Daily Quest is one of the more interesting Corp economy cards.

If all goes well, Daily Quest gives you 3 per turn. That's a huge amount of income, the same rate as Commercial Bankers Group (a card that was restricted for quite a while and is played in almost every deck that can protect it). So as long as you can keep your Daily Quest up and running, it's going to be a highly effective source of economy.

Of course, this sort of power comes with a drawback. Daily Quest has a few drawbacks, but they're all connected to each other: unlike most economy cards, this one really needs to be placed behind ICE. And not just a Pop-up Window, either, but some proper ICE that will tax the runner out of wanting to make repeated runs on the server.

Instead of listing the drawbacks, I'll instead visualise them with a few examples of the ways Daily Quest can go wrong, taken from actual games:

• You put your Daily Quest behind an Eli 1.0, a nice solid piece of taxing ICE. The Runner is using Security Testing and Paragon. At the start of their turn, they Security Test the Daily Quest server, run it, click through Eli, and replace their access. That's spent, 5 gained (2 from Security Testing + 2 from Daily Quest + 1 from Paragon), and the ability to slightly stack their deck. Five credits for three clicks is typically a good trade. A few turns later, the Corp gives up and installs over their Daily Quest to stop the runner using it as an economy source.
• You put your Daily Quest out in the open in Jinteki: Replicating Perfection, with some horrifyingly big ICE on your centrals to protect it. The runner pays their way through the ICE, bounces its server twice in order to regain some credits, and trashes it last click. Unlike any other asset you might have put there, it's refunded the cost of breaking your centrals ICE to reach it, and (having been trashed immediately) hasn't done anything else in the meantime.
• You put your Daily Quest in a server behind a single huge piece of ICE. The Runner uses their Hippo first click to trash the ICE protecting it, spending the cost to break the ICE, then runs the now unprotected Daily Quest three times in order to regain the credits they lost breaking through. The Corp has lost the credits they put into rezzing the protecting ICE, and has to scramble to re-protect or install over their Daily Quest (I can't remember which happened in the game, it was a while ago now, and may have got some of the other details wrong as a consequence).

So in order to make Daily Quest work, you have to place enough protection on it that the Runner can't ever cheaply launch repeated runs at it; if they can do anything to make runs on it cheaper, then you've basically created an economy card for the Runner, not for yourself. The usual methods of protecting assets in asset-spam decks aren't going to help, either; the Runner only needs to run its server, not to be able to trash the asset. This thing needs to be Protected™, more so than you'd typically protect a central server.

This basically means that there are only two ways to use Daily Quest which actually sort-of work. The less janky is to use it as though it were a burst economy card; many decks will have one heavily protected server, their scoring server, and Daily Quest will normally be safe there if you aren't using it for anything else. You will eventually have to overinstall it once you need your scoring server for an agenda, but 3 per turn while you're waiting for your scoring server to be in demand is still quite a lot of econ; even just two turns of Questing is the same gain as IPO, and three turns is an 8 profit which is the sort of gain that most single cards can't deal with. Many slower decks will frequently go three turns without any other use for the scoring server. I frequently see Corp decks do this, and it works, although it does feel a little like a waste.

The jankier way is to make a deck designed to protect Daily Quest, possibly even multiple copies at once. You now face the imposing task of protecting two (maybe three) central servers, a scoring remote, and an economy remote or three; against aggressive Runners, it's difficult enough just to protect your centrals and one remote, so fitting in some additional protection is even harder. But maybe you feel like it could be possible if your entire deck was focused on it. So you fire up a "horizontal with ICE" ID, such as Asa Group: Security Through Vigilance or Acme Consulting: The Truth You Need, cram your deck full of enough ICE to protect everything, and sit back and watch the credits roll in. (I've tried building Daily Quest decks out of both of these IDs, and playtested them against real opponents, specifically so that I could write an informed review of the card.)

