Chaos Theory - Having Fun's Not Hard *

What I suspected by seeing your list is that you try to use all your breakers with London Library.

What I learned from tinkering a London Lib deck these last weeks, it's that it doesn't work. Pick one as your Lib aim and use the other the straight way. From the breakers you use, Femme Fatale is the obvious choice. Then you can use cheaper fracter and decoder if you don't plan to use fat-ass breakers for the sake of it.

Also, either find a way to boost Femme for cheap (LLDS Processor or Helpful IA) or give her some support (Deus X and Sharpshooter) for dealing with 2+ strength sentries. Can be helpful in mid and late game, when ices go layer.

I have a certain success with my Hayley-London-Femme deck. Not tier-1, but quite good for a janky experiment, and really fun.

LLDS is a good idea for Femme support, I like it! Usually with this deck between the three test runs, three scavenges, and three SOTs, you don't actually need London Library to cheat out Torch and Morning Star. I do think it would be better though without Morning Star. I have a soft spot for that breaker, but I think Lady just makes more sense.

I'll come back to this deck in a little while and see if I can make it better, but right now it's too much jank to spend any more time on with Regionals around the corner.

Can you give us some details on why you are losing?

Without any feedback, here's the major stuff I see after doing some test draws:

With the amount of draw you have you might be better off with Self-modifying Code as your tutor instead of Test Run. SMC can go on the table just like London Library while TR has to hang out in your hand while you dig for Scavenge. This deck wants to draw a lot so that's not ideal.

Morning Star is good in lots of situations but complete junk in dealing with anything over strength 5 (obviously). Fixed-strength breakers usually want some sort of support from Datasucker or Parasite or something, which naturally all cost influence. Shaper's poor man solutions are:

The Personal Touch, which work great but are vulnerable to trashing alongside your icebreaker

LLDS Processor, which works great with the library but will cost you a slot in hand and 2 whenever you want to run against a barrier.

Dinosaurus, which is arguably the most efficient solution (as it frees up 2, and out of all 28 barriers there are only 2 above strength 7 (Orion and Wotan) versus the 7 above strength 5. The major weakness here is that you need to get it before Morning Star or use a Scavenge.

With any of the shaper solutions you can still be permanently locked out of a server by advanceable ICE, which you can Femme Fatale, and this is definitely an edge case, but it's worth considering as well.

The other option is just running Battering Ram. It isn't as glamorous but it gets the job done admirably and you don't really seem to be suffering in the economy department.

If you are looking to recoup some of the efficiency losses from the switch, take a gander at Garrote. That sucker tears sentries apart, and with your 5 you can have Garrote, Battering Ram, and Torch installed at the same time. Pretty much the best set of breakers in the game, and Chaos Theory is the only runner who can put them together with no extra .

Finally, spend the rest of your influence. A single point can get you a lot of things, and if you switch your breakers up you'll have a lot more. If you don't want to rock the dino, Box-E is a great console that can keep you from having to chuck events in the bin until you find what you need. Oracle May is funny, and helps you do more of what you want to do: draw events and get money.

So, the problem with SMC is that it's expensive, especially when you are playing big breakers. The whole idea of London Library and Test Run is to cheat out big breakers. Installing something like Torch or Morning Star with SMC is an enormous tempo hit.

The problem with Dinosaurus (which was in early versions of the deck) is that the order of install matters, and once again 5 is expensive for a console.

My meta is a lot of NEH fast advance right now, so this deck is sort of hopeless from the get go. The strength of it right now is you can usually cheat out Femme with London Library early and get into any single ice server, and get some good use out of Maker's Eye and Legwork. It can't maintain that pressure though, since it's too slow to get set up.

I imagine my next attempt will be less all-in on the London Library/Test Run strategy.

Yeah after reading over my post I don't know what I was saying with SMC. I blame pre-coffee brain. Any thoughts on the Battering Ram vs Morning Star debate?

Also if your meta is all NEH FA, sounds like a lot of what you need is some meta calls. I'm sure you are familiar with most or all of these cards, but I'll throw them up here anyway:

Clot

Traffic Jam

Chakana

The Source (please no)

There's also Hacktivist Meeting, which while not really an anti-FA tool, is definitely an anti-NEH tool. It also does work against RP, most HB decks, etc.

The thing about Clot is that you need support (ie, SMC and Clone Chip) for it to be effective. I don't think it works in this deck as a result. I do have a Haley deck I'm having some success with that uses Clot, Personal Workshop, SMC, Clone Chip, etc. Clot suits that deck though, don't think it suits this one.

I think the idea behind this deck is okay sort of - Test Run / Scavenge is sort of a classic combo to get a big rig set up, and London Library can act as an extra Test Run, in a sense. It gives you a bit more consistency to set up your big breakers. I think the biggest weakness with the deck at the moment is that while putting Femme on LL and changing the bypass target every turn is powerful, it's also slow and ultimately doesn't help. It would probably be better to go with Lady, Garotte, Torch, and maybe Datasucker support. That way once your rig is set up you don't have to bother with London Library anymore, so I'd probably cut that down to 2.

Still think I'm going to play either PrePaid Kate or Noise for Regionals, though.