Another use case of this card is as a friend to Chum. It only costs 2 and normal fracters, killers, decoders can't break it and it only goes away of the corp uses the optional ability to select a card in the HQ. This is as a complement to some to the other strategies on here, like if you do have a killing Snare!, of course use the ability.

I used to think of House of Knives as sort of a "it can do one extra damage and maybe flatline in a clutch situation, but scoring an entire 3/1 for that is a li'l expensive". What I was missing was that using all three counters (on separate runs; it's a once per run ability) adds up to a reverse Diesel. In other words, House of Knives is a strong econ card. Now, the synthetis of those two perspectives means: use the tokens selectively but don't hoard 'em.

Rules note: Runners, don't quickly grab my cards after the last ice! I might need to send some knives atcha!

The last chance to use House of Knives is after the last ice, after deciding whether or not to jack out, but before accessing cards. And that goes for Hokusai Grid also.