Now that the rotation is happening and Core 2.0 is shaking the meta, Merger is in an interesting spot. Most factions do not have 2 sets of 3/2 agendas anymore (except Jinteki if you count Medical Breakthrough) and with SanSan City Grid gone, fast advance (FA) will be harder to pull of. This also means that it is less likely that everyone plays Clot. In the right meta FA HB or NBN (maybe even Weyland) with Merger might work. Slot a set 5/3 together with the factions 3/2 and Merger and you have a nice FA setup requiring the Runner to steal 3 agendas instead of 4 with the usual Global Food Initiative setup most other corps use.

How strong it will be is hard to say and depends heavily on the meta that will develope after rotation but I will definitly try if Merger FA works.

So at first i was not sure what to make of this but now I think it can be a valid alternative to Plascrete Carapace that has some limited use outside of meat damage matchups. You can use it to store cards for later use on it and it also works against a Ronin or other net damage kill combos that need more than one click to pull of. The backside is that you still lose the cards and you do not want to many cards on it since you get them all at once.

All in all I will at least try it out as a plascrete alternative that lets you get rid of useless cards without trashing them.

This ICE is very similiar to Enigma, it is neutral, has a Strength of 2, one taxing subroutine and one End the run.

So it has the same weakness as Enigma that it does not cost Yog.0 anything to break it and the runner will probably only hit it once but does cost one credit more to rez, which can be huge in the first turn since it often is the difference being able to rez one or two ICE.

Datapikes tax subroutine on the other hand can be pretty good if it hits, having a similiar effect to Tollbooth and slowing the runner down in a bigger way than Enigma.

The problem with Datapike is that you need to play it in a deck with strong early game economy that does not have or gain bad publicity (since it negates the tax) which means the faction that would use it the most, which is Weyland, does not like it. For NBN and Jinteki it is often too expensive for its effect and HB has better code gate options to tax the runner.

If you ever play a Weyland deck without or little bad pub or a NBN (or maybe Jinteki) deck with above average early game burst economy were you would play Enigma than you should give Datapike a chance... in all other cases it struggles to much with its many restrictions.