Normally, I only write reviews for cards I've played. This one, though, I haven't played, and there's a good reason for that.

Instead, I'm writing this review to say: if you ever considered playing this, play Retribution instead. It's the same influence cost (but a different faction), and costs 1 more to trash programs and hardware (and 2 more to trash resources because you have to use the basic action); but it doesn't require keeping the Runner below 6, and it doesn't require spending the tag. So in effect, Observe and Destroy saves the Runner , 2 (unless they're going tag-me, which is probably a bad idea if your deck contains this sort of tag punishment card), making it more expensive than Retribution in basically all circumstances. And, well, the requirement to keep the Runner below 6 is a very hard one to satisfy nowadays, especially with Closed Accounts having rotated.

The only niches Observe and Destroy might have over Retribution would therefore be a) as a flexible punishment card that gains value when the Runner goes tag-me (the problem is, it doesn't gain very much value, only a credit or two, and your deck would have to keep the Runner under 6 permanently for this to be worth it); b) if you have some sort of jank combo that requires trashing your own installed cards (but you can do this way more cheaply than spending a card and a click and a tag and keeping the Runner poor; and if you're willing to spend clicks+cards to trash your own cards, why not just overinstall them?); or c) you're in NBN and can't spare even 1 point of influence for Retribution (I guess this is just about possible).

You can imagine the only sort of deck that could want this, therefore; something that's in NBN, tag-heavy, and tries to keep the Runner poor (maybe Spark Agency or SYNC). But those decks don't normally want program/hardware trashing anyway; if you're keeping the Runner poor and getting the tags to stick, your deck is already on the point of winning, and you'd prefer something that's better at actually closing out a game. It's also rare for that style of deck to become particularly tight on influence (frequently it can fit High-Profile Target despite the five-dot cost), so probably you'd be able to afford to fit a Retribution or two if you preferred that mechanism of winning the game.

Another similar card that's worth mentioning is Keegan Lane. This has a very similar effect to Observe and Destroy, and the same cost, but different timing (and no 6 restriction). However, Keegan Lane is much better; the reason is that it's much easier to get a tag to stick mid-run (e.g. Ping, Thoth, Turnpike, maybe even Funhouse) than it is to tag the Runner on your own turn. Using Keegan to trash a single icebreaker normally isn't game-winning on its own; but with a little bluffing/mind-games, you can often use Keegan to trash the opponent's killer while they're locked into encountering a destroyer, and get two or more trashes for your single tag. Keegan Lane is therefore quite a good card – but despite that, it's still a pretty niche effect that normally needs a deck built around it. Observe and Destroy has much less upside, and is also much harder to connect with; so given that it's this much worse than a highly niche card, and is also pretty much entirely outclassed by a 1-influence card from another faction, it really isn't surprising that it isn't very strong. So even if you do somehow have a deck that's a perfect fit for Observe and Destroy, it nevertheless won't be doing enough for you to be worth the deck slot.

Don't play Observe and Destroy.

It's been discovered, over time, that Engolo is an Anarch (and minifaction) card in disguise. You rarely see it in Shaper (apart from the occasional Kit deck); shapers have all the best decoders (and thus can typically play something that fits their deck better than Engolo), tend to prefer to spend the early game building up their economy rather than running, and are often short of MU. You rarely see it in Criminal, either (although more frequently in Criminal than in Shaper!); if Criminals want an expensive decoder, they'll normally play Amina which has better numbers, and they have plenty of tools for early aggression other than icebreakers so Engolo doesn't have much of an opportunity to shine.

The thing about Engolo is that it's a card that's at its best when you need to run, but don't have a full set of breakers. It'll get you into servers early, which is nice; but it's also incredibly expensive at doing that, which rather puts a damper on things. The problem is that if you're using it for early aggression, you're paying 5 to install it, and more to use it, which leaves you at a low enough credit total that most of your economy doesn't work and you're at perpetual risk of getting blown up by Hard-Hitting News. Meanwhile, it's able to stand on its own for only a narrow section of time (the time before the Corp can manage to double-non-code gate-ICE their servers), and then is inferior to more normal breakers against the majority of ICE you'll face. So you're putting a lot in, and not getting enough benefit from it before it starts to fade in value.

