Guido The Bouncer

Flexibility, that's the keyword for this week. Flexibility that gives you the element of surprise, especially when you surprise an opponent and pull a Runner from your Gear deck and equip him with that Kenshiri Flamethrower in your Stash!

I suspect that when most people came across their first Guido they looked at the amount of text on the card, shook their head and tossed it aside without bothering to read it. I know I did, especially when I glanced at his numbers. Big mistake! Going through cards few weeks back looking for what I could trade away I came across Guido again, and this time read all the text on the card. Wow! A Runner that you can put into your Gear deck! That's going to surprise everyone I thought.

Your opponent is firstly going to think twice about hitting a Location with Guido standing in the doorway, especially if you decide to give him some scary weapons. Guido with a Kenshiri Flamethrower is one serious deterrent, as is Guido with a Constitution Arms Hurricane filled with either Depleted Uranium Rounds or Armor Piercing Bullets. I hope whatever Location you attach him to pays this guy well!

Guido is also instant defense for any Location and can be played at interrupt speed from your hand once your opponent declares an intent to hit that Location. Couple that with a card such as Ace Up the Sleeve and you have an instant friend defending your money earner with whatever arsenal you can muster. Try It's Good to Have Friends, and Guido gets instant company, and your opponent gets instant death. Of course if Guido was defending your Cloning Center - how ironic that you can now use it to bring him back from the dead so he can defend it all over again, now that's recursion.

Sure he has a couple of disadvantages, but at a paltry 4 Eb he's certainly exceptional value for money. If you play him as an instant, he gets burned at the end of the turn, but you can use the Cloning Center as mentioned above, plus he's a loyal fellow, and can't be moved into a dispute that doesn't concern him. So the best way to overcome this is to play him at the interrupt speed and recycle him to whichever Location needs him the most - I call it job sharing, after all there is nothing that specifies you have to put him back where he came from!

There are some nasty tricks you can play as well. Play Guido, add some Cyber to him from your Stash, then ask your opponent whether or not he realised Guido used to be a Bozo? The last thing any team expects when they attempt to hit a seemingly undefended annoying Location is that all their worst nightmares are going to come true and they're all going home in bodybags. Surprised? You better believe it!

Another nasty trick is to use Holoshops. Holoshop can be used to generate 'Guido holograms'. With Guido and his alter-ego Hologram you have +9 SR and +10 Def on the Location. The Hologram goes at the end of the turn as well, but if you're opponent is playing a strong Location destruction element, this strategy effectively stops them dead in their tracks. You might lose a couple of early Locations, but with these Holograms and Guido's helping you out, the rest of your assets are fairly safe.

All this is childs play though as the nicest combo has to be using your Guido's to defend the Combat Arena, then forcing them to enter either the squared circle or the octagon to take on one of your opponents runners. Talk about brutality. With your Holoshop tokens and your Guido's that Combat Arena is going to give you a style victory pretty damn quick if you can play it right. Don't like the idea of Guido getting his face pulped? Find yourself someone else to terrorise your opponents runners. Clones make a good choice here (besides, they can't feel pain, right?)

So, with the right mentality, and the right supporting cast, Guido the Bouncer can be an extremely effective card - either as an instrument of surprise, a victim of the Combat Arena, or as hired muscle to keep the juvies away. Try him, but just make sure you pay the poor guy enough readies choomba.