but you will get that credit back if you can fire the subroutine (and you frequently will be able to fire it on the initial rez). For Cleaver, one of the more commonly used fracters now that Paperclip has rotated, it costs 2 (or one Leech counter) more to break than your typical mid-sized barrier. These are not bad stats at all, and would mean that glacier decks would be seriously considering this ICE anyway (even out of faction) – given that Fire Wall is no longer legal, your next step up in strength would be Pharos which is considerably more expensive.

With the release of The Automata Initiative, and the rotation out of the Flashpoint cycle, barrier strength has suddenly become much more relevant than it has been in the previous two metagames. When faced with ICE that's a point stronger, a Paperclip would just pay an extra credit, and a Botulus or Boomerang (or the recently banned Endurance) wouldn't even notice. But Paperclip has rotated out, and there's now much more variety in decks with respect to how barrier-breaking is handled: Arissana frequently tries to break barriers with Slap Vandal (and maybe Poison Vial), several runners are trying out Banner, and the "default" fracter now seems to be Cleaver, with Propeller seen occasionally and Curupira a little more often. These newer, or newly-relevant, ways to get through barriers tend to struggle when they have high strength; Cleaver is hard to pump, Curupira has to be pumped quite a distance, and most of the rest have a limit for the strongest barrier they can break, normally around 5 or 6. This means that ICE that can be advanced for strength is in a fairly valuable spot in the metagame: if you can get the ICE above a certain strength breakpoint, the Runner's rig might have no way to deal with it. (Most commonly, the Runner is left with a single out, usually either Boomerang or Botulus; these cards are both good against Tree Line but it is often possible to overload them.) Tree Line is pretty useful in this respect because it isn't that far off the magic 6–7 strength that suddenly stops half the opponent's breakers working; you could get it up there with 2–3 and 2–3, which is expensive, but not completely unaffordable if it makes a server impossible to run.

I've been trying out Tree Line in pretty much all my Corp decks recently, initially in "let's try this out and see how it goes, I might want to write a review" mode rather than because I necessarily thought it deserved the slot. Generally speaking, it's been very good at what it does – frequently it's the card I'm hoping to draw, and when I do install it it does its job better than the alternative barriers would. I've found myself adding more and more copies of it over time, often starting as a 1-of and going up to the full 3. However, despite this, it isn't actually helping to win that many games. Part of the problem is that you can only run 3 Tree Lines in a deck, and the card seems to be hit by the 3/deck limit much harder than most cards are. Frequently it is hard to draw them by the point at which you need them. When you do draw them late, they're more vulnerable, because this is the general nature of ICE that's drawn late: if you can't put them on the inside of the server then they become more vulnerable to Inside Job, and Hippo, and Tsakhia "Bankhar" Gantulga. That's a downside that hurts almost all ICE in theory, but when you're running mediocre interchangeable ICE you don't notice much – it just starts really stinging with Tree Line because you know that some of its potential is being wasted. Part of the problem is that locking the Runner out of one server does not win the game; you generally need to defend at least two servers (typically R&D and a remote server; for some decks, this is instead R&D and HQ), and getting two active Tree Lines takes longer than getting one.

Tree Line has a second mode: you can pay , 1 and expend it in order to triple-advance a piece of ICE. This ability is in theory very good if you want to triple-advance a piece of ICE (it is slightly better for that purpose than Dedication Ceremony, because it works even on unrezzed ICE). You are spending one card, but saving two credits and three clicks; this is a huge economic swing if triple-advancing a piece of ICE is something that you actually wanted to do. There's a basic problem with this mode, though: if you're in a gamestate where you want to have highly advanced ICE, it is probably also a gamestate in which using Tree Line as a piece of ICE would be particularly good. So expending a Tree Line is a bit of a weird thing to do; if a highly advanced ICE is valuable enough against the current opponent that you're willing to spend resources on setting it up, it usually makes even more sense to pay the extra clicks and credits to install the Tree Line protecting a weak server and advance that manually. This means in practice that expending a Tree Line is a bit of a desperation measure – something you do when you need to reinforce your servers in an emergency, at the cost of having good servers later in the game – and so far I've lost every game where I've had to do it.

