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Ankusa



Ankusa

Ankusa


Type: Program: Icebreaker - Fracter
Cost: 6 Memory Units: 1
Faction: Runner Shaper
Faction Cost: 3
If you use Ankusa to break all subroutines on a barrier during a single encounter, add that barrier to HQ.
2 [Credit] : Break
barrier subroutine.
1 [Credit] : +1 strength.

Strength: 0
Set: Fear the Masses Number: 101 Quantity:
Illustrator: Andreas Zafiratos
Recent Decks Using This Card:
No decks currently use this card.
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4 Comments

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AdorablePython
Jun 13 2016 04:22 PM

Quite expensive. But works well against Bailiff, advanceable barriers and Quicksand.

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MightyToenail
Jun 13 2016 06:20 PM
This could be fun when run on Dinosaurus. I will keep finding uses for that card!

Whenever I see a card with an effect as powerful as this, my mind goes to all the wonderful 'what if' scenarios with stuff like Paintbrush, Personal Touch, Dinosaurus etc. but in reality I expect this will be utterly unplayable. Yes, you set the corp's tempo back by bouncing their stuff back to hand, but however much they paid to get it on the board, you've likely paid three or four times that amount to remove it. No one will use this over Parasite.

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KillerShrike
Jun 15 2016 05:03 PM

Action advantage manipulation cards (like bounce effects) need to be cheap to be effective. If you consider the action equivalent cost of what it took to get a card into play vs the action equivalent cost of what it took to bounce it, the later needs to be lower to even be feasible. I.e it's only a tempo gain for the player if they gain an action advantage over the opponent in the exchange, otherwise it is a tempo loss.

 

Then you further compound that with the idea of impact, even if you succeed in gaining some action advantage with a bounce did it impact your odds of winning the game. I.e., sure you did it, but did it really matter?

 

This card is not cheap and represents a large sunk cost of action advantage. It can in ideal situations bounce multiple things and thus eventually overcome this, but it isn't a likely scenario in most games. Advanceable barriers are the exception to this as they can represent a large sunk cost of action advantage to the corp and this card wrecks them.

 

Impact would depend on board state and is thus difficult to predict. However destructive effects that remove ice entirely vs bounce them do exist which is generally more impactful and it is pretty obviously true that a greater impact would generally be had from ice removal effects vs ice bounce effects, and the pricing of most of those effects is better. Therefore impact for this card would seem to be generally unfavorable, despite certain niche scenarios where it may be a wash or slightly better.

 

There are some secondary considerations; bounce effects can flood HQ, but only if the corps is at or near max hand size, and worst case scenario for the corps they can just discard the ice that was bounced if necessary so it is easily mitigated.

 

On the other hand, the corps might also reinstall the ice that was bounced in a different position that may prove to be more favorable to them overall. 

 

So these two mild considerations basically wash each other out, in my opinion, for no net pro or con overall.

 

Basically, the edge cases where this card can be impactful and efficient are vs advanced barriers, high rez cost barriers with low-to-mid strength and few-to-one subroutines, and barriers that are installed deep enough on their server such that the corp had to pay a non-trivial install cost when they first installed it. That's a pretty barren sweet spot, and thus this card just does not seem playable. Maybe if Weyland advanceable finally gets to the point of dominance this card gets better, but otherwise...

    • bozfoogle and Valdemart like this

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