I really like the design of this card.

Like most other 3/2s before it, Embedded Reporting can be scored in two different modes: the "blank 3/2" mode, and the "4/2 with an ability" mode (which extends to 5/2, 6/2, etc., but players rarely go that far). So when evaluating the agenda, we have to look at both modes and see how they work.

The blank-3/2 mode is easy enough to understand; there have been plenty of those in Netrunner's history, and this one's no different from, say, Project Beale. Generally speaking, fast-advance decks want as many blank 3/2s as they can get their hands on, in addition to the 3/2s with upside – every additional advancement requirement makes an agenda significantly harder to fast-advance, and fast-advancement combos are normally limited enough that you need to score more than one point at a time with them, so 3/2s are great for those decks, with 4/2s and 5/3s and 3/1s being significantly worse. Other deck types don't care nearly so much about their agendas' advancement requirements being exactly 3: never-advance decks can generally afford to play cards like Wage Workers and Seamless Launch that make unadvanced 4/2s easy to score, rush decks are generally happy to park an advancement counter on a 4/2 during the Runner's turn and finish it off next turn, glacier decks can score a 5/3 almost as easily as a 3/2 and really appreciate the extra point, and kill decks generally care more about agendas being worth 3 points than they do about the advancement requirement. So any deck that doesn't fast advance is probably going to want something with better abilities than a blank 3/2.

However, Embedded Reporting can be overadvanced, scoring it in the style of a 4/2, which gives you an ability, and this one is pretty decent without being overpowered. It's an interestingly versatile ability, and here are some of the best ways to use it:

• Three of the best four neutral 4/2s ever printed give you credits when scored: Offworld Office, Corporate Sales Team, and Cyberdex Sandbox. (In case you're wondering what the other one is, it's the self-protecting NAPD Contract.) If you need an Embedded Resources to be a 4/2 that gives credits when scored, you can do that: just score it and search up a couple of economic operations. It doesn't give quite as much economy as its competition, because the operations you are looking for cost clicks to play; the exact benefit will depend on what you search for (e.g. if you're rich you could search for Hedge Fund, but if poorer you might search for Predictive Planogram instead). Additionally, the money doesn't come quite immediately; you have to wait a couple of turns. What it does do, though, is block the top of R&D for you while you're waiting – so if the reason you needed credits after an agenda score was to rez ICE on R&D (and this is a very common reason to need credits after scoring an agenda!), perhaps it bought you a couple of turns to give you time to actually play the operations you searched for and get those credits.
• If you're playing a fast-advance deck (and thus playing this agenda, because it's your only option for 3/2s right now besides a single copy of Tomorrowʼs Headline), and get the opportunity to overscore it, it can search for a couple of fast-advancement tools for you. For example, you could grab a copy of Nanomanagement with one counter, and then later on use the other counter to find a second copy of Nanomanagement (meaning that you don't need to leave both of them clogging your hand). This turns into a sort of miniature AstroTrain – using 3/2s to fast-advance each other – but one that's sufficiently expensive in credits to probably not be broken (Nanomagement costs 5 more to place a clickless advancement counter on something than an AstroScript Pilot Program or Remastered Edition agenda counter does). As such, you have a lot of incentive to overscore this in a fast-advance deck, if you can – such decks generally want to have their fast-advancement tricks in hand already when they draw agendas, in order to avoid the agendas being stolen from HQ, and an overscored Embedded Reporting effectively guarantees that.
• NBN decks presently have some issues trying to protect their servers solely with ICE – most NBN ICE is somewhat porous, quite a lot of it isn't very good unless the Runner is tagged, and quite a lot of the rest hardly does anything if the Runner decides to go tag-me. In general, to protect its servers, NBN has to use the "threat of revenge" in addition to the few end-the-run subroutines it has access to (which are mostly pure gear-checks that won't help in the late game even against a Runner on low credits). That generally means that in order to keep your servers safe, you need either tagging operations that dissuade Runners from going down to low credits, or tag punishment operations that dissuade Runners from going tag-me. But those tools often cause severe hand-clog issues if you're running too many of them; ideally, you'd run only one or two, and search for them. When scored as a 4/2, Embedded Reporting gives you a way to do that search without taking up important deck slots (decks have to contain agendas, so if you can accomplish something with an agenda slot, that's generally great as it means you don't have to spend a more flexible deck slot on it).