The expend on Tree Line is therefore probably best (only?) used in situations where having an advanced ICE is important, but having an advanced Tree Line in particular wouldn't help. There are a few ICE that work well advanced in certain specialised scenarios: Colossus (versus fixed-strength killers like Mimic and Num), Hortum (versus AI breakers like Aumakua and Audrey v2), and Oduduwa (in front of advanceable ICE to protect a server, usually R&D but occasionally HQ, from a deck designed to spam runs on it). Incidentally, Tree Line is a pretty good choice of advanceable ice to put behind an Oduduwa in order to make use of the free advancements; doing this is punished by Botulus but pretty much nothing else, so you only have one card to play around. These situations do come up, but they're rare, and in practice you never seem to have the Tree Line in hand when you need it.

So, in conclusion: if you're trying to build a deck around keeping the runners out of your servers, and are looking for a barrier to slot into it, Tree Line is going to be better than its competitors – but you are going to have trouble drawing it when you actually need it, and the Runner may have won by the time you can set it up. If you're looking for a mid-strength barrier to tax the runner a little, Tree Line may still be the best in slot now that IP Block has rotated. It's a good piece of ICE – although it improves the type of deck that may struggle for other reasons, and may not improve it by enough for it to be worthwhile playing a deck like that. It has an expend ability, but it's hardly useful because you have to choose between an expend and an install, and the install is almost always better than the expend: both are situational, but for most situations in which the expend is good, the install is even better. But even just looking at it purely as a piece of ICE, it's pretty good – against most decks, you don't even need to advance it for it to be good, its base stats are perfectly adequate on their own.

ZATO City Grid is a defensive upgrade that has quite a lot of potential, but is also pretty clunky to use. As far as I can tell, there are two main ways to use it: a) as a source of semi-repeatable unbreakable " End the run." (ETR) effects or b) as a way to fire high-impact subroutines without having to rely on the Runner faceplanting into them.


Looking at the first mode first, ZATO City Grid can do a sort of Anoetic Void impression via making all your ETR ICE into a sort of poor corp's Border Control. It isn't nearly as strong as Border Control, because you can wait to use that effect until the Runner's passed all of your ICE (thus forcing them to spend their way into the server). It loses even further to Anoetic Void, because you can wait to use that effect until the Runner approaches the server, a timing which allows Void to combo with Manegarm Skunkworks and/or Formicary. The advantage over Border Control is that you can fire it multiple times in a turn by trashing multiple ICE, and the difference with Anoetic Void is that firing it multiple times consumes a different resource (rezzed ETR ICE rather than 2+2 cards).

As such, using ZATO City Grid to defend an agenda is somewhat reminiscent of playing an AgInfusion: New Miracles for a New World glacier deck. Ag glacier was one of the top Corp decks for quite a while (and is still playable), and scores agendas in the late game via stacking enough unbreakable methods to prevent the Runner breaching a server that they run out of clicks trying. Perhaps the first time you try to run, you hit a Border Control; the second time, you get thrown to Archives by Ag's ability; the third time, the run is stopped by Anoetic Void; the fourth time – wait, did you have enough credits to get into the server four times without even spending a click to prepare? I guess I'd better use my Nisei MK II, or my Sand Storm, or sonething. ZATO City Grid, in the late game, effectively lets you do the same thing out of a Weyland deck; you might not have an ID ability that directly helps, but you don't need to find 3–4 different ways to end the run, you just need 3–4 ETR ICE rezzed on the server. Of course, this will only work in a deck that naturally can build a server of 3–4 rezzed ETR ICE, which is unusual, but isn't unheard of; this is a plausible late-game setup for three different strategies (glacier, rush, and rigshooter decks – the rush deck probably didn't want the game to reach the late game, but can nonetheless build itself a pile of ETR ICE as a plan B if it fails to win early on, and often doesn't have any better alternatives).