You then face a couple of new problems. One is that Runners are often quite good at making single runs on important servers; after all, they typically want to stop the Corp scoring agendas, and getting into Daily Quest's server is comparable in difficulty to that. You can't use any sort of shell game to protect Daily Quest, either (as you could with a non-public agenda); it has to be face up and rezzed to work. So the Runner knows exactly what they're aiming for, gets into the server, and pays a net 1 to trash it. Sure, there are ways to recur trashed assets, but now you've devoted pretty much your entire deck (and maybe a decent proportion of your influence) to Daily Quest, you'll find that you don't have the deck space to function without it, and so the Runner just needs to make a few precise runs and your economy falls apart.

The second problem is, say you do manage to protect your Daily Quests; there have been some games where I've done it. One game as Asa, I got up to 105 in my credit pool with the help of three Daily Quests (and a couple of PAD Campaigns). The issue is, while you're busy setting them up and icing them and icing your centrals and starting to build a scoring server, you're necessarily going to draw a lot of cards. And Netrunner has this annoying rule that your deck has to contain a certain number of agendas, so those are going to end up filling up HQ and eventually having to be placed somewhere before you're ready. You're already dedicating much of your deck to ICE and economy assets and backup economy so that you can afford to rez the ICE that protects the Daily Quests and to tide you over when they inevitably get trashed; are you going to find the slots for agenda reshuffle too? And if you do, how are you going to stop the Runner simply charging up their Turning Wheel for 20 turns and then accessing the entirety of R&D in one huge run?

The basic problem with the Daily Quest deck is that economy does not win a Corp games. Economy wins a Runner games – a Runner who is rich enough should nearly always win – but the same is not true on the Corp side, because you are restricted by how much ICE you can install and rez and clicks to advance agendas and room in your various servers to hold everything. So you start looking at cards that protect your agendas using credits rather than ICE – SEA Source combos, say, or Punitive Counterstrike – and somehow find the deck space and influence for them.

Then you discover that Runner economies are crazy at the moment, and even when you get up to 105, the Runner managed to earn 42 in that time and is taking enough precautions against Punitive Counterstrike that you would need to hit them with three of them to flatline. So even though you have one of the most monstrous Corp-side economies in Netrunner, it's still somehow never enough.

Conclusions: Daily Quest has a great effect while it's online, but keeping it online is not worth the trouble; it is possible to protect it, but at the cost of having a deck that doesn't do anything else (such as winning). I'd love to see the Daily Quest deck work, but somehow don't think that it does. On the other hand, the card can still be worth a deck slot in some decks: putting it in your scoring server for a few turns, treating it like burst economy, is a good way to make use of some dead time in a glacier deck. Just don't be greedy; as soon as you need your scoring server for something else, simply go and score out. Rolling around in your huge piles of cash is all well and good, but (in an unfortunate flavour disconnect, especially if you're Weyland) it's agenda points you need to actually win the game.

The last review of SEA Source was over five years ago. A lot of things have changed since.

The most notable drawback of SEA Source is its trace requirement. For one thing, you have to be at least as rich as the Runner to land the tag. Perhaps more importantly, landing a guaranteed tag will set you back a number of credits equal to the Runner's credit total. So if you're playing SEA Source, you need to meet one of two requirements: either

1. Getting a tag mid-turn is valuable enough to your deck that it's worth paying any number of credits to pull off the tag; or
2. The runner is currently so poor that the amount you're paying for the tag is reasonable by comparison.

Traditionally, SEA Source was only played for the combo with Scorched Earth, giving you 4 meat damage on the spot (8 if you had a second Scorched Earth, almost always enough to kill). That fulfils the first condition above; as long as you have enough credits to play the Scorches, it didn't matter how much you spent securing the kill. But Scorched Earth has rotated, and its primary replacements (BOOM! and High-Profile Target) seem to have been designed specifically to prevent the SEA Source combo working. BOOM! requires two SEA Sources and is a double (thus you'd need four clicks to pull the combo off, making the combo unreliable and expensive to set up in both credits and influence). Meanwhile, a single SEA Source tag will do only two damage when combined with High-Profile Target (four when combined with two High-Profile Targets), which is going to be survivable for most runners (additionally, influence constraints mean that you can only really do this in Weyland).