A side issue is that Engolo looks like it wants to be a card for aggressive decks, but those decks often want to run – sometimes even have to run – lots of times in a turn in order to make their economy work. That isn't the greatest fit for a card which has "Use this ability only once per turn." stapled onto the reason why you'd play the card in the first place.

Still, Anarch as a faction has a lot of features that make Engolo a good fit. For one thing, they have no good decoders (except for possibly Buzzsaw, if you have enough support), so having suboptimal numbers is less of an issue than it would be elsewhere. Most importantly, though, Anarchs are good at keeping servers small; they have cards like Hippo and Devil Charm and Spooned to tear down a large server before it gets too large, and cards like Stargate to prevent the Corp drawing more ICE to replace it. But the main drawback of Anarch ICE destruction decks is that they often have trouble tuning themselves to the sort of ICE the corp is using. Being able to break ICE with Hippo needs an appropriate breaker. Being able to break it with cutlery requires knowing what sort of ICE it is.

Engolo fixes all that. "Hey", it says, "I know what sort of ICE you're facing: it's a code gate. I know which breaker you need: me." If you're only facing each piece of ICE once, having slightly awkward numbers isn't that much of an issue, but knowing for certain that you'll be appropriately set up for a specific piece of ICE, regardless of what it is, is really valuable. So Engolo is close to a perfect fit for ICE destruction decks, which can often rely on it as their primary/only breaker.

Engolo is also commonly seen in Adam, who has no breakers of his own, and who gets huge benefits from early aggression. It isn't as great a fit as in Anarch, but it nonetheless is a good fit for Adam's playstyle, often persuading him to import Engolo rather than something else.

As a side note, Engolo is really, really frustrating for certain sorts of Corp deck. Those decks are unpopular, so you wouldn't normally play it just to beat them; but Corp decks that heavily rely on cutting you off a particular sort of breaker (e.g. killers or fracters) hate having to fight through Engolos as well, and it works incredibly well against combos that rely on mythic or trap ICE.

Still, even if you're facing a more normal sort of deck, being able to make critical runs early is nice (even if you have to overpay to get past medium-strength ICE), and the numbers aren't even all that bad; Engolo is at its worst against the common 3-strength ICE (and loses out to Amina against larger ICE too, because it typically has 3 subroutines), but smaller and larger ICE is still widely played, and Engolo is one of the best breakers you could ask for against something like a Surveyor that's completely out of control. Engolo's become a little worse in the current upgrade-heavy metagame because it isn't that great when running multiple times a turn (which you'll need to be able to do against things like Anoetic Void and Border Control). But if you can keep servers small, the heavy install cost and frustratingly frequent need to boost will be offset by the fact that it'll carry you through much of the game before you find the rest of your rig.

The last review of New Construction was over 5 years ago. People have kind-of forgotten about it since, which isn't that surprising because it doesn't fit in most decks (in particular, the similar Oaktown Renovation is better than it in basically every way unless your deck is very weird).

The other review suggests that it's a card for asset spam. Asset spam is very rarely played out of Weyland nowadays, because Gagarin Deep Space has been banned (and all the exciting asset spam cards are over in NBN nowadays anyway; the deck that got Gagarin banned wasn't even an asset-spam deck, but a tag-and-bag deck based around never-advancing False Lead to deprive the Runner of clicks to clear the tags).

Instead, there's nowadays one and only one reason to play New Construction: it happens to fit well into the Dedication Ceremony + Reconstruction Contract combo. Dedication+Reconstruction ("Dediconstruction"?) allows you to cheaply fast-advance a 3/2 from hand, and Weyland decks that use a combination of Dediconstruction and Audacity were a force in the meta for quite a while (up until Titan Transnational, the usual ID for them, got banned). One of the biggest problem with these decks, though, is the perennial fast-advance problem of "I ran out of 3/2s" (which is a particular problem in Weyland because it has a tendency to use copies of Project Atlas to find each other, thinning your deck of 3/2s). Some of them resorted to Merger as a fourth 3/2, but some players noticed that there was a better option available.

