Little Criminal

Minimal setup and early aggression. Late game surgical strikes.

I reached a 59% win rate with this on the BGG-L03 challenge board (username emlun). I haven't played much since, but the few times I've played with friends lately it's still stood strong.

The core aim of this deck is this: Get exactly what you need, exactly when you need it. Run rigless for as long as possible, and then keep the rig to the minimum required for the task at hand.

Minimal setup allows for a lot of early aggression, which together with strategic use of Account Siphon keeps the corp just poor enough to prevent them from rezzing important ICE. I rarely have a full breaker suite out with this deck.

Money is tight by design, so make sure every run counts. Indexing and/or The Maker's Eye let you see a large chunk of R&D on a moment's notice.

Once some ICE is up and/or money is needed, tutor up Magnum Opus with Test Run+Scavenge and drop a Self-Modifying Code. Femme Fatale loves Test Run and Scavenge. SMC + Clone Chip + Faerie + Crescentus is a nice surprise for when the corp rezzes that big ICE (Archer! :D) you indexed earlier.

In summary, the play style is a mix of Criminal and Shaper strategies - dodge ICE as much as possible, but have efficient breakers and economy for when it's needed. I like to think of it as a "surgical strike" deck - it won't always get in anywhere, but with some planning it'll often stretch just enough to get you in where you need to.

This deck gets into trouble if there are a lot of high-strength Sentries out. The game plan in general is to use Femme Fatale to bypass big ice with few subroutines, and use/recur Crescentus to derez the expensive ones after breaking them only once.

Don't get tagged unless you're sure there's no Scorched Earth around.