So, I've been working on The Professor for a while now. I have had increasing success with this "worst shaper" of ours in my local meta and on Jinteki.net, and one thing always strikes me as odd: people are consistently either surprised or pissed off when I win with the old man. "Why is this?", I thought to myself. Why are we so unprepared for The Professor to win games?

Why? Because he looked so cool when he came out! There we were, leading our gray boring lives, playing our gray boring decks. Then The Professor burst onto the scene, and we all had an amazing time stuffing a deck with every program imaginable as he took us on a journey through colour and fun. Then we played those decks, and they sucked. And so we went back to our gray, boring decks and our gray, boring lives.

In my humble opinion, it is because he looks INTERESTING, but not POWERFUL, and the important word in that statement is "looks". When The Professor came out, Shaper was already established in what it could do. And since Creation and Control, every single shaper has had unique abilities lending themselves to certain types of deckbuilding. The Professor just fell between the grates, forgotten.

What I'm getting at is that none of us took the time to actually tune the decks. Our collective Hivemind has produced some AMAZING decks over the years. The internet has tuned Butchershop and Noise to near-perfection. We have produced PrePaid Kate and and Foodcoats, decks so dominant the NAPD started hunting them. We got a card NERFED for crying out loud.

Going back to the Professor, he is in a unique position as an ID. He has no clear strategy printed on him (like Kit, Noise or Geist) without being genreically powerful enough to build a goodtuff deck with (like Leela, Kate or Whizzard). Instead, he offers us a challenge unique among runners - he gives us ALL THE OPTIONS, and challenges us to use them to their full potential. He is unequivocally the easiest ID in the game to tune. You can add and remove programs with impunity, without worrying about influence. But that's just it: he requires tuning, and lots of it.

He has one of the steepest learning curves in order to even function. Some decks have a "pick-up-and-play" feel, where you get what it's supposed to do and does it well. Others have a reversi-style, aka "a minute to learn, a lifetime to master". But the Professor is different. We need to stick with him. Tune him. Learn the nuances. We need to have our decklist memorized, our priorities straight, and learn everything we can about him. But once we've made it over that initial hurdle, you will find a runner who can do anything, beat anyone, and solve any problem. Behind the "bad" exterior lies a world of possibility we just need to find out how to get to.

So I urge you to give him a chance. Challenge yourself. Build a deck, and resist the urge to dismantle it after one game. Instead, remove the cards that didn't work and add what you need. Rebuild him. Tune him. Become his friend. If you do, you will feel The Professor come alive in your hands as you realize everything he's capable of.