The thing is, although Dediconstruction normally only fast-advances 3/2s, you can also use the same two cards to fast-advance New Construction:

1. Install New Construction.
2. Manually advance New Construction, installing Reconstruction Contract. (Yes, I know it doesn't make too much flavour sense.)
   • Between clicks, rez Reconstruction Contract.
3. Play Dedication Ceremony on Reconstruction Contract.
   • Before ending your turn, trash Reconstruction Contract to move its counters to New Construction, then score.

If your deck is planning to Dediconstruct most of its agendas anyway, then running New Construction isn't all that much worse than running a blank 3/2; you can still fast-advance it with your main combo, after all, and that's what your deck mostly cares about.

Anyway, Above the Law was recently printed, and is a much better option for your fourth 3/2, so to want this, you'd have to be playing a Weyland fast-advance deck that's sufficiently all-in that you want five or more things to fast advance. That isn't so ridiculous in a fast-advance deck, so it's possible we'll see this card come up every now and then on occasion. After all, Weyland fast advance decks have been top-tier over the last several metagames. You often don't see them towards the start of a metagame, because they keep getting key cards banned to keep them in check, and it takes people a while to figure out how to reconstruct the deck to dodge the bans before they start turning up at tournaments again. But they keep finding some way to come back time and time again, so it wouldn't surprise me if New Construction starts turning up again on rare occasions in the future. Hey, it's Weyland. Reconstructing things is kind-of what they do.

After testing it a bit, I'm pretty confident that the best place for this is a fast advance deck.

For one thing, it's a 3/2. Fast advance decks would gladly play blank 3/2s, because they need something to do their fast-advancing on; normally only 3-advancement agendas can be fast-advanced, and you can only do it a limited number of times in the game, so you want to get as many points from it as you can.

But the effect is a crazily good effect in some gamestates (despite being useless in others). If the Runner drops a Liberated Account with all 16 on it, or if their deck is heavily dependent on some particular resource, or the like, then being able to get rid of it, no questions asked, is a pretty huge swing in your favour. When you're playing a fast advance deck, then you have the power to score a 3/2 at the drop of a hat (assuming you have your combo in hand), and being able to snipe a resource with that is a pretty big deal. It's worth noting that your alternative 3/2s (assuming you're in Weyland because otherwise Above the Law isn't legal, your choice is Project Atlas and Merger) don't do anything when scored as a 3/2, so being able to fast-advance something and get a beneficial side effect is awesome.

Above the Law isn't quite so amazing elsewhere, but it's still fine; the 3/2 statline is rare and valuable for a reason. I've tried it out in rush decks too, and being able to save 1, over the cost of rushing out a 4/2 is nice (although a little minor). It usually ends up sniping something when you score it in the early game, too (maybe not much of something, but you're still slowing the Runner down, and slowing the Runner down without losing tempo yourself is something that rush decks love to do but usually can't). Probably it isn't worth running this over something like Offworld Office, Oaktown Renovation or Cyberdex Sandbox if you're building a pure rush deck, though.

That said, Above the Law can still be pretty viable in rush decks, if you're looking for a different way to close out the game. Rush decks often get stuck on 4 to 6 points, and need to switch strategy. Including Above the Law as a 3/2, along with a cheap fast-advance card like Audacity (in Standard) or Trick of Light (in Startup), will give you the potential to be able to score 2 points out of nowhere, and finish off the game. (Project Atlas is better for this, but you may well be running all three copies of that already, and having redundancy in 3/2s is helpful for this sort of game because a lot of them tend to get stolen.)

It's also worth noting that Above the Law is usable in any sort of Weyland deck as a tech card, against The Turning Wheel in particular. Most Runner decks which run it run only one copy, leave that copy installed pretty much all game (making it easy to score an agenda while it's installed), and have no way to recur it, so scoring an Above the Law can shut off what is usually one of their main win conditions. I've won several games this way. Probably Scapenet is a better tech card against this in the abstract, but Above the Law has the advantage of going in an agenda slot and not costing any influence, so it disrupts your deckbuilding a lot less than a Scapenet would. The Turning Wheel isn't popular at the moment, because the sort of decks that it goes in are bad against the top Corp decks; but if you're playing a Weyland deck that's weak to that sort of effect, you may well consider slotting in Above the Law just to be able to handle it.