So one of the reasons I think that this is such a well-designed card is that, despite being scorable as a 3/2, there's a real incentive to score it as a 4/2 instead – but you get to choose which during the game, you don't have to choose before it starts, and that means that it encourages decks (especially fast advance decks) to deviate from their core play pattern when they get a good opportunity. A fast-advance deck generally wants to hold its 3/2s in hand until it has a scoring combo for them – but if it draws Embedded Reporting in its opening hand, it may seriously consider trying to rush it out as a 4/2 behind ICE on turn 2 or 3, because the reward for that is actually good enough to probably be worth the risk. That helps to make the game more interactive, because it then isn't just about whether the opponent can stop the fast advance, it's also about whether they can stop the rush.

The other great part about this card's design is the timing. Like the other dividends cards, it triggers at the end of your turn, so the Runner will get a full turn of warning about the card you searched for, before you get to use it. Quite a few of the operations in NBN decks, especially the gray ops and (especially) imported black ops, are "unfair" in that they can come out of nowhere and ruin the game for a Runner who forgot to play around them (or were hoping that you didn't draw them). The turn of warning gives the Runner counterplay (e.g. they can choose to not run, in order to not turn on a kill card). Additionally, the card gets placed on top of R&D. For most operations, that benefits the Corp (both because it blocks R&D from single accesses, and because it is harder to get rid of untrashable cards in R&D than in HQ, due to cards like Burner and Eye for an Eye). But operations that act as "unfair" win conditions, like Measured Response, generally come with trash costs so that the Runner has counterplay – and if you put a trashable card on top of R&D, the Runner counterplay is obvious (you just have to try to get into R&D to trash it). All this means that it tends to nudge the Corp towards generally healthier play patterns and away from those that give a negative play experience.

Finally, it's also worth noting that unlike Project Beale, which would outright win you the game if overscored by 10 counters, this card has diminishing rather than accumulating returns if you somehow manage to overadvance it into the stratosphere. That means that instead of encouraging Psychographics combos and utter jank like importing Red Planet Couriers into NBN, the card instead encourages trying to go a bit further with basic actions and Netrunner fundamentals, and it's probably more beneficial to the game to have those moments of mid-game decision-making happening all the way from jinteki.net casual lobbies up to the top tables of tournaments than it is to support decks that use PAD Factory to advance the opponent's console (the latter is fun once or twice – I should know, I've done it – but doesn't have the same sort of lasting benefit).

So this is a well-designed card, but how strong is it? The flippant answer is "it doesn't matter how strong it is, it's a 3/2" – fast-advance decks would be playing it regardless, but they definitely get value from its 4/2 mode existing, so it's somewhat stronger for them than a true blank 3/2 would be. It wouldn't surprise me if it also turned up outside fast advance on occasion (although it probably isn't a staple); it has a number of decent modes when scored as a 4/2, and although none of them are extremely strong, the flexibility might well be enough for it to earn a slot (especially if the deck has some fast-advance tools available as a plan B, and thus benefits from 3/2s existing in the deck even if they aren't normally sccored like that).

The Seventh Rotation is upon us. All the FFG cards have rotated out, apart from the few that were reprinted in Ashes or System Gateway (or reprinted with a different name in Elevation). I think this has removed more cards from the Standard metagame at once than at any previous time – and that shifts the context of the cards that are still left, because the game has changed around them.

Take Game Over, for example. Historically, it hasn't been a very good card, in most gamestates effectively reading "Pay 4 and take 1 bad publicity. The Runner pays 6 and trashes a few cards that are no longer relevant." That effect isn't completely terrible, but it was historically outclassed by, e.g., Hard-Hitting News, which was much better in a metagame where Corps were generally rich midgame and doing economic damage to the Runner wouldn't matter much in the late game.

