MKUltra - Android: Netrunner LCG

I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of this card.

Recently, Netrunner's Martial Law expansion came out, so this week I'm going to look at a few cards from it.

First, the name. MKUltra was a real project run by the CIA to discover the secrets of the human mind and how it behaved under adverse conditions. In short, they wanted the secret to mind control. What's really controversial about MKUltra was less the subject matter and more the methodology. Most of the organizations and institutes involved in MKUltra had no idea what they were really a part of, and a fair number of subjects had no idea they were being experimented on. The entire thing was kept securely in the dark, and the whole incident would become the poster child of government organizations performing sinister things behind the public's back.

All that history seems to play very little in the card mechanics, but it does set the flavor of the card and conjures feelings of civil unrest against the government. Mechanics wise, this card does a few new things. You have the recursion ability, which lets you play the program back from the heap when you encounter an ICE weak against it. And the second ability starts as a standard strength boosting ability, but with the additional effect of letting you immediately break subroutines. This entire thing is also carefully worded so that it still works if you can't break a subroutine, or can't break the maximum two.

The art is nice and psychedelic, which is standard for cards depicting the virtual world. I especially think the two different eyes fit the flavor. It calls to mind the idea of government monitoring, but also the idea that the public is looking back, trying to gaze under the surface and see what is really going on. I also like how you have one eye gazing away from the player, while the other is looking straight at them. Also, we have another quote from the Flashpoint.