Wow. Um, where do I begin?

There are definitely combo decks that can be built around this. I have no question there. I'll talk about those in a minute. First, I want to talk about the card in a vacuum.

By itself, this card is just bad. When you have 5 cards in your hand, this card will boost your base memory limit from 4 to 5. That's it. I'm fairly certain any memory bonuses stack on top of that (so it takes Chaos Theory from 5 to 6, for example) but that's it. Put into a normal deck, this is +1MU for 2 credits, which is worse than Akamatsu Mem Chip. It also eats up your console slot.

Then there's the giant downside. If you have 5 memory worth of programs installed, and your hand size goes down for any reason, you have to trash programs. Play a card without drawing one first? Lose a program. Take damage? Lose at least one program (maybe more, depending on how much damage). Suffice to say, in a normal deck, playing this card is usually worse than not playing it. Not just worse than playing another card, but worse than not playing it.

So, obviously you're not just going to toss this into any old deck. With all that potential for downside, what's the point of this card? Well, it does have a few powerful synergies. With 3 x Origami, your maximum hand size becomes 14. Fill that hand up (possibly by using Duggar's), and you have 14 memory. Granted, 3 of those memory slots are taken up by Origami, but that's still 11 free memory. There are other ways to increase your hand size and/or memory, too, but that's the most obvious.

Once you do that, what do you do with all that memory? Well, the only thing that really does a lot with it right now is Overmind. But it sure does do a lot. It doesn't seem all that hard to get 10 Overmind counters, and if you work at it, you can get a lot more (by using Duggars when you're already at maximum hand size and either having an extra click from a card like Rachel Beckman or installing Overmind using something like Clone Chip right before you discard down to your maximum hand size.

The advantage of using Ekomind in this manner is that you don't need to keep your hand big after you use it. Once you have your massive Overmind in play, you can let your hand size go back to a normal size, maybe using Levy AR Lab Access (since you've probably discarded most of your deck by that point, and might want to use some of those cards for something). While having a giant hand size might have some advantages (such as ignoring damage) it also has at least one pretty big disadvantage. His name is Komainu and he sees a lot of play.

At the end of the day, is an Overmind that big worth all that effort? Probably not. You still need to boost strength up from 0 every time you want to break something. It's not like you're breaking things for free. Against an HB Iceberg deck, you may only be able to get 2-3 good runs out of it, and those runs will be about as expensive as they would be with normal Icebreakers.

It's possible that some even stronger synergy will come along later, but for now, I don't think you're going to be seeing this card on any tournament-winning decklists.

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I realize that I should be comparing this card to other consoles. But since my current runner deck wasn't actually running a console at the time this card came out, I found myself comparing it to Akamatsu Mem Chip instead. If you aren't running another console, and all you really need is a single point of memory boost, no other card does it better. Yes, the draw ability is fantastic against corporations that play very "sideways" like NEH, and just okay against other corporations. But if you're using it as a replacement for a single Akamatsu, even getting one draw out of this card makes it better.

At the end of the day, I guess what I'm saying is that it's pretty hard to beat a card that gives you 1 memory and another bonus for only 1 credit. This will be my console for a little while.

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