Wildcat Strike is probably one of the most controversial cards in System Gateway. I've heard opinions about it ranging from it being massively powerful to worthless, and debates about whether it's ever correct for the Corp to give the Runner the cards. So here's my attempt to untangle the mess and work out how the card functions.

One of the core conflicts I've seen in the opinions about this card is between "the Corp should always choose the credits option" and "surely that makes no sense, there must be times when the cards are a better choice, otherwise this would just be a better Sure Gamble". Despite these opinions being at odds with each other, it actually turns out that both opinions are pretty much correct.

Let's look at the card from the Runner's point of view first. When you play Wildcat Strike, it either gives you +4 net, or else it gives you 4 cards at the cost of 2. The value of 4 Runner credits is fairly constant in Netrunner; most of the various economic quantities in Netrunner have wildly varying values, but (apart from the first few) Runner credits tend to have a consistent value over the course of the game (primarily because they're used to power icebreakers, so the number of runs you can make is directly proportional to the number of credits you have). So if the Corp picks the credits option, you gain 4 credits. The value of 4 cards is much less constant, though; if they're worth more than 6 credits, you'll get the credits (assuming the Corp knows what they're doing), otherwise you'll get the cards. So a simplistic look at Wildcat Strike gives the following options:

• 4 cards are worth more than 6 credits: Wildcat Strike gains the Runner +4 worth of value
• 4 cards are worth less than 6 credits: Wildcat Strike gains the Runner v-2 worth of value, where v is the value in credits of 4 cards

But there's a second choice to consider, here: although the card gives the Corp a choice, it also gives the Runner a choice. Nothing forces you to play events as soon as you draw them, so the Runner has the choice to not play Wildcat Strike, even if it's in their grip. They can choose to wait for a better opportunity – one where the cards are worth more – or even to not play it at all, because the card wouldn't be worth it. The point at which an economy event becomes truly worth putting in your deck is just a little short of a 4 gain (e.g. Sure Gamble, Creative Commission, Bravado, Career Fair are each worth approximately 4 when played). The point at which you might conceivably include it in your deck if you're really desperate for economy events is 3 (Easy Mark). The point at which you'd play a card if it somehow ended up in your grip, even though you didn't want it in your deck in this matchup, is around 2 (e.g. Infiltration, when you aren't in a matchup that needs the expose). So we have more like 4 options, based on v, the value in credits of 4 Runner cards right now (and bearing in mind that Wildcat Strike costs 2 to play):

• v > 6: Wildcat Strike gains the Runner +4 worth of value (the Corp chooses the credits)
• 5 < v < 6: Wildcat Strike gains the Runner +v-2 worth of value (the Corp chooses the cards)
• 4 < v < 5: the Runner delays playing Wildcat Strike if possible, or plays it for +v-2 worth of value if they doubt they'll get a better chance
• v < 4: the Runner leaves Wildcat Strike to rot in their grip

So now we can see why it's usually correct for the Corp to choose the credits, given that the Runner is knowledgeable and chose to play Wildcat Strike: the odds that the credits are more useful to the Runner than the cards is aiming at a very narrow target, because if the credits were more than marginally more useful, the Runner would probably have delayed the Wildcat Strike until they could get more value from it. It's much more likely that 4 cards are worth more than 6 at any given point in time than it is for their value to fall into the narrow 5-6 range.

