The Devil's Cutlery (Brighton Store Champs winner)

So, a huge caveat for this deck: I'm not convinced it's reliably good. What it is good at, however, is beating Foodcoats. I knew this from playing it a fair bit in the first Stimhack League on Jinteki.net, where it would generally beat HB, and generally lose to NBN, so I mothballed it. However, after a fairly mediocre performance with Kate at the previous store champ I went to - and particularly poor performance against Foodcoats, which the cut was full of - I thought I’d bring it back out: if I wasn’t good enough against the field with Kate, I might as well bring a runner I knew I could reliably beat Foodcoats with, and attempt to drag it into the cut on the back of my corp deck (Haarp murder), where it would put me in with a good shout.

Frankly, I'm as surprised as anyone that it worked. In Swiss I went 6-0 with Haarp, and only 3-3 with Maxx (wins against 2xNEH and Haarp; losses to IG, Haarp and Sol), but in the cut Haarp went 1-1, while Maxx went 3-0 against HB.

Although it doesn't look like it now, this actually started off from tweaking mediohxcore's RegMaxx. When it became clear that CVS was so prevalent that a Parasite/Datasucker deck was in a bad spot, I wondered about switching all of those parts of Maxx's ice destruction for cutlery, and threw in Faust as a one-of because it's a really good card. That rapidly became 3 Faust (it turns out an ID that draws a card each turn is a really good fit for a breaker powered by cards. Who knew?) and it was tweaked from there.

The final changes a few days before the tournament were to put in E3, losing a Clone Chip, and to switch Liberated Account for Day Job, as I found it hard to often afford the 6 cred install cost without ruining my tempo.

Your plan A against Foodcoats is essentially this: don't let them have a remote. Run it every turn they put something in it, and trash whatever is there - if they didn't rez, fine, if they did then come back and trash the ice too. Balancing money is sometimes a bit difficult, but the fact that you don't have to spend money to break ice usually means you can keep the remote empty and therefore less dangerous. If you have to go low to get rid of campaigns, Day Job helps recover. If you did a good job of controlling the remote this way, mid-late game Legworks should be very profitable.

Plan B is Keyhole, which you can switch to if the remote looks like getting out of control, but don't focus on winning with it. It's there to force the corp to invest somewhere other than the remote, which will usually give you the breathing room to start dismantling the remote again.

A few comments on specific cards:

E3: This is obviously great against bioroids, but it does a lot of work generally helping save D4v1d tokens or cards to Faust against multi-sub ice. Switching a Clone Chip out for this was one of the points at which the deck became significantly better, as it lets you run each turn more consistently and facecheck more aggressively.

Cutlery/Immolation Script: While these are vital to the deck, most are only one ofs. That's fine. Maxx helps you see them, and then you can play whichever is most relevant with Deja Vu or Same Old Thing. You only want extras if you want to see them very quickly, which is why there are 2 Spooned (along with 3 D4v1d) to make sure early Turing remotes don't get out of hand.

2x Levy: I’m still not sure if this is a good idea. Originally I thought you’d need two with all the Fausting, but actually the second rarely gets used unless you’re playing against something really grindy (I only played it against IG on the day). What it does do, though, is let you be much more carefree about using your Deja Vus and Same Old Things on power events, without worrying whether you’re going to be able to Levy. It still might be worth it for that – as I said, I’m not sure.

Drug Dealer: I had a single inf left, and dropped this in thinking it might be good. I’m not convinced it is, at least against HB. The money it takes makes it much harder to trash their stuff, and between Inject and I’ve Had Worse it’s rare not to be able to get in when you need to. It did work holding off the kill against Haarp and IG, but I still think it’d probably be better as something else – maybe a Shard.

In the end this is all going to be irrelevant with MWL arriving in less than a week: I probably wouldn’t try to play this in a post-MWL environment that is looking largely yellow. While its definitely better against NBN since the addition of Day Job and E3, I still think you’re disfavoured: controlling the remote is not going to win you the game against NBN, and you can’t R&D lock. But if you want to give it a try, go wild: as a starting point I’d certainly add an extra Knifed for all the Wraparounds, and drop a Spooned to compensate. Regardless of its future prospects, I hope the deck's been of some interest.