I don't normally write hate reviews because there's a lot I love about this game, and there are a lot of good, interesting and fascinating cards, so it feels like a shame to focus on the negative, but I feel this is needed, and I hope I can provide nuanced and educational insights into this card.

Strength Shredding

Strength shredding has often been a staple of the Anarch roster, with cards like Wyrm, Parasite, Datasucker and Ice Carver originating in the ANR core set to modern staples like Devil Charm, Leech and this card right here.

The underlying premise is fascinating, it revolves around the idea of Anarchs eroding and chipping away at the Corps defences themselves, cutting them down to size and forcing them to play your game rather than playing theirs.

Each of the sources of strength shredding are interesting and serve their own niches, the aforementioned Leech (and it's progenitor Datasucker) generates Virus counters through central runs, something the Runner already wants to do and is blocked by protecting centrals, something the Corp already wants to do, while simultaneously playing into the theme of "defend your Archives" that Anarchs often have going on. The counters are expended when used too, which means that from the Corps perspective, even if your ICE isn't directly taxing the runner credits, it's never the less taxing them on a finite and valuable resource. It's also always vulnerable to purges (and by extension Mavirus) should the Corp decide it's worth it to do so.

Ice Carver is consistent and universal but it's expensive to install and unique, limiting it's efficacy to only shredding a single strength it's useful at making everything slightly weaker but doesn't provide as much value when dealing with any specific problematic piece of ICE.

Devil Charm is incredibly strong, shredding six strength in one go but so emphatically "single-use" that it removes itself from the game, helping the runner in a pinch, but making it clear to the Corp that Devil Charms are a finite resource in and of themselves.

Arruaceiras Crew's strength shredding effect is relatively tame on its own, reducing an ICE's strength by 2 is useful but limited and taking a tag is a hefty investment that costs a click and 2 credits to clear, while going tag-me is actively anti-synergistic with keeping this card alive since it's a resource. To make the most of it, you probably need to play Seb and Valentina to offset the cost of the tag, something that makes a lot of sense within the overarching design of Rebellion Without Rehearsal.

A key use of strength shredding is supporting fixed strength breakers like Mimic, Yog.0, Cleaver and Buzzsaw as well as just generally increasing the efficiency of normal breakers like Corroder by reducing how much they need to pay in pump costs. In this way, strength shredding exists partially as an indispensable part of the breaker rig and partially as a piece of soft-economy, saving you money in pump costs throughout the game. I have no problem with this style of strength shredding (so long as it is appropriately balanced, see Şifr) as it has healthy strategy and counter play, with fixed strength breakers having meaningful limitations and struggling against large ICE when not supported by strength shredding.

However, ICE breakers are not the only application of strength shredding...

ICE Destruction

ICE destruction has had a long and varied history within the Anarch faction too, also originating in the Core set, and also still being seen today, it's had it's fair share of ups and down. Occasionally being nothing more than a gimmicky add on that you "could" pursue and occasionally being so meta dominant that it warranted bans. Some would argue that ICE destruction is the natural end-game of the Anarch philosophy, eroding the Corporations defences to the point that they are utterly destroyed and at times, I do see the appeal, but ICE is such a fundamental part of the game that any ICE destruction needs to be very carefully monitored for balance.

Broadly speaking, ICE destruction can be divided into 3 camps, the kind that requires you to fully break ICE, such as Knifed, Forked, Spooned, Hippo and on the corps side of the table, Oversight AI. This strategy usually relied on powerful AI like Faust or Eater or ICE warping breakers like Engolo or Laamb to give you a very consistent way to break and thus destroy a wide range of ICE without needing to establish a full breaker suite.

The second type doesn't greatly interact with the ICE itself, instead just establishing a set of conditions which if met can trash ICE, or even give the Corp the choice to trash their own ICE, such as Trypano, Kraken or Climactic Showdown. These are arguably the weakest and have seen little play so I won't go into great detail about them.

The third type, to which Arruaceiras Crew belongs, and thus the one I'll focus on here, is the type that destroys the ICE when it reaches 0 or lower strength. Aside from serving as a counter to difficult to break, low strength ICE like Endless EULA, it generally works on the premise that high-strength ICE should be harder to destroy.

The progenitor of this archetype is Parasite, which, in isolation, presented a mounting threat with the ability to destroy any piece of ICE given sufficient time, or required a continual investment of purges by the Corp if they wished to keep their ICE. The amount of time it would take destroy the ICE, and by extension the frequency of purges required to protect it would be directly proportional to the strength of the ICE.