As a consequence, after losing its main combo, SEA Source ended up dying out in favour of alternative tagging cards: first Midseason Replacements, and when that rotated, Hard-Hitting News. But it nonetheless isn't a bad card, and as such it's made something of a resurgence lately, as a sort of "alternative" tagging strategy.

Nowadays, SEA Source is primarily played as an enabler of single-tag punishment cards, taking advantage of the fact that it lands the tag mid-turn and gives the Runner no clicks to react before you use it:

• Exchange of Information is the closest comparison to the old Scorched Earth combo, potentially giving you an immediate win by swapping a 1-point agenda for a stolen 3-point agenda (and thus making SEA Source's credit expenditure redundant). It's a lot fairer (read: less broken) than the old tagging combos were, because you need to be playing a mix of agenda sizes and will need to be on 5 points already to close out the game. That makes this an unpopular strategy, but it's still seen from time to time and can be effective, often as a plan B in a deck whose primary strategy happens to use some of the same cards.
• The All-Seeing I has an effect that is incredibly powerful against some decks; if you can land SEA Source into The All-Seeing I against a runner with a resource economy, or an early-game Adam: Compulsive Hacker, the runner may end up unable to execute on their strategy. There is some number of credits at which doing this becomes a bad idea, but it can be fairly high; as long as the Runner isn't super-rich, spending to pull this combo off may well be viable.
• The best combo, however, is probably with Closed Accounts. Landing a SEA Source loses the corp a number of credits equal to the number the Runner has. Then the Closed Accounts follow up loses the Runner a number of credits equal to the number the Runner has. In other words, both you and the Runner lose the same amount of credits, so unlike the other uses of SEA Source, this isn't setting you back relative to the Runner. If you do this on the first two clicks of your turn, you have one click left to make use of the tag, too; The All-Seeing I or Hard-Hitting News are both great options to make use of your (effectively) free tag, or perhaps you could simply trash a resource with your leftover credits.

These are all cases in which you might viably want to pay to land a tag on a rich runner (richer than around 12 or so), even though you have to match the size of their credit pool. Despite working better against a poor runner, SEA Source is nonetheless typically only used in decks that can't reliably keep the Runner poor; if you want to land tags on a poor runner, Hard-Hitting News is usually better. Of course, you could run both (they even combo with each other if you're running Closed Accounts), and many decks do. SEA Source also has the advantage of the surprise / deck-building factor; some tech cards against Hard-Hitting News (notably Misdirection) have no value against SEA Source because they require spending clicks to use, and the Runner doesn't have clicks during the Corp's turn.

If you're unfamiliar with tagging suites, one warning: "I'm richer than you" tagging suites tend to accumulate in your hand over the course of the game, because you often won't draw them when you have a tagging window and/or won't have a tagging window when you draw them. If you have a strong economy (and you need a strong economy to play them), the window will likely come eventually, but you don't want to clog up your hand for too long before then. As a consequence, cards like SEA Source, and the corresponding punishment cards, are rarely played as 3-ofs; playing more than 1 or 2 is generally not worth the deck space unless your entire deck is critically dependent on landing the tag (and given the "soft" nature of SEA Source's tag punishment companions, it almost certainly shouldn't be).

In conclusion: if you're running a deck that can easily get rich, but can't keep the Runner poor, and are looking for a tagging suite, SEA Source, while well short of its former glory, is still a viable option, and can surprise a runner who is trying to play around Hard-Hitting News but feels safe in running once they have 12-15 or so (the point at which Hard-Hitting News becomes uneconomical). It might not get you an immediate flatline any more, but can nonetheless win games, typically via ruining the Runner's economy in combination with NBN tag punishment. So it is once again seeing some play, and rightly so.