But the rotation has made both Corps and Runners a lot poorer, especially if either of the two players is trying to force interaction (and many staple Runner economy cards, like Daily Casts and Rezeki, have been banned). That's had two main effects on the game, which are both somewhat favourable for Game Over: Runners are more likely to be using an economy which needs to flood the board with resources or non-icebreaker programs in order to function, as there aren't so many alternative options nowadays; and Runners who get hit with Game Over are less likely to be able to pay. Additionally, with many of the older cards gone, it's more likely that Runners will be making use of some of the many cybernetic cards in Borealis – so it may sometimes even be relevantly possible to hit Hardware. So the card is probably worth re-evaluating in the context of the new metagame.

The first thing that's worth noting is that Game Over is a somewhat situational card, but it's a situation that is somewhat common and that many decks benefit from having a card to cover: Game Over is at its best when it's protecting a lead that's starting to slip away. That in general is a really common scenario for Corps in Netrunner, though: in general the Runner has an advantage at the start and end of the game and the Corp in the middle, so if the Runner isn't particularly aggressive, it is common for the Corp to have a somewhat precarious lead going into the late game, and the game is often decided by whether or not the Corp is able to close it out. I've been testing it out in a fast-advance deck, which might potentially lose an agenda to random accesses early-game, is likely to fast-advance a number of agendas in the mid-game and get a lead, but then has to face a difficult late-game where the centrals are being hammered. Perhaps the Runner is trying to R&D-lock you; the Corp counterplay to that is to draw a lot of cards in order to sneak agendas past the R&D lock, and the Runner counter-counterplay to that is to steal the drawn agendas from HQ. So you effectively end up in a situation where the Corp needs to survive just one Runner turn with their agenda in hand and their fast-advance tricks available, but may not naturally be able to do so because the Runner is able to keep up constant pressure.

Game Over shines in this sort of situation. For one thing, the Runner is probably spending lots of credits in order to keep up the pressure. Game Over isn't very good if the Runner is rich, as they'll just pay to keep everything important. But (as is commonly the case for NBN) it's much better if the Runner is under economic pressure. Cards that give the opponent a choice, like this one, are usually worse than they seem, because the opponent can pick the least damaging option and thus the card is only good for you in cases where both options are good for you. But if you pick a card type that's powering the opponent's economy (either by making credits directly or by saving them credits), Game Over is effectively giving the opponent a choice between losing credits or losing credits – they can pick the option that loses them fewer credits (which in this situation is usually to trash everything), but either way they are losing credits: and as long as they needed those credits to get in and stop your plans, Game Over can be sufficient to buy the turn you need to win the game. (Compare to something like Oppo Research: Oppo is great to hit the opponent with in the midgame because it takes them a while to recover, but it doesn't do that much to close out a game where both players are close to winning, as the opponent can just ignore the tags and try to win that turn.)

Game Over's somewhat awkward timing restriction (it has to be played the turn after an agenda steal) can matter, and it restricts the deck types that you can put it in. In particular, you're generally aiming to win the turn after playing Game Over, which means that if you're planning a scoring win, you will need an agenda left to score – and the Runner just stole one, so you need to have had two of them. Likewise, if you have a kill combo that depends on things with a trash cost, you need the Runner to not trash them in the same run that's stealing the agenda, So your deck will need to be the sort that draws lots of cards, ideally ones that the Runner wasn't able to access recently. This is a problem that isn't unique to Game Over: the "R&D lock", which aims to prevent the opponent ever drawing an agenda, is a common option for Runners for their late-game strategy, so Corp decks often need a way to counter it. That means that Game Over will be better if your deck has cards that aim to win through an R&D lock (as opposed to preventing the lock being set up in the first place), e.g. bulk card draw and things that shuffle R&D. This means that I think Game Over is better in decks that are particularly vulnerable to R&D lock (such as fast-advance decks) and are therefore already playing cards to try to deal with the situation.