Is ZATO Grid good for this purpose? I suspect that it is at best a plan B. If you're trying to do an impression of the infamous Haas-Bioroid: Precision Design rush deck, scoring behind a small pile of ICE and a big pile of upgrades, there are much better options (like the infamous Manegarm Skunkworks / Anoetic Void combo); and although those options have weaknesses of their own, ZATO City Grid doesn't really fix any of those weaknesses. On the other hand, if your deck's natural plan is to win via some other method, and that other method naturally tends to build (or can cheaply be modified to build) large servers in the late game, ZATO City Grid can give it an alternative path to victory by only spending a card slot or two. Diversifying your win conditions is usually worth it if you can do it cheaply – many Runner decks will be great against some of your win conditions but poor against others – so being able to use just one or two card slots to gain a late-game way to blow up your scoring server in order to forcibly score an agenda is generally a good trade.

A good comparison is Audacity (which blows up your hand to score an agenda). Some fast-advance decks are built around Audacity, because it's a really strong card; but most decks can't afford the downsides of playing an Audacity in the mid-game and leaving themselves vulnerable. However, even for decks that couldn't survive after playing an Audacity, a 1-of Audacity can nonetheless be worth it as a way to get the last couple of points scored when the deck is otherwise running out of steam. ZATO City Grid plays similarly, but can work with larger agendas (4/2s and 5/3s are just fine because you're planning to score the agenda over multiple turns anyway) – "all" you need is a pile of rezzed or rezzable ETR ICE on the server.


Of course, just firing ETR subroutines, while practical in some circumstances, might seem like a waste of the potential of a card like this. Many impactful subroutines are balanced by the difficulty of firing them; one particularly commonly seen pattern is for the subroutine to do something that doesn't matter in the early game, but to have no real chance of firing except on a face-check (and the Runner is unlikely to faceplant into your ICE once the early game is over). As such, the game has lots of ICE that isn't really very useful because it only really functions in a situation that's unlikely to ever come up.

ZATO City Grid can be thought of as giving this ICE a reason to exist. Something like Zed 2.0 has a great subroutine (everyone wants to be able to blow up Endurance, right?), but is incredibly porous in the early game and unlikely to fire in the late game (you can't actually blow up the Endurance because it'll just break the subroutines). ZATO City Grid, by force-firing subroutines, can give you a way to actually fire these subroutines for once. The primary problem is, this still isn't necessarily going to be very good – if you decide to use ZATO on Zed to get rid of an Endurance, you've just spent 9 to get rid of an 8 card, and spent two cards and two install clicks on top of that, and probably several more credits installing additional ICE on the server. So you're behind on economy, and the Runner is still running into what is presumably your scoring server (if you try this on a different remote server the Runner probably won't ever run there), and you didn't really do much permanent damage because Endurance is normally run as multiple copies. Similar reasoning applies to firing, e.g., bulk net damage subroutines (Bathynomus), which could win the game but is more likely to fall flat,

However, there is one fairly common subroutine that does make sense for this sort of combo: " Trash 1 program.". This is a sort of perfect storm of "useful outside the ZATO combo" and "worth it when used with ZATO":

  • Program-trashing ICE is generally useful in rush decks (except against Anarchs who rely on conspiracy breakers like Black Orchestra), because it acts as a pseudo-ETR when combined with an actual ETR ICE (normally a code gate because almost everyone is running Paperclip and it's hard to ETR with a sentry). The idea is that you have your program-trashing sentry in front of a run-ending code gate (say Thimblerig or Magnet), as a form of gear check that keeps your server safe until the Runner finds their killer; if they attempt to run the server without the appropriate breakers, you trash their decoder and now they can't break through the ICE behind. So although the subroutine isn't spiky in the very early game, it's nonetheless useful in helping to keep its server safe.
  • Against some decks, trashing a program can be really high impact, sometimes effectively winning the game on the spot. Against Anarchs, the impact isn't too great, normally just disrupting their economy a little, because they can normally reinstall their breakers from their heap, so you're either forcing them to pay to do that, or just destroying economic programs directly. Likewise, the various Apocalypse decks tend to have plenty of spare breakers because they're planning to blow up the board themselves. However, Criminals often only run one of each breaker; blowing up their Amina or Cat's Cradle can make all your code gates impenetrable for the rest of the game, so all you need to do from that point is to find enough code gates to beat their bypass effects and Boomerangs. Shapers are a little better at recovering from trashed breakers, but often run very light on ways to recur them nowadays (and if you can trash the World Tree from the 80-card Kabonesa Wu deck that's going around at the moment, the deck will have extreme difficulty trying to draw into a way to get it back). So even if you need to do something janky in order to get the subroutine to fire, there are plenty of matchups where the payoff is worth it.
  • ZATO doesn't care about the strength of the ICE you're using – the relevant factor, other than its subroutine, is its rez cost. With many types of subroutine, this would introduce tension between running cheap ICE (good with ZATO but useless without as it isn't very taxing) and expensive ICE (taxing, but a big loss to trash to your ZATO). With program-trashers, though, the cheap ICE is just as good as a gear check as the expensive ICE is.