Kakurenbo is a strange card that's somewhat looking for a home.

At its heart, Kakurenbo is a card that installs and advances things. Those are both basic actions; normally, if a card's effect can be replicated with basic actions, the card is designed to do that more efficiently. For example:

• Mushin No Shin: cost ; effect 1 install + 3 advances (3, )
• Dedication Ceremony: cost 1, ; effect 3 advances (3, )
• Saraswati Mnemonics: Endless Exploration ability: cost 1, ; effect 1 install + 1 advance (1, )
• Priority Construction: cost 1, ; effect 1 install (ignoring all costs) + 3 advances (3+, )
• Shipment from Tennin: cost 2, ; effect 2 advances (2, )

In all those cases, we have savings. Normally there's a saving of a couple of credits, but more notably, every single one of those cards has a click saving. And when it comes to installing and advancing, a click saving is really powerful, because it lets you get more counters on a card before the Runner sees it.

Many of the above-listed cards have drawbacks preventing you from unconditionally using them to immediately score an agenda; it doesn't take much Netrunner knowledge to see why "IAAA, score" is a powerful play that fundamentally changes the game when it's possible. But even if you don't have the ability to do that with an agenda, many other advanceable assets also care about being able to advance them highly before the Runner sees them, especially in Jinteki (which is why, when fast-install cards have the "cannot score or rez" drawbacks, they generally come in red). If you IAA a Project Junebug, then a Runner will be set back somewhat if they decide to check it, but it won't be all that hard a blow; they were prepared for potentially taking 4 net damage, their hand size is likely larger than that, it won't take long to draw back up. And if you use only basic actions, an IAA is the fastest you can charge your Junebug up. Mushin No Shin would let you IAAAA your Junebug before giving the Runner an opportunity to check; surviving a check on that with only basic actions would be "draw, draw, draw, run" and leave the Runner with no cards in hand going into the Corp's turn, something that a Jinteki deck shouldn't have much trouble taking advantage of.

So after seeing the sort of cards that Kakurenbo has to compete with, we can look at its numbers and get very confused:

• Kakurenbo: cost 2, ; effect 1 install + 2 advances (2, )

This isn't a Mushin No Shin. It isn't a fast-advance-for-assets. It doesn't do anything any faster than you could do it normally!

As such, any possible use of Kakurenbo has to think about "why am I using Kakurenbo, and not just manually IAAing the same target?". The whole "shuffle around cards in Archives to hide what you're doing" effect doesn't actually help when installing a card from hand, because if you directly install a card, the Runner still normally doesn't know what it is (unless they happen to know everything in HQ already, e.g. because they knew last turn and also saw the top card of R&D). So there are only a few differences between the operation and the basic action that might potentially make it usable:

• It can be used to retrieve a card from Archives, if the card you wanted to IAA isn't in your hand. In other words, this can be used as a kind-of janky Archived Memories / Restore equivalent in Jinteki colors; you're retrieving the card and installing it with no click loss, nor without the loss of other cards of the same type, but with the drawback of having to IAA it rather than doing something else with the card. If the card you want to install was face-down (e.g. an agenda or an ambush that was earlier discarded to hand size), then this will also conceal its identity from the runner. If it was face-up, though, a runner with a good memory will only need a single Archives run to figure out which card you installed; they can simply look there to see which card is missing.

  So this effect isn't particularly good for shell-game purposes, but might nonetheless be helpful for recursion in cases where you don't care if the Runner knows what you're doing. The other review mentions NGO Front, which is a good example of the sort of card that can be IAAed unprotected even when the Runner knows what it is; a Kakurenbo on an NGO Front is basically the equivalent of Hedge Fund, click for credit, click for credit. Another good example is the in-faction Bio Vault, which can quite usefully do work protecting a pre-existing scoring remote.

