At the risk of once again finding that my math skills aren't what I thought they were, I'm going to propose that this card isn't quite as useless as it may seem.
The specific lens I'm going to use is a case where it is installed and advanced once, then immediately rezzed and trashed. In that scenario, it is essentially a double operation with a cost of 1, in that it's to install, to advance, to advance.
The specific use case is in rerezzing an Adonis Campaign or Eve Campaign. My understanding is that the credits on the campaigns stay in place when the card is derezzed, but I was unable to find the specific ruling which states that. Though the math I will go through here presumes this is the case, it isn't a complete dealbreaker if I'm wrong on this point.
Adonis Campaign will normally yield 8 for its 1 to install. The calculation for this is:
- 12 payout over four turns
- minus 4 to rez
- to install
That's 8 for its 1 to install.
What Test Ground brings is the ability to reload that 12 by rerezzing the card. So to the above string of actions we add the following:
- to install Test Ground
- to advance
- to advance
- to derez Adonis Campaign
- 4 to rerez Adonis Campaign
- additional 12 payout over four additional turns
This is an additional 7 off of Adonis Campaign for 2 (and a card). This is the same yield as Celebrity Gift.
All told, then, the two-card combo will yield 15 over 8 turns for 3.
Naturally, it will also work with Eve Campaign, a situation in which Test Ground enables a total of 23 over 16 turns for 3 (an additional 11 for 2).
As for downsides:
- Yes, this is a two-card combo, with all the issues that entails.
- No, the copy of Test Ground you include is not as good as either an Adonis or an Eve Campaign.
- It is perhaps true that having an Adonis sit in a server for as long as an Eve normally does means that the better comparison is not Test Ground compared to Celebrity Gift but Test Ground + Adonis Campaign compared to Eve Campaign, and this is less favorable.
- Adonis + Test Ground is 15 for 3
- Eve Campaign is 12 for 1
- This means that Test Ground is actually only yielding 3 for 2, which is obviously not very good.
- Yes, you probably are going to want to protect your 16-turn Eve Campaign with some ice, which reduces its value.
- No, this means that you probably aren't using this as your scoring server.
- While you could theoretically use Test Ground the turn immediately after rezzing your campaign, you probably want to wait until the turn before it finishes paying out so it's less of a tempting target for the Runner.
Finally, there are some other uses for a 1-cost double operation (which is the lens through which I'm viewing this):
- derez a piece of ice that's about to be Knifed, Forked, or Spooned
- derez a piece of ice hosting a Parasite to keep the Runner's memory tied up
- derez Elizabeth Mills so you can remove another bad publicity
- derez Lily Lockwell so you can draw 3 more cards
- after the Runner trashes Crisium Grid on HQ, derez a remote Off the Grid just before the second run on HQ is declared successful ... then rerez it after the run ends
Of course, none of this is to suggest that Test Ground is a great card. But, perhaps, better than useless?
