This card was a huge design mistake. It has warped the meta so hard that barriers are all but non-existent. Why put a barrier in your deck when you can just play another etr code gate that is more taxing and probably has a facecheck punishment to boot?

The fact that this card was still allowed to exist after MWL 2.1 shows that Boggs actually doesn’t know what he’s doing, and it scares me.

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One of the chief issue's I've seen be raised is that Paperclip's replacements in Anarch don't really compare too well. BlacKat can be very efficient (with stealth support), and Morning Star is awesome when (if) you get it to work. Yusuf needs even more support and is vulnerable to purges, and then there's what? Berserker? Nfr? —
Barriers and their counterpart Fracters are in a weird design space right now. Barriers have historically always been the cheapest-to-rez with a solid ETR at the downside of being easy-to-break (see Corroder in Core 1.0). As Corroder's popularity skyrocketed due to its flexible nature and great numbers, many played it. This obviously led to corps deciding whether to include barriers solely on how they fared vs. Corroder (see Eli 1.0). Eventually, we got to a point where unless you were Blue Sun, there was no point in playing mid-to-high rez costs for high-strength barriers as gearcheck barriers became the norm. In response, we started seeing nastier barriers being released that actually had facecheck penalties which went against the historical norm for the subtype (see Bulwark, Tithonium, Chiyashi). Those expensive barriers still see tons of play today but imagine how runners would get past them without Paperclip now that Corroder is gone. Practically all of Anarch’s remaining fracters are quasi-fixed-strength except for BlacKat (and Yusuf?), which would still struggle against the expensive barriers without a proper stealth setup. I can’t defend Paperclip, you’re honestly right that it should never have been designed (the install-from-heap is overkill) but barriers/fracters may be stuck this way. —
I see my opponent toss all his Paperclips in the bin. I then rez a Black List behind an Paper Wall. This has stopped many in my local meta. Paperclip is not all powerful. —
That situation is very rare. —

One thing i never see talked about with this card is using the token when the runner plays a high impact run event like account siphon. They won't just ETR and come back in because their event is wasted.

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