  It becomes better for shell-game purposes if you can fill your Archives full of ambushes that fire from there, thus discouraging the Runner from checking. As of the 20.06 ban list, this is very difficult; Shock! has rotated, and Breached Dome is banned, so the nastiest thing a modern Jinteki deck is likely to have in Archives is Cyberdex Virus Suite. Given that Kakurenbo is in Uprising, it won't be of any use in the older formats, either; you'd have to play an "almost all cards legal" format, in which case you probably have more broken things to be doing.

  Note that this card has the "Remove this operation from the game instead of trashing it." line of text, that's normally reserved only for recursion cards, even though it's probably unnecessary in the case of this card in particular (as it only retrieves one card); this implies to me that NISEI probably had Archives recursion in mind as one of the primary uses for this card when designing it.

• It flips Archives face down. Industrial Genomics: Growing Solutions would have loved this effect, if the two cards were ever legal at the same time (but sadly, they weren't). Maybe that's the reason you'd play Kakurenbo in an older format. Apart from that, this effect doesn't seem particularly useful; it isn't like it forces the Runner to forget all the cards they saw earlier (although maybe some Runners will).

• It allows you to trash cards from HQ. This is something the Corp can do anyway, by discarding to hand size, but that's sometimes undesirable (requiring overdrawing, which often places agendas in HQ before you're ready for them), and is something that the Corp often wants to be able to do without making it obvious that's what they're doing. (In particular, if you're planning to hide an agenda in Archives due to flood, you definitely don't want the Runner to figure out that that's what you're up to.) If you use Kakurenbo to trash one card from HQ, then install a card previously from Archives, then it looks the same as if you installed a card from HQ; perhaps the Runner will decide that they don't know what the card is anyway and thus that there's no point running Archives to see if anything is missing from it. This seems like a high-risk strategy and not strong enough to lead me to put Kakurenbo in a deck, but it might be a fringe benefit.

  If you trash more than one card, it will be obvious what you're up to, but in some cases that might not matter, e.g. when it's already known that the Runner won't survive an Archives run due to a large concentration of Archives traps, or unbreakable ICE on the server.

• It's a different type of action from the "install" and "advance" basic actions. Haas-Bioroid has something of a sub-theme of caring about types of actions; in some combo decks, being able to perform one action as a different type of action has been valuable. For example, MirrorMorph: Endless Iteration's ability triggers if you perform three different types of action in a turn.

  The most notable card in this respect is Jeeves Model Bioroids, which triggers if you spend three clicks on the same sort of action. An IAA turn will never trigger Jeeves; you only spent two clicks advancing. On the other hand, Kakurenbo triggers Jeeves automatically, being an operation that naturally costs three clicks.

  What's notable here is that Kakurenbo's main drawback, of not actually saving you any credits or clicks, gets entirely negated if you have a rezzed Jeeves: the bonus click from Jeeves makes up for the complete lack of bonus clicks from Kakurenbo. And that fourth click becomes hugely valuable in this context, because it gives you a third advance for an IAAA. That's faster than you could normally advance a card, and Kakurenbo has no restrictions against rezzing or scoring. So Jeeves + Kakurenbo is a two-card combo that lets you score a 3-advancement agenda from hand. It would also allow you to immediately use a hypothetical asset or upgrade that requires three advancements to use (although as far as I can tell, no such assets or upgrades currently exist).

So in conclusion, Kakurenbo is not really a Mushin No Shin or Dedication Ceremony at all. Taking account everything it actually does, it is in effect a weird sort of Restore equivalent that also lets you score 3/x agendas from hand if you happen to have a Jeeves Model Bioroids installed already, and might potentially have some small amount of shell-game usage if Archives happens to be heavily iced. It's clear how the ability to fast-advance might be useful in a deck (and in fact, the only use I've managed to make of Kakurenbo is the Jeeves combo in a fast-advance deck). Its other abilities are somewhat all over the place and don't seem all that helpful, but perhaps they'll be useful to some future deck (the requirement for an iced Archives immediately makes me think of a Jinteki: Replicating Perfection shell-game deck that wants to reuse Ronin and Project Junebug, which might be viable but probably isn't the best Replicating Perfection build).

