Fairchild - Android: Netrunner LCG

Now, they have all come together.

There is actually quite a history behind Fairchild, this being the fourth card in a line that has spanned multiple sets. Before Fairchild, there was Fairchild 1.0, Fairchild 2.0, and Fairchild 3.0. How are they all connected? Let's start with something easy first: the art. Each card has art done by Liiga Smilshkalne, so all feature a similar palette and style. Now for the first three cards, each card depicts a separate figure, but here the heads of all the figures have joined together into one entity. Another quick note is that all the cards until now have be non-unique, but this version of Fairchild gets unique status, again showing the growth of the card.

Another thing is that each card serves as an upgrade of the other. The most obvious is the increasing cost and strength of each card. Even the influence cost goes up as the card gets more powerful. Next you have the first ability. With bioroid cards, most of the cards have text that allows the runner to bypass so many subroutines is they spend so many clicks, with 1.0 being one, 2.0 being two, etc. With Fairchild though, things have evolved to the point where that piece of text has dropped off completely, which really strengthens the card.

The subroutines have also evolved over time, though the last one makes some more drastic changes. Fairchild 1.0 had two subroutines that were pay 1 credit or trash a card. Fairchild 2.0 upgraded this to pay 2 credit or trash a card, plus it added another subroutine that did 1 brain damage. Fairchild 3.0 upgraded this again to 3 credit or trash a card, and added the option of ending the run to the last subroutine. But now we get to Fairchild. Now all the subroutines are about ending the run, with each one offering an alternative cost for the runner. So the first two subroutines lets you pay 4 credits, the third one lets you trash a card, and the fourth one lets you suffer brain damage. All these subroutines still call back to what came before, but they have still been completely modified.

Overall, what interests me about this card is less the card itself and more the journey it has been on.

Baba Yaga - Android: Netrunner LCG

Ba ba ya ga ga....

Baba Yaga is a witch of traditional eastern folklore. She's probably most famous for her walking chicken house, so I'm surprised the card went with something else. In folklore, witches seemed to use household objects as magic vehicles. In the Americas it became mostly the broom, but Baba Yaga did in fact use a mortar and pestle, though she still has a broom with her in the quote. As for that quote, yes, it is from a real Russian fairy tale collected by Alexander Afanasyev.

Now as for the card itself, I find it odd the art went with depicting the mortar and pestle as opposed to the witch herself, though we at least get some menacing figures standing around it. I like to interpret this card's ability as the AI can learn and use programs, similar to how a witch uses spells. Making the program a cyberwitch, which I find very cool.

Sapper - Android: Netrunner LCG

noun: a soldier employed in the construction of fortifications, trenches, or tunnels

I've heard the term "sapper" used before, but I couldn't exactly define what it was. I looked it up on Dictionary.com, and came up with a few results. A sapper is someone who digs trenches or other fortifications. Further digging (sorry) turned up that the word "sap" can also mean a deep, narrow trench. The term is mostly used in the military, but I have heard it connected to mining as well.

Well, vocabulary lesson over, on to why I picked this card. I'm not intimately familiar enough with the game to say these things have never been done before, but they are rarer abilities. First you have the ability where if the runner accesses the ICE, they are forced to encounter it. Equally rare is the ICE has a trash cost.

The art is fine, with smooth slabs sinking into a pit in the ground, which alongside the flavor text of the card, makes me think of Dante's structure for hell. Speaking of which, how many different things are there colloquially said to be a special place in hell for?

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.

Gordian Blade - Android Netrunner

Go Digisword!

Time for a bit of historical legend. Alexander the Great was a real ruler and part of Greece's history. One legend from Alexander's career is the Gordian knot. The challenge was whoever could undo the knot would receive great prizes, I forget what it was exactly but the story has an Arthurian feel so you would probably get to rule something. Many men tried but failed, but then Alexander came along. Alexander undid the knot fairly simply: He took out his sword and cut it in half. Nobody contested the claim, and Alexander was declared the winner. The story is often used to describe problems that seem extremely difficult or hard to solve but have a simple solution that almost everyone overlooks.

So in the future, some hacker creates an icebreaker and names it the Gordian Blade. I really like this name, as it not only reflects what the program does perfectly, but it also draws in ancient Earth myth and history. A lot of the Netrunner programs receive mythical names, because they sound cooler that way. People would buy more antivirus software if it had cool names like this. They would also buy it if instead of showing a progress bar it showed a freaking cyber sword cutting through the matrix.

Project Beale - Android Netrunner

Trivia time. Here's the card.

"Look at all the Android devices I can choose!"

Overall, the card is a simple agenda card that rewards you for advancing it past the requirement. Pretty straightforward. But what in heavens name is a "Beale". After an extensive internet search (aka. Wikipedia), I now know that Beale is a common last name in Britain, and that a lot of people have had the last name Beale. Given that this card belongs to NBN, the corporation in charge of the media in the Netrunner universe, I think the card is meant to be a reference to this guy.

"I'm as mad as hell..."

This is Howard Beale, a character played by Peter Finch in the movie Network. Even if you know nothing about the movie, odds are you have heard the above quote sometime in your life.