As a summary, to play Game Over, you need a deck which a) can get a winning combination of cards into its hand even while under pressure and b) just needs to be able to survive a turn to be able to actually use them to win. If you do have such a deck, though, a Game Over in hand is extremely good at converting a lead into a win: if the Runner starts to come back into the game via spending most of their credits stealing agendas, you Game Over them, locking them out for a turn, and win the next turn – and if the Runner doesn't manage to steal any agendas, you won't be able to play Game Over, but you win regardless. The bad publicity would have been a major downside if you played it earlier in the game – but if you're planning to win on the turn afterwards, you only compensated the Runner 1 per run they make on their net turn, which probably won't be enough for them to get in anywhere.

Game Over is kind-of terrible in the early game, or if you're behind, though. If you play it before most of the Runner's cards are on the table, the positive effects of the card won't have a significant impact and the bad publicity will really hurt – and thus if the Runner manages to score six points in the midgame, the card will be entirely useless. Likewise, if you play it when you're behind, it will probably hurt you more than it hurts the Runner. As such, you really want your deck to be one that leverages the Corp's mid-game advantage in order to be ahead going into the late-game.

You also really want the Runner's deck to be one whose economy relies on installed cards rather than events: but this condition might not be as bad as it seems. For one thing, Game Over takes up just a single card slot in your deck (because you're only planning to play it late-game anyway, and can generally leave it in your hand until then), so it's OK to use it as a tech card rather than a core part of your strategy: if you have a deck that struggles against Runners who gradually build up a resource-based economy over the course of a long game, then this can be your tool for dealing with it, and you can ignore it in the matchups that don't look like that. Additionally, there's a sort of "situation stacking": the card has two requirements to be good (you have a lead going into the late game, and the Runner has an economy based on a lot of installed cards) , but those requirements tend to be met in the same sorts of games (a Runner who is spending lots of time setting up a large board probably doesn't have enough aggression to take the lead in the midgame), and thus when one requirement is met, the other also tends to be met.

So is Game Over actually good now? I'm not sure yet, but assuming that you're playing the right sort of deck for it – a deck that tends to get the advantage mid-game, wants to use a tech card slot to help it close out the game against late-game-focused Runners, forces the Runner to spend a lot of credits on interacting with it, and is sufficiently scared of R&D locks that it's already running ways to escape them – it might well be. When the right moment to use it comes up, it's great, so the only real question is as to whether those moments come up often enough for the card to pull its weight, or whether it would be better off as some card that's more generally applicable.

After some experience playing both with and against this card, my conclusion is: it isn't as good as it looks, which is a bit concerning given that (at least to me) it only looked decently good rather than amazing.

The three main ways in which a piece of ICE can have a good effect are stopping power, taxing power, and the facecheck. But Mycoweb doesn't seem to do particularly well in any of those dimensions.

Let's look at the facecheck first. Jinteki generally only wants to spend 8 on rezzing one piece of ICE in the early game if it does enough damage to the Runner in the process to make up for the cost of the rez. Spending 8 is quite the tempo hit, potentially taking a couple of turns to recover from – but that's forgiveable if you land a hit on the Runner that also takes a couple of turns to recover from. In this case, though, an early-game rez of Mycoweb frequently does nothing at all: in the early game you normally need to install all the ICE you draw (meaning that it doesn't end up in Archives), if you spent 8 on a rez then you won't be able to rez anything else impactful even with the 2 discount, and you're unlikely to have another spiky sentry or code gate rezzed to copy a subroutine from. Some Runner decks opposite will keep the "period of time where rezzing Mycoweb is useless" around well into the mid-game; in one game I played as a Runner, the opponent rezzed a Mycoweb when I already had a decoder installed (hoping that I would pay the costs to break it), I judged that the subroutines would do less damage than the break cost and let them fire, and the Corp realised that none of the subroutines actually did anything useful in the gamestate at the time and had to let me past.