I think many people who look at Cerebral Cast will look at the effect, think "tagging? this isn't Jinteki", and decide that this is a card to be imported. I think that's misevaluating the card somewhat, though.

Cerebral Cast is a card that gives your opponent a choice. Like all such cards, they are only good if you make sure that the worse choice is good for you. So in order to be able to make good use of Cerebral Cast, you need a deck which can make use of either option.

First off, the brain damage. There are two basic types of deck that care about brain damage: flatline decks which want the Runner to have a smaller hand size so that they can withstand less damage at once; and grinder decks that rely on the fact that the smaller the runner's hand size, the more cards they will have to draw if they want a safe hand size buffer for running. The majority of the cards in either category are Jinteki cards; even when building a brain damage deck out of Haas-Bioroid (which has most of the brain damage cards), it will still often rely on Jinteki cards like Snare! or Neural EMP to finish off the runner; and grinding cards like Harvester also typically come in red. So if you want to build a deck to profit from brain damage, you'll probably be playing a lot of red cards. Cerebral Cast is unusable against an opponent who doesn't care about brain damage, so in order to make it work, you'll need to include both Cerebral Cast (3 Jinteki influence), and several brain damage punishment cards (also typically Jinteki). In other words, this card isn't going to be all that effective out of faction; you're paying influence for it, and plenty more influence for the support cards.

What about the tag? Tags do do something on their own; they allow you to trash resources, which is something that even a Jinteki deck with no tag punishment can make use of. If you Cerebral Cast click 1, and the runner can't stand having two arbitrary resources trashed, they have to take the brain damage. So this is already a card that can help out a typical Jinteki deck, situationally; although if you want to trash resources using a psi game, you would probably be better off running Voter Intimidation which doesn't give the Runner a choice.

However, the main reason tag punishment cards aren't normally played outside tagging decks is that it's hard to land a tag mid-turn. The best mid-turn tagging card is probably SEA Source, which not only requires an economic advantage over the runner, it is very expensive when the Runner is rich (and thus will probably lose you the game in this case unless you use it to win on the spot or else combo into Closed Accounts). It takes support to be able to pull that off; a strong economy, at least. So tag punishment cards aren't widely played outside decks that can either land a SEA Source, or else land a Hard-Hitting News in such a way that the Runner won't simply clear the tags.

Cerebral Cast is a notable card because it changes this theory. To fire a Cerebral Cast, all you have to do is win a psi game, and then the Runner has to take brain damage or else let you tag them. And if you have a sufficiently powerful tag punishment card in hand, the Runner has to take the brain damage. Cards like Closed Accounts and The All-Seeing I are huge setbacks to typical runners, and only 1 influence each, meaning that they're easy to import into your decks if you want to.

So the way to think about Cerebral Cast is that it says "if your deck is running tag punishment, do a psi game for 1 brain damage". (In testing, the majority of runners took the brain damage, and were correct to do so; the few that took the tag normally ended up losing as a consequence.) "Psi game for 1 brain damage" is a hugely strong effect in most Jinteki decks (often winning games on its own); Cerebral Cast gives you the opportunity to get that effect, but only if you're willing to dilute your deck by spending some influence on tag punishment cards. So it's effectively a build-around card that suggests trying out a new deck style: Jinteki, plus a tag punishment subtheme.