The upshot of all this is that, unlike with most non-ETR subroutines that you might want to use with ZATO, you can find program trashes on ICE that wouldn't be embarrassing when the ZATO isn't there. Something like Sapper is perfectly viable for forcing a killer install (when stacked with a code gate on your scoring server), and great when used with ZATO because it only costs 3. If your deck is naturally running that sort of ICE, then adding ZATO to its server will give it a new lease of life once it no longer works as a gear-check, perhaps giving you a scoring window or even winning you the game out of nowhere.


All this discussion of the upsides of ZATO so far has, however, neglected a serious downside that needs to be mentioned in any review. The elephant in the room here is Pinhole Threading. "Dies to Pinhole" has become a bit of a meme, because it applies to such a lot of cards – and the primary purpose of Pinhole is to get rid of defensive upgrades like this one, so you'd expect Pinhole to beat it – but the problem is that Pinholes are close to mandatory for many decks in the current metagame, so you're very likely to run into them, and it's hard to justify a strategy based around ZATO City Grid when your opponent can just Pinhole the Grid away and cause your strategy to cease to function.

It isn't just a case of "this is a defensive upgrade so Pinhole beats it", though – ZATO is even worse against Pinhole than upgrades normally are. This is partly because ZATO is limited to defending remote servers, so it can't do anything to help stop the Runner Pinholing through Archives (whereas the other similar defensive upgrade we got in Parhelion, Nanisivik Grid, is very good at defending Archives and so you can use one Nanisivik to help out another). It's also partly because ZATO cares about the ICE arrangement of the server it's trying to defend (unlike most defensive upgrades, which don't care at all); as such, setting up a ZATO means investing resources into getting your scoring server just right, and if the ZATO gets Pinholed, all the resources you spent on that are worthless. And it's also partly because unlike other defensive upgrades, ZATO can (sometimes) defend a server even with no other upgrades helping it, which means that it often has to try to do the work by itself, and if it gets Pinholed, the server is now much less defended rather than slightly less defended; this means that it can be very hard to tell whether you have a scoring window or not, and thus rather raises the risk that you'll try to jam an agenda, only to have your ZATO Pinholed and your agenda stolen.

A secondary downside is that ZATO is pretty similar to Nanisivik Grid, which is somewhat easier to use and which has already found a home (in the AgInfusion glacier decks which were mentioned earlier). Nansivik Ag is a strong enough deck that some Runners have taken to making weird card choices in an attempt to beat it – things like Tracker which previously weren't seeing play at all. Because the two Grids have such similar rules text, this leads to some amount of "splash damage" in which tech cards being used to beat Nanisivik are also capable of beating ZATO, so you don't even get the "maybe my opponent's deck will be unprepared for this" factor that you'd normally get when running an unpopular card.


So is ZATO unplayable? I think it might be in most identities, but it can be somewhat redeemed by the ID it was probably designed for, Ob Superheavy Logistics: Extract. Export. Excel.. The obvious combo here is to use ZATO's trash to trigger Ob's ability; there are some janky suggestions in the other review for particular combinations you could use, but even something simple like "trash Ballista to trash a program, installing Border Control," can easily keep the Runner occupied for long enough to let you finish scoring the agenda that they were trying to steal (and is probably more effective). However, this specific use of Ob's ability doesn't do anything to stop you being Pinholed.

