This dude is his own faction. Good for him! (At least he has plenty of influence).

Will make for some very interesting builds: is it Criminal-Adam or Anarch-Adam? Shaper-Adam?

Fun times.

I really like the mini-faction runners idea, and I hope it takes off. Great flavor and a wide open design space. 

I'll need to actually play the new runners to fully understand them of course, but what can we infer from the information available?

Starting with Adam, I like the three laws of robotics reference, and I find his cardset to be intriguing. However, I also find his cardset to be disappointing / aggravating. It just doesn't seem to work

Lets look at the cards...

The directives:

Safety First Your maximum hand size is reduced by 2. When your turn ends, draw 1 card if you do not have cards in your grip equal to or greater than your maximum hand size. 

 

Always Be Running Your first [Click] each turn must be spent to make a run or play a run event. Once per turn, you can spend [Click] [Click] to break a subroutine on a piece of ice currently being encountered. 

 

Neutralize All Threats The first time each turn you access a card with a trash cost, you must trash it by paying its trash cost, if able. Whenever you access cards from HQ, access 1 additional card. 

 

 

So, those are mostly detrimental unto themselves; the downsides seem slightly worse than the upsides. What about his other cards?

 

Dr. Lovegood: When your turn begins, choose one of your installed cards. Treat the text box of that card as blank for the remainder of the turn. 

 

 

Well, that also seems suboptimal. I have to spend 2 to install a card just to help me manage my problematic directives? And it's not an optional effect. It doesn't say "When your turn begins, you MAY choose..."; seems like it could end up screwing me occasionally.

Brain Chip +MU Your maximum hand size is increased by X. X is equal to the number of agenda points you have.

 

 

Ok; now this is more like it. A console that gets more powerful when I score. I can get behind that. The +handsize also helps to offset the first directive.

 

Independent Thinking Trash up to 5 of your installed cards. Draw 1 card for each card trashed (or 2 cards for each card trashed if you trashed at least 1 directive). 

 

 

Ok, so I can get rid of the troublesome directives, but if I'm just going to do that then why am I playing Adam at all? Also, after the 3 directives are gone, am I really going to have a bunch of additional installed cards that I want to trash for this? Kind of a stinker card.

 

Multithreader 2 [Recurring Credit]  Use these credits to pay for using programs. 

 

Some psuedo-economy. It's ok, I guess. Not lighting my world on fire however.

So bottom line, I want to like Adam. I like the Frankenstein and Asimov homages. I like the art on independent thinking. I fundamentally like the concept. But, with the exception of his console (and even that starts off weaksauce with 0 points scored), his faction cards are simply not very good. Bummer.

I don't know... we should see him in practice. The way most games I have seen work are Corp installs ice over HQ and RnD, or HQ and remote with a card in it. Given the icreased access and the immediate breaking possibility first turn HQ double access might score you an early agenda, fueling the console later on. However, it is 50/50 to work and might soak most of your first turn.

Also, it is rather amusing that Safety First makes you such a sweet Scorchable bioroid. Oh, the irony.

Thinking that a first turn legwork could do some, ah, work

what's with the 1 star rating?  i think people are seriously underestimating this guy.

I think the directives are meant to be broken, fluff-wise symbolizing sentience and independence from the 3 Asimov's laws. Maybe that's the way we should we play him, coz honestly the cons pretty much outweigh the pros in the long run. His directives helps the runner to play aggressively in stage 1. But I think we must ditch them during the 2nd and 3rd stage.  

I've been thinking of using Scrubber and Demolition Run, running and trashing cards in HQ to leverage on the directives' abilities. Afterwards we should be able to discard to two every turn to leverage on the Safety First's card drawing ability, to get Independent Thinking (or Aesop) asap. This got me thinking of using cards that are okay to be trashed. Harbinger (borrowing from Apex, tho it won't do much aside from being trash fodder), Cache (for being a virus and getting some money out of it, after it's exhausted we can ditch it to Independent Thinking or sell it to Aesop), etc. Virus cards and Deja Vu might be useful in this, but I still couldn't figure out the numbers and the virus cards to include. What do you guys think?