Of course, once you start going down the tag punishment route, then that starts to change the way you evaluate your cards; an initially minor change to a deck (mixing in some tag punishment so that you can run Cerebral Cast and thus deal brain damage without needing a trace or a Cerebral Overwriter shell game) can start leading to temptation. "If I'm running all this tag punishment anyway", you may think, "what about adding some tagging cards to combo with it?". I'm someone who likes both competitive decks and jank decks, so of course, once I thought of this, I had to try it out. And my verdict is: surprisingly, it actually kind-of works. Cerebral Cast is what makes the tag punishment cards playable in Jinteki, and the tag punishment cards then make the tagging cards playable. Because you're playing Jinteki and not NBN, it's hard to get the economy needed to make a traditional tagging suite work; but it doesn't seem to be impossible, and you have the huge advantage that your opponents are unlikely to be playing around traces the way they would if you had a yellow identity.

It's also worth noting that Weyland tag punishment, although very expensive in influence, naturally works very well in a Jinteki deck (especially one that does brain damage!) Cards like High-Profile Target are incredibly scary when you're playing against a deck that reduces your maximum hand size and is constantly threatening a flatline combo (especially because Cerebral Cast triggers Fumiko Yamamori to deal an extra point of meat damage).

Conclusions: this card is a really strong card in-faction if you build your deck around it, but at the cost of having to use potentially suboptimal support cards. As a consequence, it basically creates its own deck style, "the Cerebral Cast deck". I don't think it's usable out-of-faction. It is possible to go further, making use of Cerebral Cast plus its support to produce a full-on Jinteki tag deck; this probably won't win tournaments (although the surprise factor will definitely help), but can hold its own in a casual environment and will stand a good chance against most castual decks.

I've been playing with Spear Phishing quite a bit recently, and this card deserves a review, so it may as well be me who writes it.

Sometimes, a new Netrunner card is released that is totally unprecedented, and everyone scratches their head trying to figure out whether it's any good or not. Spear Phishing is not one of those cards; it's a bypass event, that's something that we've all seen and played with even as far back as the original Core Set. So the main question for a review to cover is: how does this compare with other bypass events, and should I play it in my deck?

The obvious comparison here is to Inside Job, the classic Criminal bypass card. Spear Phishing is very similar: 2 to play, three influence, you run as part of the same click and bypass one piece of ICE. So that's the comparison I'll be making; if you want to know how Spear Phishing compares to some other source of bypass or pseudo-bypass, you might as well use Inside Job as a common point of reference.

In order to make a fair comparison, we need to think about why we'd use bypass events in our deck. There are three common scenarios:

1. It's early game, and there's a piece of ICE that we simply can't break due to not having appropriate icebreakers yet. Perhaps the opponent is rushing out an agenda behind an ETR barrier, or perhaps we want to get into HQ to trigger a "successful run on HQ" trigger. The server in question is likely to be lightly iced because it's early game, so a bypass event will probably let us straight in.
2. Similar to scenario 1, but it's later in the game. The Corp is starting to build up a scoring server, and we can get through some of the ICE but not all of it. If we can bypass the appropriate piece of ICE with an event, we can use icebreakers, secondary bypass or pseudo-bypass to get through the rest of it.
3. It's late in the game; we have a full set of icebreakers, and we want to get into some sort of monstrous server with heavy ICE. We don't need bypasses to make a run possible, but bypassing a large piece of ICE will make the run considerably cheaper, so we can use the bypass event as though it were an economy event.

Looking at the first scenario, we discover that Inside Job and Spear Phishing are effectively identical. This is in my experience the most common scenario (bypass events are more effective in the early game, so if you're playing a lot of them you're probably planning to win or lose before the late game happens). There's one ICE on the server; if the Corp rezzes it, it will be both the first encountered and the innermost (thus triggering either of the two bypass events), and if the Corp doesn't rez it, the situation is likewise symmetrical.

