Not gonna lie; this deck is my baby, and I love it. It had a rough start in life, accomplishing approximately nothing at game nights at home and in the store championship I took an early incarnation of it to, but now it's all grown up and got to top 8 in the Scottish Regional. Woop!

Setting Up

This deck is quite reactive, so you probably don't want to stick to this to the letter. However, I would recommend sticking to these initial two points unless you have an excellent reason not to:

• Get an Eater out as soon as humanly possible; Eater is your rig. You need it.
• At the same time, you also want Comet and at least one Prepaid VoicePAD out (ideally two or more) ASAP.

Fortunately, these two problems have one, elegant solution. Drugs.

So many drugs.

Inject is a key card in this deck, and with the current composition, it's usually 1 to draw four cards, occasionally 0 for three cards and one program in archives, so you can Retrieval Run it out. Don't be afraid to massacre your Stack on the first deck through; Injecting 3 times on your first turn isn't just acceptable, it's downright advisable. And if you still haven't hit a Comet, an Eater and two Pre-paids, then Same Old Thing the Inject. Seriously. There is a reason this deck runs two Levy AR Lab Accesses.

Once you have Eater out (Retrieval Run it, or Déjà Vu it back to your grip if they ICE archives), you should probably start running just to run down the corp's econ. Don't wait for the Comet and Pre-paids before beginning to actually do things; you'll just let the corp get rich. The first step on this path is to run early, and often. Especially if the deck has a strong economy, you want to drain their money by forcing them to rez ICE on their centrals to prevent you getting easy accesses, or, if they're an asset economy deck, smash all their assets to pieces. Know your enemy; you need enough creds to Eater yourself to safety, and you need to know which key assets to trash. Don't faceplant into a Janus 1.0 without 10. Trust me, it's a bad idea. I know.

Luckily, once you have Comet and the Pre-paids out, your burst economy borders on the absurd. Use Comet to double Sure Gamble for one click. Use it to Lucky Find twice for 3 clicks. Get your third Pre-paid out, then take a turn to Day Job and Sure Gamble for 15. If you need to, recur your econ. Sure, technically less efficient, but with 2 Pre-paids out, Déjà Vu then Comet into Day Job is just a regular Day Job. Same old thing a Lucky Find for 3 clicks, then Comet out a Lucky Find in your hand; making 18 in a turn (or slightly more with Pre-paids).

When the Levy Breaks

Now is a good time to talk about Levy AR Lab Access. You are going to Levy at least once. You will likely Levy twice. By the end of the first run through your deck you should have a Comet, a Pre-paid and Eater out. You should probably also have Keyhole, though if they've heavily ICEd R&R you'll want to Parasite/cutlery (Knifed, Forked, Spooned) through it first.

Judging when to Levy is a skill; you should always be wary of hate, mostly Chronos Project and Blacklist. I usually do my first Levy once I'm out of economy and have already Retrieval'd Keyhole. You will need to keep track of how many economy events you have left. No, Dirty Laundry doesn't count. For the second Levy, you should have Keyhole out already, unless you're planning to win without it, so just track economy.

Sometimes, it's worth holding off on the Levy at the end of a deck-through, especially if you're rich and have plenty of recursion left. Some of your most brutal turns can happen when your stack is empty and your entire deck is at your disposal. This is a good time to recur cutlery, for instance. However, this can be a risky play. Remember Chronos Project, and remember Blacklist; keep an eye on the corp's face-down cards. Remember that damage exists. Be careful.

The Beatdown

Once you're all rigged up and Cometing into endless cash, you'll want to start actually winning. This mostly accomplished by a judicious combination of Keyhole and Wanton Destruction. "But I'm only running one Keyhole and 2 Wantons!", I hear you cry. It's ok; you don't need any more. Recursion, remember?

Pick the weakest central, and hammer it repeatedly. Needless to say, repeated Keyhole runs on R&D are brutal, but with Comet and Deja Vu, you should be able to make repeated Wanton runs with nearly as much ease. Wanton them once and then, when they try to recover next turn, Deja Vu Wanton back to your hand, and immediately play it with Comet. Have 2 Deja's or 2 Wantons? Do it again next turn. Even better; have both. What's not to like about 4 turns of Wanton; the 12 cards in archives?

Use Hades Shard for important accesses. I usually drop Hades on a Dirty Laundry run at archives. Then, when you spend all turn on Wanton or Keyhole, you can immediately Hades for all that freshly trashed goodness.

Central servers will often be heavily stacked. This sucks; if a server drains your economy too much, Cutlery and Parasite it to pieces. One nice thing to do with Parasite is try to time it so that you Levy while parasite is hosted; that way, when it's trashed, it won't get Levy'd back into your deck, so you can easily Retrieval Run it out onto a new victim.

You may be wondering about Jackson Howard right about now. Don't you worry. That mother****er has his own section.

