Bad Publicity? Don't mind if I do.
The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
Yesterday we talked about tags, today we’re talking about another token that’s been in the game since day one.
Bad publicity actually has its roots in the “original” Netrunner, that is the game made by Richard Garfield. It used to be an alternative win condition for the runner: if you managed to give the corp seven bad publicity, the corp immediately lost the game.
I don’t know what it says about the state of the world that this idea now feels naïve. That if the corp received enough bad publicity they would just stop, or be stopped.
In Android Netrunner, bad publicity instead acts as a source of credits for the runner. The theme being that those harmed by the corporations actions donate credits to the runner as an act of retaliation.
I love this narrative. Because it reminds us that the world of Netrunner is much bigger than just the corp and the runner, or even those directly adjacent. Sure, the owner of a major business won’t ever publicly associate with runners, but after being on the receiving end of a Hostile Takeover, they may just be upset enough to donate a little to the cause.
Above the Law
The rules of bad publicity get a minor change in Vantage Point. If you want all the details, I encourage you to read the article put out by Jamie, the NSG rules manager. For our purpose, it is enough to understand the basics.
Bad publicity is a kind of token that the corp can have.
Whenever the runner initiates a run, they add one credit to their “bad publicity fund” for each bad publicity the corp has.
The runner can spend credits from this fund for the duration of that run.
If there are any credits left in the fund when the run ends, those credits are lost.
The “bad publicity fund” is a new term, bad publicity credits used to simply be added and subtracted from a runner’s credit pool. Other then some edge case interactions (again, read Jamie’s article if you’re interested) this now makes it easier to track your bad publicity credits, and otherwise works the same.
They work very similar to the credits hosted on Overclock. You get them for the run, if you don’t use ‘em, you lose ‘em. But unlike recurring credits, like on Cezve, you are not limited to using bad publicity once per turn. You get them on every run you make.
The price of greatness
Bad publicity, then, is bad for the corp. Why would you be willing to give the runner more money? Potentially four extra credits per turn, if they make four runs per turn!
Well, in practice it is rare for a runner to make four runs a turn. Whether they are trashing assets or barreling through ICE, a single credit tends to not be enough to accomplish their goals, so they have to pause to catch their breath and solidify their income at some point.
Just as importantly, just money doesn’t win games. Runners need icebreakers for that money to do anything. It doesn’t matter if you have a hundred bad publicity, if the runner doesn’t have a way to break through that Palisade, your agenda is safe.
This can be a strategy of rush decks: score out agendas quickly behind ICE that primarily has End the run subroutines, and hope that you can win before the consequences of your actions catch up with you. It’s risky, it’s deplorable, and it is absolutely Weyland.
And on that note, I think it is time to take a look at a new card.
Liability is a new subtype for corp cards that indicates that the card gives bad publicity. It is replacing the illicit subtype, for reasons both mechanical and narrative.
Vulture Fund is a monster of an economy card. Comparing it to similar cards in the card pool, it sits somewhere between Hedge Fund and Government Subsidy in terms of costs. Hedge fund costing five and netting you four credits, Government Subsidy costing ten to net you five.
Vulture Fund only costs seven and nets seven. That’s a lot of money.
The ability to gain seven credits at the cost of a bad publicity may be familiar to players who’ve made deals with Weyland before. Too Big To Fail offered a similar value proposition, though only if the corporation was poor. The big difference, however, is that it had a play cost of zero.
Too Big To Fail could easily undo the game plan of credit denial strategies, and for that reason I’m glad that Vulture Fund does not work that way. A criminal who has managed to get the corp to spend all of their money rezzing the big ICE can be sure it will take them at least a few clicks to get back up.
So, how good is Vulture Fund? Seven credits can buy a corp a lot of things, but giving the runner a bad publicity is a hefty cost. It all depends on how you use it. And as it just so happens, I have a deck I’ve been hoping to make for a while that I think could use it quite well.
Outrunning your problems
The Zwicky Group has been an ID I’ve had an eye on since Elevation came out. One of the fundamental challenges with rush decks is drawing enough cards. You need your money and your ICE, you need your agendas and whatever scoring tools to score the agendas. Zwicky has always struck me as a rush ID because operation econ tends to be less profitable than asset-based econ, but it pays out much faster. And so by filling our deck with a lot of operation economy, we will be able to do a burst sprint, but we may not be able to keep up in a marathon.
Vulture Fund doubles down on this idea. We are happy to grab seven credits now, and that bad publicity? If the game goes that long, we’ve lost anyway. Meanwhile, we have powerful but expensive fast advance cards imported, like Nanomanagement or even Big Deal.
The Dark Side of the Moon
I know there will be some players sad to see that there is no Weyland ID that cares about bad publicity in Vantage Point. The Outfit was quite powerful in its day and still has plenty of fans.
Bad publicity has always been primarily a mechanic for Weyland. Much to our surprise, then, when it turns out the new NBN ID is not one that cares about tags, but instead about bad publicity.
Editorial Division: Ad Nihilum
NBN Identity: Division
Minimum Deck Size: 45 – Influence: 15
The first time each turn you take bad publicity, you may search R&D for 1 non-agenda black ops, gray ops, or liability card and reveal it. (Shuffle R&D after searching it.) Add that card to HQ.
It never happened.
Illustrated by Emilio RodriquezThis is quite a departure, but it makes some sense when viewed through the lens of NSG’s philosophy on tokens. As with tags, the idea is that if they are a part of the game, and it is something everyone has to bring with them to tournaments and what-not, then it should be something that everyone gets to use.
I suspect Editorial Division will be a terrifying deck to play against. A lot of the most feared cards the corp can use are either grey ops or black ops, and as mentioned above liability is now the subtype used for a whole bunch of cards that can give the corp bad publicity.
The four cards that immediately spring to mind when I read this ability are Public Trail and Oppo Research, as well as End of the Line and Measured Response, which kill redact careless runners that dare to interfere with your plans.
Although that last card deserves some special consideration. Bad publicity gives the runner additional economy, allowing them to make runs cheaper or for free. Given that a runner can survive a Measured Response if they have enough money, it may prove to be inadequate in a deck that is handing out bad publicity.
Consequences
It may feel like the corps can get away with anything. But even the biggest corps have liabilities. Even they can cross the line, go too far, anger the wrong people. Push too far, and their kingdoms will come crashing down around them.
Bad publicity is playing with fire. Are you afraid to get burned?