The redeeming feature comes in the less obvious combo – instead of firing Ob's ability with ZATO's trash, what you can do instead is to use Ob's ability to install the ZATO mid-run. Like all operations, Pinhole Threading costs a click to play, meaning that it can't be played in the middle of a run and you need to make time in a turn to play it. When you're trying to steal an agenda, every click counts – so if you install ZATO mid-run using something like Border Control (which pretty much any Ob deck should be running at three copies), the Runner will have to take a click off to Pinhole it before running back onto the server again, effectively allowing one Border Control to eat up two clicks. The great thing about this is that you don't need to draw the ZATO or spend a click installing it; all you need is to have it in your deck. (In fact, you'd rather prefer for it to still be in your deck so that you can search for it – this leads to an odd sort of deckbuilding requirement in which it's probably right to include multiple copies to increase the chance that one of them is still in your deck in the late game, weirdly mirroring the principle via which some cards are run as several copies to increase the chance that you see one early.)

It's possible to do better than this, though – instead of using Border Control to install ZATO City Grid, you can use Stavka. The idea is to wait until the Runner is locked into encountering an unrezzed Stavka, then rez it, trashing a rezzed 4 card (e.g. Mausolus, or a second copy of Stavka). You can then trash Stavka to ZATO, trashing one of the Runner's programs, and without the Runner having any opportunity to Pinhole it at all. (Against most Criminals and some Shapers, the missing program will probably also force them to jack out, so it's possible and even reasonable to do this in the middle of trying to score an agenda.) Although this combo might itself be janky, its components (other than ZATO) aren't, being perfectly reasonable cards to run in glacier or rigshooter. So it's possible to be playing what looks like a perfectly normal deck, then suddenly go into jank mode out of nowhere, trash a critical program with a ridiculous combo, then go back to sensible Netrunner again and finish scoring your agenda.


As a consequence of all this, I suspect that ZATO City Grid may be viable in some decks. However, it isn't remotely dependable. One of its biggest downsides is that it has a more serious case of Pinholitis than perhaps any other card; it also tends to get hit by tech cards that Runners are running for other reasons. Additionally, both of its main uses (destroying programs, and taxing the runner out of clicks during an attempt to steal an agenda) are somewhat situational; you're paying quite a cost to make use of them, and although the benefit you get from paying that cost might be worth it, it also might not be. In order to make it worthwhile, therefore, I suspect that it needs to be placed into a deck that can take advantage of both of its major modes and can also help patch up the Pinhole weakness somewhat – and even then, it's the plan B, not the primary strategy.

Fortunately, decks like this do seem to exist. "Toolbox Ob" has quickly become an established shell for a deck, and is typically quite happy to play situational cards. It generally has rushing as at least one of its plans, which naturally pushes it towards playing lots of ETR ICE; and it also pushes it towards having a range of ICE types at a range of costs (which in turn means that it's usually running Sapper, which is the best 3 sentry for non-Jinteki rush decks). This sort of deck is a perfect fit for ZATO (I already had one built prior to Parhelion's release, and ZATO fit right into it without needing to change many card slots). Despite that perfect fit, ZATO City Grid hasn't been amazing in my testing, but it has at least been doing enough to justify its slot. This does, however, make me suspect that the card isn't strong enough to justify a slot unless you're already running the sort of deck for which everything likes up perfectly – after all, even if you are, the card merely becomes decent rather an an all-star.

It is, however, quite a lot of fun (when it doesn't just get Pinholed)!

Cool review! = D

Excellent review, but i'm going to differ. ZATO City Grid is a very, very specific card, and it only fits in a few specific decks, but when you play it in the right deck, it is insanely powerful, and often a win condition.

Continuing my previous comment : one thing that has to be noted is that ZATO City Grid can be installed mid-run with Ob + any trashing ice (such as Stavka), which is a beautiful reaction move. Alternatively, you can bait the runner into an easy run, trash an Envelopement to get an ETR, and use your ID to install a Stavka (which becomes very dangerous, because you can then trash that Stavka to guarantee a rig-shoot). It's just a wonderful world of powerful combos.