Today's card is a modest but important card in the Imperial faction in IACP, the re-costed Advanced Com Systems at 0 points.
First off, just want to say, not my first choice in terms of artworks had I been on the committee when this card was put into the IACP.
Moving on to the actual card, it's very rare for the IACP to make a card that can go on any figure of a specific trait cost 0 points. In a game where points efficiency is still very important, this can create problems when we try to make new attachments if they have to compete with existing attachments that cost 0 points.
However in this case, lowering ACS to 0 points had a very specific purpose. Advanced Com Systems was originally a 1 point card with exactly the same effect seen here, extending the reach of any Leader's printed abilities that affect friendly figures to reach 3 spaces instead of just 1 or 2. In Season 2, the Committee was trying to fix Kayn Somos, and while they found that he was in an ideal place at 7 points with ACS attached to make his Firing Squad ability usable, having his deployment cost be 6 became problematic in combination with Death Troopers' Field Tactics ability as well as Strength in Numbers (a lesson we'd be relearning again in Season 7 playtesting). At that point I suggested to the committee (again not a committee member back then) that instead of having Kayn at 6, bump him up to 7 and make ACS cost 0 instead, and after debating the possible downsides of having a 0 point generic upgrade in the game, the committee went with my idea.
Now IACP has several leaders that compete for the use of ACS to boost their abilities. As mentioned, Kayn Somos was the first leader to really want this card in IACP. Then came the recosted General Sorin and new Deployment card Director Krennic in Season 4 which had abilities that benefitted from attaching ACS. And then came Agent Kallus in Season 5, who's Hunt Dissent ability becomes much more flexible with ACS equipped to him. Though occasionally you do just see it slapped onto a single Officer to allow its Order ability to reach 3 spaces instead of 2.
One of the downsides that was discussed with this card is if it was appropriate to just be buffing regular Officers in certain lists, which were already a staple in Imperial list-building. The conclusion that was reached was that increasing Order's range on one officer from 2 to 3 wasn't that much of a power increase, nor was it going to really change how often you saw Officers being run in Imperial lists. Officers were valuable for adding cheap activations and bodies to a faction that generally had higher costed figures than Rebels or Scum, and generally Order was an ability that was most valuable on turn 1 when its range didn't really matter that much.
Don't forget to include this card in your list if you've got one of the Leaders listed here or even just a regular Officer, and check out https://classic.tabletopadmiral.com/imperialassault/ which has all the IACP cards available to let you play around with building your own Imperial Leaders list for Imperial Assault IACP Skirmish.