In the very late game, the facecheck would theoretically be more impactful, if you could get the subroutines to fire – maybe by that point in time you have a lot of highly-damaging subroutines to copy, and Archives might be loaded with ICE (especially if the opponent is trashing it). But at that stage of the game, the facecheck doesn't matter so much because the opponent will almost certainly have a way past the ICE anyway (especially because ICE installed late tends to be on the outside of a server, the most vulnerable location).

What about stopping power? If someone is trying to make the critical game-winning run through a Mycoweb, they can usually get through by matching 5 strength and breaking two subroutines (the last two). Mycoweb is in a weird spot where it has a lot of subroutines, but they rely a lot on synergy in order to work, e.g. the first two subroutines usually have no immediate impact other than setting up the last two subroutines (although they are helpful for future runs). In one of my games, I was trying to steal the last required agenda point from R&D with low credits and dubious breakers, and couldn't afford to break all the subroutines – so I just broke half the subroutines, and still got in. In the early game, the stopping power is even worse – you can't use a Mycoweb to stop a steal unless you have a run-ending sentry or code gate rezzed already, or rezzable from the play area or Archives, and you won't be able to afford both the ICE to copy and the Mycoweb. As such, the stopping power is somewhere between "somewhat porous" (late-game) and "this doesn't matter at all" (early-game). One way you can try to patch up this weakness is to play ICE like Anemone that make the first two subroutines relevant even on a last desperate run; but this is only a tax of 1–2 more, so the synergy probably isn't worth it unless your deck wants to play Anemone anyway.

I was initially expecting the taxing element to be the best part of Mycoweb, and it is, but it still isn't as good as I'd like. The basic issue is that the normal approach to taxing ICE is to put it on a server that the opponent's deck wants to run repeatedly (e.g. R&D against certain Shapers) in order to limit the number of runs that they can make there (via forcing them to spend more money, and thus more time repairing their economy between each run). In order to get value for that, you want to have your taxing ICE rezzed early – otherwise the opponent will get most of their value runs in the early game and just switch server once you've spent effort in fortifying the server they were originally attacking. But Mycoweb isn't useful for taxing until you're already set up with additional ICE to copy, or appropriate ICE in Archives, so it only taxes through a small proportion of the game – and that mostly negates the purpose of taxing the opponent, because the number of runs you're stopping is low in absolute terms and thus the amount of damage you're doing to their gameplan doesn't justify Mycoweb's 8 rez cost. The actual amount taxed is also smaller than it looks: decoders are generally more efficient at breaking things than fracters or killers, the opponent can know or guess that some of the subroutines might be irrelevant and not break it, and the opponent may consider face-tanking the subroutines in certain gamestates (often the best you can do with the last two subroutines is 3ish net damage, which most runners are capable of tanking if they don't have to do it too often).

I'm not yet sure whether Mycoweb's status is "playable as a 1-of in most decks which synergise with them, because it's decent in the late-game", "playable only in decks which synergise with it particularly well", or "never worth it regardless of deck" – I don't have enough experience with or against it to work out in which of those categories it falls. But I don't think it's a staple, and your deck would need to fit it particularly well to consider playing it at 3 copies.

(I've been meaning to write some "banned/rotated card retrospectives" for a while. This one's my first.)

Ah, Formicary. A card that started its life as a way to give the Runner a mildly annoying surprise when they ran an apparently unprotected server, and ended up as part of way too many degenerate combos. There's an entire official article about why this one card was banned, which basically summarises to "trying to ensure that newly designed cards didn't combo too degenerately with Formicary ended up being too restrictive on the card designs".