However, players caught onto the fact that by pairing it with other source of strength shredding like Datasucker, Wyrm or Şifr they could greatly accelerate the destruction process in what would become known as "ice bombing," destroying the ICE in the same turn the Parasite was installed and thus cheating around the time constraint and denying the Corporation any opportunity to purge it. By combining Parasite with paid-ability speed installs like Self-modifying Code or recursion like Clone Chip it was possible to clicklessly install the Parasite during a run as you encountered a newly rezzed piece of ICE. It's for this reason that the strategy of ICE bombing even became popular in Shaper for a time.

In my opinion, Chisel tries to solve these problems, it still uses virus counters to strength shred and still destroys the ICE once it's strength reaches 0 but it only generates viruses counters on encounter, rather than at the beginning of the turn, thus requiring greater interaction and investment from the runner. And, since it checks the ICE strength on encounter it's a nonbo with Leech, thus removing one of the major avenues for ICE bombing.

Both of these cards also theoretically have a number of counters to them, such as purges, virus hate and trojan hate (Magnet and Tithonium) which give the corporation some much needed counterplay for this highly destructive playstyle.

The Problem with Crew

If Chisel is a step in the right direction then Crew is two steps back, rather than try to limit ICE bombing it goes all in on encouraging it. It isn't installed on a specific piece of ICE, it's a resource that can target any piece of ICE during the encounter, functionally rolling the jobs of SMC and Parasite all into one package and sidestepping any and all Trojan hate and virus hate in the format at the same time. Allowing you to threaten any piece of ICE on the table, rezzed or unrezzed and causing many runners to just install a Crew, install a Devil Charm and start running without fear.

Even once the initial Devil Charms are gone, Crew itself isn't removed from the game, thus making it one of perfect targets for Anarchs ocean of recursion, allowing them to play half a dozen or more Crews throughout the course of a game. Since you can use the first wave of Crews and Devil Charms to crack open the Corporations wall of defences, it makes it all but impossible to keep Leeches out of centrals and gives the runner an oppressive chokehold over the game where by they constantly have tools to destroy any serious piece of ICE they are presented with, robbing the Corporation of any ability to build a scoring window once they're setup.

The Solutions

Ban Arruaceiras Crew - This card should never have been printed in my opinion and the simplest and cleanest solution is to ban it

Ban Devil Charm - If you don't want to ban Crew itself, the next best targets are the strength shredding support it often relies on, due to the limited reach of it's own strength shredding ability. Leech is used in a wide range of different Anarch decks (including non-ice destruction) but Devil Charm is used almost exclusively for ICE destruction meaning it would be a relatively low-impact ban on non-ice destruction decks while taking a lot of the power out of Crew.

Print a Tech Card - The existing ICE that cannot be destroyed through strength shredding like Self-Adapting Code Wall and Lotus Field are frankly pathetic, since the runner can just bounce right of them and come back with a breaker, thus buying the Corp painfully little time. A better tech would probably have to be some kind of big scary Sentry that can't be destroyed, thus punishing runners for face checking aggressively with just a Crew and some strength shredding. But I consider this the least ideal option, since not all Corp decks want or can afford to include such a tech card.

Addendum

Edit #1: Belatedly realising this whole review is a long-winded recap of the history of strength shredding, fixed strength breakers and ICE destruction when all I really want to say can be summed up in a TLDR so I've added that.

Edit #2: Rewrote, reworded and added headers for added clarity, readability and accuracy as I missed crucial details on my first write up.

Edit #3: For those thinking this is just an annoying "jank" card I'm just getting worked up over because I lost to it a couple times it is, as I write, currently sweeping through the meta game, with decks relying on the Arruaceiras Crew/Leech/Devil Charm combo winning the 2025 CBI and performing well across a large number of districts with a large number of different particular variants. This is, without question, one of the strongest archetypes in the game at the time of writing.

TLDR: This card is ICE destruction without almost any of the limitations, conditions, weaknesses or counterplay that defined prior iterations of ICE destruction and designing cards with game-warping effects without drawbacks is bad actually.

This is a fairly decent card I've been seeing in a variety of anarch decks, and even outside anarch a bit. Crew is ice trashing when strength hits 0, similar to Chisel. However, crucially, Crew fires during the encounter, while chisel only works at the start. This means that Crew works with Leech, allowing you to lower ice strength to zero with you Leech counters then trash it with this resource. This affords you a good deal of flexibility. Leech is a card that has uses outside of ice trashing, helping to enable the fixed strength or expensive to raise anarch breakers like Buzzsaw, Cleaver, and Mimic. Devil Charm was usually comboed with Chisel, but it wasn't used much outside of the combo. Of course, nothing says you can't run both together, but Crew being one less influence makes it more splashable, and I've seen it in some AI decks to deal with problem ICE.

The tag ability is also useful, but mainly to combo with itself. Crew can very easily trash cheap gear checks from 0-2 strength, letting you run early while maintaining a threat on servers. Late game though, Crew can still serve to remove problem ice, but it starts to need its combo pieces, rather than working on its own.