New Angeles City Hall - Android Netrunner

I chose today's card to address an issue I have with some futuristic sci-fi works. Here's the card:

Home of NCIS: New Angeles.

Some card stuff first. It seems alright, though I'm confused how city hall helps runners avoid getting tagged, and why city hall is helping runners in the first place. Maybe the building or the sheer number of people in it help mask the runner's signal, but it would be nice if the card explained that instead of giving a generic quote from the city mayor.

But onto my main issue. Why do science fiction works, in order to make a futuristic sounding city, simply take an existing city and add the word "new" to it? Are city namers so creatively bankrupt and lazy that they constantly use this formula. New Who gave us New New York. We have New Gotham, from the short lived Birds of Prey live action series and I think from Batman Beyond. Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds gave us New Domino City, and on and on. What is it about tacking the word "new" onto something that makes it more futuristic?

And, using this card as an example, what happened to the original city? What happened to Los Angeles? Was it destroyed? Was it rebuilt as New Angeles? Was New Angeles built over Los Angeles? If it was simply rebuilt, how much of Los Angeles was built over to justify the "new" status? People usually don't tack on a "New" every time their city suffers a major disaster and is rebuilt, else Nero would have dubbed Rome after the fire New Rome. Well, he still might have, but the name obviously didn't stick. Same thing with London and Chicago when they suffered disastrous fires. Why would it work in the future if it didn't work then?

My point goes to all sci-fi writers: Don't tack New onto a city for your futuristic city unless you have a really good reason or explanation for it. Otherwise it comes across as lazy, and I'm certain you can come up with better names for your cities.

Deep Thought - Android Netrunner

There is one reason I'm talking about this card today. If you happen to have read a series a science fiction books by a certain British author, you should understand why.

"The ultimate answer to the question, of life, the universe, and everything, is... 42."

 

 

 

Deep Thought is a super computer from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that was built to calculate the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. Above was his answer. I feel like/hope this was an intentional nod to the series, but other than the name there's little to support this hypothesis.

This program looks like a Buddhist monk, it even has the third eye highlighted. It's also a virus, giving you a back door into the company's R&D, aka. their deck. This seems less like the Deep Thought I think of when I see this card, but it's amusing to pretend. In the meantime, be careful what you download and what sites you visit, lest your personal information is stolen by a psychic computer monk.

Dedicated Response Team - Android Netrunner

Continuing with the new Future Proof cards, we have this:

Sir, is there any reason we're upside down?

Again, I like this if for the art alone. An elite commando squad almost straight out of Halo standing upside down on a building. Why, how, who cares if it looks cool.

We also hit on one of the sillier terms in the game, meat damage. Meat damage. Doing 2 meat damage means the player discards 2 cards from their hand. The confusion is there is also net damage, which does the exact same thing. In the game's universe, what does meat damage actually mean. Does it mean these guys show up and shoot at the hacker. If so, you'd think they'd be a bit more lethal. Maybe it breaks some universal multi-coorporation code, or the government actually has enough power to do something about corporate murder. Maybe these guys just break your thumbs for misbehaving, I don't know.

I would be find with body damage, but meat damage? What if the hacker is artificial, aka. no meat? This is a cyberpunk setting, so it's likely to come up. But yeah, in Android Netrunner, you can hire your own personal SWAT team.

Darwin - Android Netrunner

So, I've gotten tired with Yu-Gi-Oh! for the moment, so let's look at another game, Android Netrunner. The game is set in a typical cyberpunk universe, where hackers square off against corporations. It's also an LCG, a living card game, the term trademarked by Fantasy Flight. How is this different from a TCG or a CCG? Long story short, TCGs and CCGs distribute cards mostly through randomized expansions. You're not guaranteed to get certain cards. An LCG though takes out the randomized part, making it easier for players to get the cards they want. In both formats though, players can  still play with their own customized decks. While I ultimately prefer and am partial to TCGs and CCGs, I still love LCGs. Part of the reason is that they have helped keep alive certain old games, A Game of Thrones and Call of Cthulhu for example.

I partly chose to do Android Netrunner because the fine people at cardgamedb just released scans for the latest expansion, Future Proof. What goodies can we find in here? Today, we start with this.

The star of the next Syfy telemovie.

The image of this card is a freakin' orca with arms and legs (or legs and legs, I can't tell)! One thing that confuses me about Android Netrunner is the program and ICE designs. Do they actually materialize in cyberspace, like Digimon, or are these illustrations simply meant to convey an idea of what the program does, since real programs are honestly boring to look at. I feel like it's the latter, but that doesn't stop me from imagining the programs battling each other in these forms.

One minor slip up here is the name, Darwin. The whale has legs, similar to that Darwin fish logo. But orcas are not fish! They're mammals, just like all other whales. It's possible this is meant to be the reverse of the Darwin fish, land based mammals evolving into aquatic ones as opposed to aquatic animals evolving into land based ones, but it's still a bit vague. Again, this is a nitpick, the illustration is fine if a bit unclear, but then again it's meant to evoke a concept and less of a physical thing.