Food for thought: now that hacking / rigging can be done without cyberware, one can have a character with
- Electronics skill group 4
- Conjuring skill group 4
And lots of drones.

Have a complicated mesh of drone groups subscribing to one another, and a bunch of spirits on remote service ordered to assist their operations... One man army.

Good thing you can no longer buy gangs like in SR2

By the way, vehicles + spirit powers = fast and sneaky. Who wouldn't love that?
Oh yeah. The GM.

A Jack-of-all-trades is never as good as a specialist in a chosen field. It's possible to have a mage/hacker/rigger, but it would be a heavy karma sink.

It's hard enough to make a pure magician in 4th edition, let alone someone who tries to specialize in multiple areas at once.

Actually I can build a mage hacker rigger that never spends a karma on anything but magic.

Start with computer skill, have a contact that can maintain your hardware. Have a powerful comlink and upgrade the drones control computers (1000nuyen per drone to rating 5/5 in hardware, software you only buy once). You have agents to deal with all your matrix tasks, you don’t even bother with VR, just send the agents in and watch there information pass back so you can select the actions you want them to take.

You are as good as a rigger that uses lots of drones (he could have jumped in one and made it better but most would be exactly the same) and as good as a mediocre hacker with good equipment, but your taking fare fewer risks.

Edward

Hermetic Mage Rigger or Hermetic Mage Decker (but not really a Hermetic Mage Rigger & Decker) is indeed now viable as a strong character. They'll still come up a little short on combining Rigging and magic though because of the Control Rig implant. Either you have it and reach that top level of rigging but become at best a second rate mage due to magic loss or you don't have it and lose that Jumped In edge. Unless Streetmagic reintroduce Geasa, any mage with essense lost isn't really running with the big boys. IMO magic loss hurts even more than it did in SR3.

Of course you don't need the Control Rig for captian's chair swarming.

Just give your character the XM30, that will turn them into a one man army. It says so right in the description

Gangs are still availiable, just not quite directly.

In SR3, you just needed to buy a high-powered gang leader or crime boss as a level 3 contact. In SR4, buy yourself a 6/6 crime boss contact, and get the same effect. You're then a "made man" in the Mafia, or similar, and can call on a lot of muscle as needed.

This isn't a freebie, but it will provide you with extra muscle in a pinch. You can also do thei trick with a high-ranking officer in the military, and get actual armed troops under the right circumstances.

It might be possible to rely on drones/spirits for attacking and on a max-level agent with the necessary programms for hacking. Then give your char a good autofire-weapon and some social skills. Although I haven't tried it out yet, it seems possible to me.

True - like everything else in SR, it comes with a drawback