Cache Refresh Brain Rewiring [SOCR4] - UNDEFEATED!!

Being impulsive and easily amused, I went with CI for the Stimhack Online Cache Refresh tournament. I'd like to say that my reasoning was that CI has several viable builds, meaning I could mix it up if I got bored of one, but the truth is I didn't even think of that until after I'd played one round and gotten bored with my first deck. Still, getting to do the 50 Shades of Purple thing was very fun, and over the course of the tournament I played combo CI, 'vanilla' MCAAP FA CI, and this deck, which is probably my favorite because I did not expect it do work as well as it did, which I found relatable.

This deck was born after being told by @nicohasa that you could Brain Rewire by replacing Show of Force/Contract Killer with Neural EMP. Your first question when being told of this might be "why would you?", because you 1) suddenly get blown out by all the anti-net damage deck people play against Jinteki anyway, 2) lose to random IHWs, and there's probably a 3) too. The upshot, though, is that SoF and Contract Killer aren't Cache Refresh legal, but Neural EMP is, so the answer to your question is "because it's Cache Refresh!".

If you want to combo, you need SfMM, Biotic, 2x Neural, 1x Brain Rewiring, and either a Calibration Testing or a Biotic in hand, which lets you Biotic/SfMM Calibration Testing to score a Brain Rewiring, shuffling the Runner's entire grip into their stack, and then double Neural EMP for the kill.

Why you shouldn't play this deck

To combo, you need to have drawn both your Neural EMPs, your only SfMM, and then some other cards on top of that. I'd love to have more copies of either of these, but only being allowed a single Core Set means you can't. In Standard, Brain Rewiring is a pretty fast deck because it doesn't need that many cards to combo, and draws pretty fast.

In Cache Refresh, this deck loses VLC and is pickier about the cards it needs to combo, so it's very much the worst of both worlds. To mitigate this, I put in an MCA, which lets you build a remote, hope your opponent thinks you're planning on scoring your first 5/3 and that they can win by setting up and not giving you 4 more points, letting you surprise them with a kill. It worked once. Still, don't try this at home.

Despite this, I actually won both the games I played with it, letting me quit while I'm ahead. (I might even have won a third too, truth be told, but I know I didn't lose one because I elected to lose virtually all my Runner games instead, so 100% winrate it is.) I attribute this to very good draws and my opponents not realizing you could Brain Rewire in Cache Refresh. So consider this a PSA of sorts.