Jackson Mother****ing Howard

Yes, you're right, of course. Jackson Howard is a problem. But not an intractable problem. This deck does have to play through Jackson, but it has done so, and it has done well despite his obnoxious recycling efforts. My advice boils down to this: kill Jackson Mother****ing Howard. Kill him fast, and kill him dead. Here's how you do this.

1. Hades Shard is your weapon of choice. Corps fear the Hades Shard, and rightly so. It is your job to fuel that fear. Keep 7s open whenever possible. If your Shard hits the heap, it is a top-priority Deja Vu target: a Shard in the heap isn't a threat; a Shard in your grip could come down any second. Don't worry about digging for it; a Shard in your stack is even scarier, to the corp, than a Shard you've just Deja Vu'd back to your hand, because they don't know where it is.

2. Trash his smug face at every opportunity. I've heard people advise against trashing Jackson; that may be good advice for a non-archives-centred deck, but it is not good advice with this deck. Trash Jackson Howard at every opportunity. Trash his smug face from their hands with Wanton. Trash his smug face from R&D with Keyhole. Trash his smug face from servers whenever possible. Always trash him. Consider, if you will, the myriad benefits of a trashed Jackson:

   1. If you just trashed Jackson, they didn't get to use him to put agendas back in R&D.
   2. If they want their Jackson back (which they do; after all, they need him to put agendas back in R&D), then they have to use some recursion on him. Usually, another Jackson. That's one card that they're forced to recur which isn't an agenda! It's almost like 2 free points!
   3. If they Jackson their Jackson back in, they will likely not even draw it. It's usually more likely that you'll Keyhole into him and trash his smug face.

3. Sniff out face-down Jacksons. Did they just play an unprotected card in a new server? Are there face-down cards in archives? It's probably a Jackson. Most corps won't even try to hide this. Run it, and trash his smug face (see point 2 above).

Other Problems

Here are some cards that gave me trouble, and some advice on dealing with them:

• Crisium Grid: if they drop this on HQ or R&D, my first reaction would be to shift focus to the other central. However, it might be best just to cutlery and parasite the hell out of the affected server and then run in and trash it. If the ICE isn't too intimidating, Crypsis may help.

• Caprice Nisei: people like to talk about Crisium Grid screwing this deck over, but Caprice is like Crisium on steroids. Same advice as above. Yes, you will have to repeat until you win the psi game. Sorry.

• Blacklist: I didn't come up against this card, and for that I thank my lucky starts. If I were suddenly confronted with it out of some Netrunnerish nightmare, I would probably draw aggressively and fish for anything that helps get rid of it: Crypsis, cutlery, Singularity, whatever.

Card Highlights

Now you should have a rough idea of what the deck does. Let me explain some specific card choices:

• I've Had Worse (or the absence thereof): I ran I've Had Worse for a long time, but recently cut it to make space for 3 Dirty Laundry's. A controversial choice, no doubt, but, in my mind, the right choice. If I was going to put more anti-kill tech in, I would go for a second Plascrete Carapace over the I've Had Worses. Here are my reasons:

  • I've Had Worse is less good with MaxX. Part of the power of the card derives from the ability to hold one or two in hand against Weyland or Jinteki, particularly the ability to hold multiples in hand against a potential Scorched Earth in the Weyland mid-to-late-game, but with MaxX, that card is going to stay in your grip only as long as you don't Levy.
  • I've Had Worse is even less good in this deck. This deck will Levy sooner than an average MaxX deck, exacerbating the previous point.
  • I've Had Worse takes up more card slots than Plascrete, and this deck is starved for card slots.
  • And finally, this deck doesn't need I've Had Worse. You have a built in safeguard against Scorching; it's called heaps and heaps of s.

• Parasite: this may seem like a weird one at first, and it certainly doesn't actually do that much for the deck. Sadly, Swordsman means that it is necessary. I considered Mimic for a while, but decided that it's even more suboptimal than Parasite: at least Parasite kills Komainus and, eventually, Tollbooths. Other than break Swordsman, literally all Mimic does is save you 1 on ICE that is exactly strength 3. I would be delighted to hear better ways of dealing with Swordsman in the comments below!

• Singularity: this card is exceedingly situational, but man oh man does it do work against servers stacked with upgrades. That said, it's expensive, and a Caprice Nisei will ruin your day. I am considering cutting this.

• Vamp: another situational card. This is essentially Jinteki hate, but don't be afraid to use it on other corps when you can afford it. It will hit certain Weyland decks pretty hard.

• Crypsis: this is another odd one, but it's useful when you really need accesses, for example at match point with an agenda in their scoring remote. Can also be good for getting at Crisium Grids, for instance. Ideally, you want to cutlery your way out of these situations, but when you don't have enough recursion to eat your way through a 3 or 4 deep server, Crypsis is your friend.