Anthill Excavation Contract

Weyland Asset: Industrial

Rez cost: 3 – Trash cost: 1 – Influence cost: 2

When you rez this asset, load 8 credits onto it. When it is empty, trash it.

When your turn begins, take 4 credits from this asset and draw 1 card.

“If you lived here, you’d be at work by now!”

— Weyland recruiter

4 stars

The online TCG Hearthstone has a statistic called drawn winrate. Drawn winrate, to keep things simple, is a measure of what the expected winrate of a deck is in games where you have drawn this card. Another way of viewing this can be, "How much more likely would I be to win if I drew this card right now?"[^1] All of this brings me to Rashida Jaheem, so let's talk about her.

One of the great failings of Rashida Jaheem is, I would venture to say, she has a high drawn winrate. An early Rashida can really give you the gas you could ever need, and then some, and if you never draw her, you can find yourself struggling to get the cards and money you need to get your game plan going. Now imagine the drawn winrate for two Rashidas, or three Rashidas. I think you can see my point. Rashida Jaheem is just one card with a lot of concentrated swing potential, and whether or not you can draw that one card early enough can often be the difference between winning or losing. I think it can be easy to say that Null Signal does not want to repeat the mistakes of Fantasy Flight and print a card that puts that much winning into a single package.

Anthill Excavation Contract is, in my opinion, an attempt to print a worse Rashida. When played like Rashida, it only gives you 1 credit and 1 draw, which isn't great, but the turn afterwards, it will give you 4 more credits and a second draw, which is a bit better. Is it as immediately good as Rashida? No. But I think that's the point. Rashida was too good, and this is worse. This should result in slower games, with less swing value from drawing an early Anthill Excavation Contract, while still giving the corp some gas.

Will Anthill see play outside of Weyland? I doubt it. I think there'll be some decks that reach for it, but it's very likely that it'll stay a Weyland-only card, albeit a very commonly played one.

[^1]: I was able to find a breakdown of these stats on hsguru, so you can find more information there. Needless to say, it's a pretty interesting set of numbers. For those who are more magic-inclined, I have also located a pretty neat article by magic the gathering data science about similar sorts of statistic in mtga.

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