That isn't to say, though, that 4 cards are usually worth more than 6! Probably more than half the time, they aren't and you'd prefer the credits. So in order to make good use of Wildcat Strike, you need a deck that can often get into situations where the cards are particularly useful. Playing this sort of "opponent chooses" card can be very frustrating, because you need to design your deck and/or gamestate around increasing the value of one of the options, and then you don't even get that option, it's just that you had to plan for what would happen if you did. As an example, Cerebral Cast would have given you a desirable outcome – 1 brain damage – in the Jinteki decks that played it, back when it was legal. But in order to accomplish that, the decks had to run some proper tag punishment. This is despite the fact that it was nearly always wrong for the Runner to take the tag; the tag punishment was included in the deck without much hope of ever being able to use it, it was just there so that the Runner couldn't make the choice to choose the tag. Wildcat Strike is similar: you need to design your deck so that it could sometimes make really good use of a "draw 4 cards for 2" effect, even though it rarely actually gets that effect in practice; you just need to be able to realistically threaten it in order to force the Corp to give you the credits.

We therefore have to look at when 4 cards are valuable enough to be more than 6. Generally speaking, card draw is better earlier in a turn (so that you have more clicks to react to the cards you draw), so Wildcat Strike (despite not saying priority) is realistically best played on the first click of a turn. You also need to have a high enough credit total to be able to do something with the cards right away; playing Wildcat Strike with your last 2 remaining is generally unwise because you'll just end up stuck with a lot of cards and no credits to play them. Your deck also needs to be able to generate credits very efficiently, with basically no clicking for credits ever (otherwise, you could change some of the clicks you normally use for credits onto clicking for cards instead and get a similar effect). Your deck probably also needs to be good at emptying its grip – e.g. by being able to install things efficiently – so that you don't have to discard some of the cards you draw and reduce their value. Note that a side effect of all this is that decks where Wildcat Strike is good are typically also decks where Earthrise Hotel is good, so you should expect to see them in the same decks.

One other thing that you need to pay attention to is that Netrunner is a game of asymmetrical information – often, the Corp knows a lot more about what's going on than the Runner, and it's quite possible for the Runner to misevaluate and think they want cards when in fact the cards actually won't help them. For example, say the Runner is playing an Anarch deck full of cards that gain value from being discarded (like Paperclip and Exclusive Party), and cards like Moshing and Patchwork that can make use of spare cards. Wildcat Strike looks pretty good here, and the Runner may well fire it off while they have more cards in hand than usual (hoping to draw into Moshing if the corp chooses the draw option, and discard a bunch of conspiracy breakers and redundant cards). That's all very well, but if the Corp happens to be holding an Ark Lockdown, they'll simply just choose the option that floods the Runner with cards, and calmly negate all the gain that the Runner thought they were getting with a single operation (as a bonus, this can occasionally just win the game for the Corp on the spot by removing all the copies of a breaker at once). Wildcat Strike looked good, but it was actually terrible because the Runner didn't know what the Corp could do. I'd say that about a third of the time that a Corp player who knows what they're doing chooses to give the Runner the cards, this is the reason (the other two thirds of the time, the Runner either miscalculated, or misinterpreted "if the Runner plays the card correctly, the Corp should usually choose the credits" as "if the Corp plays the card correctly, they should usually choose the credits" and didn't realise that they couldn't handle being unexpectedly given the cards).

So is Wildcat Strike good? I think more than half of decks don't really want the effect; you need the deck to be much better at generating credits than it is at drawing cards to reliably get opportunities to use it, and also need the ability to be able to do something with lots of cards if the Corp does choose that option. That said, this isn't a massively rare combination of circumstances either; although probably most decks don't want this, there are quite a few that would. The problem, of course, is that in those decks it's just copies 4, 5, and 6 of Sure Gamble; it's a card that only goes into decks that can make masses of money and gives them more money (which it does very efficiently, but it isn't the economic quantity that they really wanted). So your deck needs to be making masses of money and still wanting more. Oddly, that still isn't all that rare a combination; it's uncommon, but if your deck is using a traditional breaker suite, it probably needs all that money to avoid running out of steam against glacier decks. So Wildcat Strike has its place, but it isn't a card that you can just blindly use without thinking about it.

(Also, a big thank you to NISEI's playtesting team for giving us all something to think about. The numbers on this card are really interesting and well-placed, and it's a testament to a well-balanced design that they can inspire so much debate!)