“The boss likes to swoop in at just the last second. You should consider yourself lucky.”
4 stars
I don't think there's much to say actually. I think this card wants be run as a 1 or 2-of in a decent number of non-bad publicity focused decks, and that means it's a pretty good card. Lots of money y'all. If you want more opinions on bad publicity, please read Veronica's piece on this card and Editorial Division.
When you score this agenda, you may search HQ, R&D, or Archives for 1 agenda and reveal it. (Shuffle R&D after searching it.) Add that agenda to HQ or the bottom of R&D.
While this agenda is in the Runner’s score area, it is worth 1 less agenda point.
3 stars
Before I talk about Let Them Dream, I need to talk about 5/3s. The job of the 5/3 agenda is to win you the game in 3 agendas, and decks that run 5/3s usually want to score out with any combination of two 2-pointers and one 3-pointer. But the 5/3 has one major vice: they kinda suck. They're so much harder to score out than 4/2s (or 3/2s!), and their payoff usually isn't even worth the work! This is especially true because corps vastly prefer to score out 5/3s as the game-winning agenda, so any "on score" text is irrelevant. If the corp got to choose, they would dedicate the entire power budget of a 5/3 towards hurting the Runner, and none of it on helping the corp. This is incredibly obvious when you see what 5/3s corps run, and why they run them. For example, Send a Message and Next Big Thing give the corp tempo for having an agenda scored or stolen, while SDS Drone Deployment and Méliès City Luxury Line hurt the runner's tempo in the worst case and can deny a steal in the best case, but the best thing a 5/3 could do is to guarantee the runner needs to steal more agendas than you need to score. This is what Global Food Initiative did. It did so well at this job that it was used in 99% of competitive decks when it was put on the restricted list 2 years after its release.
Let Them Dream may have the same incredibly powerful effect as Global Food Initiative but, as a 4/2 that costs one neutral influence, it’s having to compete for deck slots with 3/2s that are easier to score and strong 4/2s that have a bigger impact on the board. Does this mean it’s bad actually? Hell no! Being worth only 1 point on steal is still too powerful. I can see it being used in maybe some slower glacier decks, and definitely in some decks that only run 1 and 2 point agendas (Thule), but I don’t see Let Them Dream being anywhere near as dominant as its predecessor.
As an additional cost to steal this agenda, the runner must spend click.
When you score this agenda, gain click.
“Welcome aboard, Moonsilver Class members. Our express stops today are at New Lovell, Heinlein, and Imamura Station.”
5 stars
Scoring PD is still back baybee! Ikawah Project has been a staple card in scoring PD for about as long as I can find decks of it. (Here's examples from 2021, 2023, and 2024. I have no idea what was going on in 2022.) The only card that's as much of a staple in these decks as Ikawah Project is Global Food Initiative (which might be relevant to my next card review). This might be bringing back enough old tools for scoring PD to make it a top deck in the Vantage Point meta. I know that I'm certainly gonna be playing it.
1 credit: The barrier you are encountering gets -3 strength for the remainder of this encounter. Spend credits only from stealth cards to use this ability.
There have been many golden ages of piracy, each occurring on stranger and stormier waters.
4 stars
While this can be an interesting breaker that requires support to function, I’m moreso eyeing it as a way to enable ice destruction. Barriers are the most high value targets for Arruaceiras Crew, and Corsair can destroy a Pharos using 3 stealth credits and the tag + 2 credits ability on Crew. Logjam can be even cheaper. All of this depends on the set printing enough stealth support to make that package worth it, since I don’t think justTrickster Taka will be good enough to make you run this breaker. I’m not worrying about this. Stealth as a keyword is a tightly coupled bundle of setups and payoffs. Like similar synergy packages, you choose a suboptimal way of building your deck and building your rig for the payoff of getting to use good stealth cards. Obviously, Corsair is total garbage if Vantage Point stealth decks will only get to use the Ashes stealth cards, and I think the review would be uninteresting if I said, “I don’t see any stealth support from the first card spoiled for the set. 0 stars.”
On the other hand… Imagine the future where Corsair gets no support and Shaper tries to treat it like a classic Shaper HyperMantle-esque 1 breaker suite with importing Taka and using Chromatophores and Pelangi to try to make everything a Barrier. It’d be so funny.
Welcome back to Netrunner scoops season! This one is gonna start low and slow, since Vantage Point isn't going to be out until Q1 2026. As per usual, I will be trying to review as many cards as I can until the set finally comes out. Here's hoping I can review them all.
Null Signal Games@netrunner.nullsignal.gamesLink to post
Announcing Vantage Point, the next expansion compatible with Netrunner from Null Signal Games.
However, there is a catch this year. This will be my first set of card reviews since I've started volunteering at Null Signal Games. While it is very exciting for me to help work at the organization that makes my favorite card game, this still carries some risks. Not to get too inside baseball, but I will make sure to try to alleviate some concerns about compromising the quality of my card reviews.
To clarify how much I would know, I am in the web dev team and not in the development team (confusing, I know). This means I don't make the cards, and I don't playtest the cards. I have seen all the cards (sans art) one time a number of months ago, but I've had no experience with how they will actually play or anything of the sort. Also, my memory is really bad. In other words, I know very little, verging on nothing, and my reviews will still fare about as well as the average person.
My reviews are still my pure first impressions, which will be proven wrong as soon as the set comes out and I will continue to regret my bad reviews as much as I regret having rated Trick Shot at 2 stars.
Hope y'all are as excited for the new set as I am. God I'm so excited to get out of Sable meta.
