From FFG:
Creation and Control is the first deluxe expansion for Android: Netrunner The Card Game, containing 165 cards (three copies each of fifty-five individual cards) that depict the conflicts between Haas-Bioroid and three new Shapers.
Who will write the future? In the dystopian future of Android: Netrunner, the majority of human interests center around the vast hordes of data compiled and stored throughout the omnipresent network. More data flows through the network every second than was ever recorded during the first five thousand years of written language, and the future is shaped by those individuals who know how to secure data upon this labyrinth or know how to set it free. Creation and Control follows the struggles between three new divisions of the artificial intelligence empire of Haas-Bioroid and three individualistic runners who, for motives that few will ever understand, seek to unlock corporate data from the network and set it free.
Efficiency, Security, and Infinite Frontiers
In Creation and Control, Haas-Bioroid gains sixty-six new cards (three copies each of twenty-two individual cards), including three new identities. Each of these identities represents one of the megacorporation’s divisions and lends itself to its own style of play. Yet even as players gain the opportunity to assume command of new Haas-Bioroid divisions, they’ll find that the corporation’s core personality remains intact. In fact, in Creation and Control, Haas-Bioroid’s core personality is revealed more prominently than ever before.
The megacorporations of Android: Netrunner control vast financial empires and awesome portfolios of interests. They employ armies of people, androids, and programs to advance their business interests, creating products, marketing services, and maintaining public relations. These corporations and their interests are far larger than any one individual, even if they all originally derived from personal interests. Haas-Bioroid is no exception, though in Creation and Control as players find a whole array of agendas, ice, assets, and operations, they also discover one of the company’s driving personalities, Director Haas (Creation and Control, 10). Her dedication to efficiency inspires the entire company, and it can also provide the backbone for a broad array of deck designs.
Haas-Bioroid is known not only for its commitment to efficiency, but also for the cunning artificial intelligence of its bioroid ice. Accordingly, Creation and Control upgrades its security with bigger, better, and more expensive versions of its Core Set bioroids. These are then paired with powerful upgrades, traps, and agendas that research even more security measures. When scored, several of the expansion’s new agendas reward Haas-Bioroid players with agenda counters that have different uses, depending upon the agenda, but all of which can create nightmares for unwary runners. No matter which new agenda Haas-Bioroid pursues, even if it’s Director Haas’ Pet Project (Creation and Control, 4), you can expect it will reflect the corporation’s renewed commitment to data protection.
A Program for Every Problem
In an age where nearly all aspects of life are integrated with data on the network, those with the talent and vision to parse individual files and strings of code find that the world looks an awful lot like a series of puzzle pieces that are just begging to be put together in some new and interesting fashion.
All runners rely on hardware and programs to make sense of the virtual world that surrounds them when they’re jacked in, but when it comes to the design of new programs, few can match the sheer creative genius of a Shaper. Creation and Control explores the myriad ways in which Shapers employ programs. From their reliable icebreakers to Self-Modifying Codes (Creation and Control, 46), Shapers write and use programs for nearly every occasion. Whether it’s over-writing itself, providing virtual credits to fuel the destruction of corporate assets, breaking ice, or slowing a corporation’s ability to access the network, a Shaper’s program is a piece of art that is both elegant and functional.
Even with the support of all their programs, however, clever Shapers know they need other tools to keep the corporations off their balance, and Creation and Control provides them some useful hardware, a few valuable resources, and several new events that allow them to flex their creative muscles. After all, when a Shaper isn’t tinkering with some new line of code or upgrading his console, he’s often devising some clever new tactic to try on his next run. As an example, Escher (Creation and Control, 31) is just the sort of innovative trick that only a Shaper could invent. When Criminals run on a server, the only thing that might convince them not to access its data is a lucrative yield of credits elsewhere. Anarchs would rather destroy ice than play with them. But the minds of Shapers work differently, and while Escher may not pay off immediately, it can allow a Shaper to rearrange the puzzle pieces of ice to create much easier runs in the future.
Tricks and Tools for All
While Haas-Bioroid won’t share its agendas with other corporations and events like Escher are difficult for other runners to build into their decks, Creation and Control offers plenty of tricks and tools that fit nicely into decks for each of the game’s other factions.
The deluxe expansion introduces twenty-seven neutral cards that, like Dirty Laundry (Creation and Control, 52), can tighten the focus of any faction’s strategies. And fans of the game’s other factions may wish to look at the expansion’s new Haas-Bioroid and Shaper cards and cherry pick their favorites to fuel new deck designs. Haas-Bioroid’s bioroids and technological assets can help secure nearly any corporation’s servers, and most runners would be foolish not to explore the potential of the myriad programs their Shaper peers are constantly inventing.
Who will write the future? The victorious. If you’re seeking to win the high-stakes cyberstruggles of Android: Netrunner, you’d do well to explore the new paths to success made possible by the fantastic new tricks and tools in Creation and Control!
