Monorail

Are you sure Jinteki is the right faction to run this from? I used to run this combination of cards in HB because most of the pieces are already there and you only need to import Whirlpool. HB also has the econ to install all those ICE, and even in a pinch just hard rez the Janus.

Your Howlers simply aren't doing a whole lot of work in this deck with just one bioroid around.

This combo actually got way more threatening with The Twins. It's a really gimmicky combo, but a very nasty surprise for runners who don't use any AI breakers. Even if they run on the very first click, they still end up taking 5 brain damage from the Whirlpool of double Janus.

Might be a Weyland thing since the twins are around, but I'm almost absolutely positive you lose the element of surprise if you run it out of HB (nobody expects the Spanish inquisition!). If you play it in HB everyone will always run first click thinking they need to be able to click through things. Since Howler can tutor out of Archives and R&D I don't imagine you'd need more than one. I don't expect Janus to pull of the combo more than once, and I don't expect it to actually flatline the runner right then, but it could put the runner in range of a flatline from a Snare or a Chum in front of a Chum. or something.

I also wanted to run it in a deck with as few cards as possible. It's a dumb, janky combo, and will need all the consistency it can get to work.

Howler takes the card from HQ or Archives, not R&D. So you need to find one first.

Personally, I think the element of surprise is there even in HB because... who runs this combo, really? Another thing is that even if they 100% know the combo's gonna be there, the server can still be unrunnable if they have no way to break either Whirlpool, Howler or Janus (twice). You can also not rez the Whirlpool and just use the Howler as a cheap one-time ETR.

I feel dumb..

Whirlpool isn't a bad choice for importing into an HB deck at all. Whirlpool -> Janus 1.0 -> Cerebral Overwriter.

The problem with that is you pretty much have a dedicated "trap server" that any moderately experienced runner will be able to suss out fairly quickly.

I gave up attempting to have janky kill servers when Snitch started hitting the table. It can still be done, you just have to throw something in front of your Whirlpool and even then a Snitching runner may just run to get past it, expose it and get out.