Why wouldn't you just play pad campaign? I get that it is cheaper to rez, and harder to trash (barely on both counts), What am I missing?

Because its effect is not 'forever', it is psychologically less threatening to a runner. Combine that with cheaper to rez and more expensive to trash and you have an income card that is too low profile a target for most runners to ever trash. Throw it down with no ice protecting it, and odds are great that it will never get run.

Unless the runner have a Bank Job

Also, holding clicks and credits equal like many do, this will cost you less if lasts less than three turns, and the runner will have to pay more to trash it than PAD Campaign. It's not as efficient over a long period of time, but it definitely stands to last longer, and beats PAD Campaign for the first six turns.

Why is it that every time I see someone use the word "psychological", they actually mean "If my opponent plays poorly"?

It also tells the runner what it is and takes your payment before their turn. If the runner runs it the turn you rez it and power it, you've lost a click and they 5 credits, with Pad Campaign you get a payment from it immediately after rezzing it, so you've lost a credit to their 4 credits, or if they run it as you intend to rez it, nothing to their 4 credits. This strikes me as a very minimal improvement at best.

NDBurns, on 14 February 2013 - 11:56 PM, said:

There is not one single and unique way to play this game.

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Sure, but if one of my click is worth 5 credits from the runner's bank, i'd say it's a good tradeoff in my favor !!

reyda, on 15 February 2013 - 12:13 AM, said:

Obviously not, but saying that something might cause your opponent to make a poor decision (trashing or not) when they have the relevant information is not psychological, and it's certainly not something you should rely on.

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The comparison isn't between Marked Accounts and nothing, it's between Marked Accounts and Pad Campaign, if you'd rather spend a click to make the runner spend 5 than a credit to make the runner spend 4 that's fine, but you'll be left with a worse card in situations where the runner doesn't trash it quickly.

You can run both pads and this (with x3 limit and such simple econ card it makes sense), and you can bluff with this waiting for runner to check before rezing it.

If runner doesnt check all such cards you can start playing 3 advance agendas naked
If he does check he is wasting many clicks on useless runs.
Economy wise this card is not great, but those 5 credits of runner trashing it can make a difference, and getting one click on this instead of 1 credit will probably net those 2 eventually.
At first i hated pads as corp, but then i played as runner and realised i have to trash them or corp will get too much economy in the long run.

Bank job is bad, but not that bad - 7 credit swing in 2 actions is big, but not making those less protected servers is also big loss. And bank jobs can be really useless if corp plays defensively so runners might get rid of them in their decks. (rock-paper-scissors FTW)

Still its not the answer to economic problems, efficency of this card is worse than pad - pad pays 1 cash when you have 2 at the begining of your turn. This guy costs 1 click during your turn - one click is worth a bit more than 1 cash. And after 3 turns if its not trashed you need to waste a click again... One more thash might make it okish, but i think this should be more like 7 (especially as imp can ignore it anyway)

Or maybe the economy will stay like this but ice will get better synergies etc... we'll see

Logistics wise, I find the card useful if you're running a longer game, or have multiples out. Mainly thinking of it compared to Mining Corp. It costs 5x the amount to trash, costs 1 less, and if you use the same amount of clicks, you gain more money.

You also have the ability to tell it how much or how little you want to devote your turn to it.
Melage - you lose a whole turn to gain 7c.
Marked - you only lose 1 click and you get 3c (yes I'm aware it's not an immediate pay off), however if you have say three out, burn three clicks you get 9c over the next 3 turns, and if the runner wants to kill those, he's out 15c. Which is worth 3 clicks in my opinion.

For evil's sake, if you want to be a real jerk about it, you can get even more mileage with Encryption Protocol, costing the runner 6c per card instead.

Also, if you're running these and Pads, you can effectively cost the runner some serious clicks and money which he's not using to run other servers (throw Tollbooth or Popup in front of it and he's going to really have to consider how much it's worth)

t's definitely got some drawbacks on having to keep feeding it, but if you've got three out, you can feed none, some or all of them and still keep some actions going which I feel is a better payoff than Melange, but slightly loses out to Pad as an either/or, I'd personally take it as a compliment to, as opposed to an instead of.

In testing, I've come to appreciate this card a lot. I run a heavy-econ deck, and eventually my opponents get frustrated and stop trashing my econ cards (because it's costing them too much to keep up on them). At one point, I had 3 PADs and 2 of these, all unprotected by ICE. It wasn't hard at all to throw a spare click into these every once in a while (I wasn't doing much with that last click of the turn anyway). I've also pulled that "unprotected 3-cost agenda" trick more than once... my opponents have to either run on every unprotected card I drop (which becomes a pain when I'm running so many of them) or accept that I'm sometimes going to sneak in a 3-cost agenda without needing to protect it. It's delightful either way.

As others have mentioned, this is a better card in practice than it may seem at first. I believe that it is always worth trashing unprotected PAD campaigns. The lack of rez cost and higher trash cost makes it a harder decision to trash Marked Accounts.

If I install this unprotected, I've only spent 1 click. The runner would have to spend 1 click and 5 bits to trash it. It can be a great decoy to install and leave un-rezzed until the runner checks it.

I agree that PAD campaign is a better economic building card, but I can't play with 6 copies of PAD campaign.