Analyzing the cards myself, here's how I feel:

Safety First - Honestly' I can't see many cases where you would actually have 2 or fewer cards in your hand to reap the benefit. If you try to artificially obtain this result, you basically gained ~ 1 click at the expense of not playing how you normally would.

Neutralize All Threats - Out of the three, I'd say this would be the best. In the early game the extra access is nice. In the late game it is still something and the whole being forced to trash isn't all that bad if you have good economy. However, in between those stages, whenever that may fall, it could really hurt your econ.

Always Be Running - This is pretty good in early game and pretty bad in late game due to its interaction with Neutralize All Threats. In early game, it will help to get those nice HQ multiaccesses (I mean how often do you see any early game ice that can stop this?). It will definitely help you to steal an agenda. If you're playing against Weyland, it might deny them an Atlas. It also would be good against early game weak remotes (although more likely it will stop people from setting them up in the first place). However, there will be many turns (especially in Neutralize All Threats's awkward moment and late game) that you wouldn't want to run on your first click. To be honest, this could potentially be nice in other factions, but thats another story.

I disagree with the above post about Dr. Lovegood being bad. I think that it is good for the time before you want to Independently Think away your Directives. In any other faction it is crap.

Speaking of Independent Thinking, it's time to analyze that! First of all, if you play this card and are trashing any directives, you should trash Safety First to get rid of the hand limit. Two cards drawn per card trashed = more than five cards, let alone three. Also, if you have Dr. Lovegood out, trash him with the directives, as he will be a detriment once they're gone. This also seems to potentially be good out of faction, namely in Apex (especially the Always Be Running variant), but again, a story for the card's page or Apex's.

Brain Chips seems pretty good, actually. With the Directives, it seems fairly easy to get an average 2-point agenda on the first or second turn, and +2 MU ans Hand Size is amazing for 2, and it only gets better as time progresses. Might potentially be good in a very rushy Criminal, but again another story.

Multithreader seems pretty good. I mean, people have splashed Cyberfeeder before, right? This, unless you have viruses, is better than Cyberfeeder, although it is only a little more versatile in the way you can use the credits. But still, i think it deserves more credits than it's getting.

I've already tried Apex on OCTGN, and i think I want to try Adam too. I think I like him more after this analysis. At first, it seems weaker than it is. But thanks for reading this.

My favorite Runner out of the 3 mini factions. I'm unsure if FFG said whether or not they're going to print new cards for the mini-factions but I'm hoping they do! There's so much design space for Sunny, Apex, & Adam that they'd be crazy not too!

From what I understand is that the minifactions have their own problems. Sunny is the most played because it is fairly straight forward with a cloudbreaker suite while the others have a much more restricted methods of dealing with ICE. It is much like how Shaper becomes the first faction everyone plays because it is straight forward with all the mechanics and interactions in the form of icebreakers break ice.

Apex I heard is slow to play because you only get to install 1 facedown card a turn and unlike credits you cant just all of a sudden come up with a ton of face down cards unlike other runners dropping a ton of credits and making power-runs.

Adam doesn't have an icebreaker suit instead it has methods of bypassing subroutines with click, like all the minifactions you have to import cards as they do not have a large enough card pool to make a deck on their own. Adams one program is reoccurring clicks for programs that will be imported. THe directives are not all that bad but all three of them are a headache that hurts you more than it helps making Adam a slow starter even though it is running each turn. I heard the trick to play adam is to figure which one or two directives to keep and discard the other ones. The problem is that when you trash two directives, the corp will trash the 3rd one making Adam a 0 link Andromeda without the head start. So you will want to fully splash atleast one directive in your deck.

I've played a few games with Adam now and he is quite fun. Is he tier-1? No, and I'm skeptical that any of the mini-faction runners ever will be tier-1. But he can be very efficient. Yes, you have drawbacks on those three directives that begin the game in play - but you also essentially have 3 ID powers as well. You begin the game with some card draw, an omnibreaker and an HQ interface already installed and online. It can be excellent! Don't forget, Dr. Lovegood can always target himself as the card to be blanked if you don't want to use him on any of the directives on a certain turn.