The basic idea behind most Formicary combos is that you trigger a "the Runner approaches the server" ability of another card, then after that's resolved, use a long-distance Formicary rez to cancel the approach, thus allowing the original trigger to trigger a second time once the Runner passes the Formicary. There's are quite a few possible effects you could use with this, but most of the combos weren't being actively played at the same time, so it's worth looking back at just how much chaos this one card caused:

• Formicary + Cayambe Grid. This makes the Runner pay the Cayambe Grid tax twice, and in the typical Cayambe Grid deck, the tax is enormous and trying to pump it up out of reach is one of the main things that the deck does. Cayambe Grid got banned in June 2020 with minimal explanation: the ban was apparently a targeted ban to kill one specific deck that was extremely unfun to play against, but the balance team didn't specify which. I do think the "the ban was to kill Formicary + Cayambe Grid" theory is plausible, though.
• Formicary + Manegarm Skunkworks. This was basically the same idea as with Cayambe Grid, but didn't cause as much friction, and wasn't played that commonly. Most likely this is because people preferred to combo Manegarm Skunkworks with Anoetic Void instead (although there was nothing actually stopping you from comboing all three cards together, but people preferred not to bother with that in tournaments, most likely for influence reasons).
• Formicary + Dedication Ceremony on Reconstruction Contract in Ob Superheavy Logistics. This uses up three cards and requires a specific identity, and only works in Eternal, but is effectively an automatic win (barring specific removal cards like Pinhole Threading), and is much simpler than the typical Netrunner win combo. The basic idea is that Dedication Ceremony costs 1, and most ambushes cost 0, so once the Runner is locked into breaching Dedication Ceremony's server, you can trash it to move the counters (as long as there's a legal target anywhere, e.g. you have advanceable ICE), use Ob to install an ambush from R&D in the server the Runner was accessing, and then choose the newly installed ambush as the card to put the Dedication Ceremony counters on. Many players' immediate reaction is "does that work?", and the answer is "yes, as long as you don't destroy the server mid-run by removing all the cards in and protecting it", which generally implies that there must be ICE protecting the server. The Runner might well jack out – but then you could wait until your own turn and choose a different card to search for and put the counters onto, making for a nearly automatic win because you can choose between, e.g., Project Junebug and Clearinghouse based on whether the Runner accesses or not. Ideally, you'd want 6 counters rather than just 3, using double Dedication Ceremony (because that makes both Project Junebug/Cerebral Overwriter and Clearinghouse definitively lethal against normal hand sizes), but that takes an entire turn to set up; adding Formicary to the mix therefore lets you set up the combo using only 3-click turns via allowing you to ICE the server clicklessly if the Runner decides to run it. This sort of combo isn't the only reason Ob was added to the Eternal points list (first at 1 point, then 2), e.g. Ob also combos with Estelle Moon which is one of the most broken cards in Eternal, but it can't have helped.
• Formicary + HB "derez matters" cards (e.g. Stegodon MK IV, Brasília Government Grid). One of the main drawbacks of Formicary is that its trigger typically only works once, because it needs to be derezzed to trigger but rezzes itself when it does. One of the main drawbacks of the HB cards is that you need to find ICE (sometimes even off-server ICE specifically) to derez. As such, the cards cancel out each others' drawbacks, with each giving you more uses of the other, in a self-sustaining cycle. This is what finally ended up getting Formicary banned.

Also, there's one card theoretically combos with Formicary, but where the combo wasn't really the problematic part: Formicary + Nanisivik Grid. The idea is that you can use one Nanisivik trigger to, e.g., trash a program (the Runner's killer could be a good choice, as that makes Formicary more expensive to get through), and then if the Runner runs back through, use a second Nanisivik trigger to end the run. It turns out that Nanisivik Grid was broken enough on its own, however, that the Formicary combo was overkill (you put one Nanisivik Grid on Archives and it makes it almost impossible to disable any of your Nanisivik Grids, including both itself and ones placed elsewhere).

Some non-combos include Letheia Nisei and Mti Mwekundu: Life Improved, which are only usable once per run even if you use Formicary to interrupt the trigger.