Spear Phishing does have a very slight edge in this situation, but it rarely comes up. If the opponent is using The Twins, then Spear Phishing will negate its effect (thus they'll probably choose not to use it, and you can get forewarned about what's about to happen for future runs), whereas Inside Job will run right into it. However, ever since The Foundry: Refining the Process rotated, you're very unlikely to see The Twins in a serious or even casual game. More relevantly, Spear Phishing will negate the effect of Ganked! on a 1-deep server, whereas Inside Job will run right into it; Ganked! is played sometimes, normally in combination with very spiky ice, and so this is enough of an edge to be worth mentioning (albeit not enough of an edge to really inform your deck choices).

The other two scenarios are where it starts to fall apart, meaning that Spear Phishing is definitely the inferior card. When the server contains multiple ICE, then Spear Phishing and Inside Job have different methods of choosing which ICE to bypass. Inside Job's is usually better, for three reasons:

• Inside Job bypasses the outermost piece of rezzed ICE (because you don't "encounter" unrezzed ICE). So if you run at a 2-deep unrezzed server, the Corp will have to rez both pieces of ICE to avoid giving you a free run. Using Spear Phishing in the same situation, the Corp will have to rez the outer ICE to avoid giving you a free run, but will have the option to leave the inner ICE unrezzed, giving them more flexibility in how to spend their credits.
• If you're playing bypass events, you're probably also playing fixed-location bypass or pseudo-bypass such as Boomerang or possibly Femme Fatale (Boomerang in particular is a very good card that's almost universally played in Criminal, and becomes better still in combination with bypass events). These are more likely to be targeting inside pieces of ICE than outside pieces of ICE (because they can only target ICE that was present at the time they were played, and ICE is installed inside to outside), so Inside Job is more likely to produce a powerful bypass of two pieces of ICE, whereas Spear Phishing is more likely to provide a redundant double-bypass of a single piece of ICE.
• Corps normally install gearcheck ICE first, then supplement it with larger or spikier ICE later, so the inside ICE is more likely to be cheap to break than the outside ICE is.

The first of those reasons is a pure win for Inside Job. The other two are just statistical, though; for any given run, usually Inside Job will work out better, but sometimes Spear Phishing will work out better because the Corp installed their ICE early enough that you could choose where to place your Boomerang, or installed gearcheck ICE on the outside of a server rather than on the inside (perhaps specifically to play around Inside Job!).

Thus, Inside Job is better on average, but that doesn't mean that Spear Phishing is unplayable in formats with Inside Job legal; because it is sometimes better, this gives an incentive to play a mix of bypass events. If you have three Inside Jobs in your grip, it's preferable to having three Spear Phishings, but better still would be to have a mix of the two, so that you could choose which to use as appropriate; the two cards are similar enough that you'll usually make at least one bypass per game for which they would be equivalent, so being able to use Spear Phishing when it's right is more valuable than having to use Inside Job even when it's wrong.

The only remaining question, therefore, is what sort of mix you should run. If running one bypass event, obviously you'd prefer Inside Job. If running two, two Inside Jobs seems best; nothing says you're going to draw both of them, and you want to make sure that if you draw a bypass event, it's the better one. When running three bypass events, I think running 3×Inside Job is still the better option, but 2×Inside Job and 1×Spear Phishing is definitely a reasonable option.

Spear Phishing therefore comes into its own when you run a deck that wants four or more bypass events (for a highly aggressive Criminal deck, four is entirely reasonable; I've run up to seven on occasion, although two of them were more specialised than the general-purpose events compared in this review). You can't (legally) run four Inside Jobs, so you would be looking for alternatives anyway this point, and Spear Phishing is probably the best of the alternatives (at least, if you consider only alternatives within the same faction; you could make a decent argument that Compile would be the best or second-best bypass event if it didn't cost Criminals three influence). However, it's sufficiently good that I think a three-Inside Job, one-Spear Phishing mix would be preferable to four Inside Jobs even if the latter build were legal; the benefits of "maybe it is the inside ICE I want to bypass this time" outweigh the disadvantages of "maybe I don't draw an Inside Job in a situation where Spear Phishing is insufficient".