I can see why the card got banned. In most of the combos above, at least one piece got banned (or for Eternal-based combos, pointed); the only exception is the Manegarm Skunkworks combo, and that's a card that lots of casual players surely were wishing would be banned (Skunkworks combos were part of what was the best archetype in Standard for quite a while). Perhaps the lesson here is that, when you find a degenerate combo, maybe it's both halves that are banworthy!

Let's say that, for whatever reason, you decided to make a Jinteki rush deck. (Saraswati is a good choice, due to saving a click every time you install an agenda; rush decks can sometimes live or die by their economy, and saving clicks gives you time to play the economic operations.)

In previous formats, the way to make a rush deck's economy work would be to fill your deck full of economic 4/2 agendas: Corporate Sales Team, Cyberdex Sandbox, Offworld Office, that sort of thing. (3/2s don't generally provide meaningful amounts of economy, with the exception of Luminal Transubstantiation which is not legal in Jinteki; and 5/x agendas are too hard to score for a rush deck.) Unfortunately, Corporate Sales Team has rotated, and Cyberdex Sandbox has been banned, leving a bit of a gap in the typical rush deck's agenda suite. As such, rush decks have to resort to scraping the bottom of the barrel for agenda economy somewhat, perhaps even resorting to marginal choices like Timely Public Release because "at least it saves a click installing ICE".

Trying to fill this void for a Jinteki rush deck, I decided to try out Flower Sermon, and was blown away by just how much it helps out the typical rush deck. This happens for two main reasons:

• The agenda gives a direct economic benefit, in that it allows you to clicklessly draw cards. Drawing cards by click is something that a rush deck frequently has to do (because you want to get the agendas into hand before the opponents can set up, and also need to draw into ICE and economy operations). So the agenda is effectively saving on those clicks.

  The relatively free card draw is also pretty helpful for Jinteki rush decks in particular, as it helps to support certain cards that they would likely be running anyway – Hansei Review for their economy, and Anoetic Void to delay the Runner by the last vital couple of clicks (it is far from unheard of for the Runner to find their last critical icebreaker halfway through the turn before you score the 7th point, so having a clickless way to fuel Anoetic Void can make the difference between a win and a loss).

• The agenda also gives a fairly large indirect economic benefit: it helps to protect the top of R&D, because you can use an agenda counter to put a useless card there (or even a Snare!, and you can do that once the Runner is already committed to accessing). This means that once you have scored a Flower Sermon, R&D needs less protection than it usually would, and so it effectively saves you money because you don't have to rez (or even install) as much ICE there as you normally would. This effect probably isn't quite up there with Offworld Office, but it isn't that much worse, and it's definitely better than the currently available alternatives for economic agendas.

  It's worth noting that this protection works even against the new Cataloguer (you place an untrashable card on top of R&D after the Runner rearranges it). It doesn't work against Stargate, but Cataloguer is much more popular at the moment – often replacing Stargate – and that's helping to make Flower Sermon better than it previously was.

This means that Flower Sermon is probably better-positioned for rush decks nowadays than it has been at any time since it was printed. It's no longer facing as much competition from other agendas, with most of the good economic agendas being rotated or banned. It's also facing a more friendly line-up of cards from the Runner side than in previous formats. If you decide to play a Jinteki rush deck in the current metagame, it should definitely form part of your agenda suite – it has been one of the best-performing agendas in my testing (along with the obvious Offworld Office).

The remaining question, of course, is "should I really be playing a Jinteki rush deck anyway?". I don't have a great answer to that one – other styles of Jinteki decks are more popular at the moment, and probably for good reason. But in my testing, it at least hasn't been completely hopeless; even with an untuned list, it seems to outperform most of the other casual Corp decks I've been trying out (although I suspect it won't hold up in a proper tournament), and it's a good way to get a lot of games in quickly. Still, if we ever end up in a metagame favouring rush (which looks like it might actually happen, given the popularity of somewhat clunky Shaper decks at the moment), Jinteki rush seems to be an interesting alternative to Weyland rush, and if it's viable, Flower Sermon will be a major part of the reason why.