Suck Me Dry

This is my variation around Anarchs running Faust. I never liked playing Noise so I've decided I'll do something different. Here, the main combo is Quetzal ability (together with e3) and Faust aggressiveness (together with e3). While this deck obviouosly likes to set up Wyldside/Adjusted Chronotype/Datasucker and e3, it doesn't have to. Faust is your key card and you have to threat remotes early. Quetzal turns off a good chunk of ice (especially in NEH FA). Don't be afraid to lose cards. If you hit Swordsman, Parasite it quickly and have another Faust ready. After you set up, you get Faust food every turn, you still have some draw boosts, so you can get in everywhere.

I've decided that Imps are very important for current meta (important enough to justify 3x) - there's quite a lot combo decks out there, and being able to turn off some of their tricks is very good. It also helps with maintaining advantage, while thrashing high-cost assets, like Pads or SanSans.

This decks works reasonably well against killing decks, by using Public Sympathy. 9 card hand plus Plascrete is suddenly out of the reach in the mid game. Watch out in the early game, though, you're still an easy target, but hopefully IHW will save you.

Three cards that are surprise for Corp are: - 2xLegwork (works very good in early game, where Corp suspects Medium on the table soon and icing R&D better) - Vamp - that pretty much wins you the game most of the time. If you can Vamp in a key moment, you all of sudden can enable a lot of paths to win. This works especially well with combination with - Amped Up - star of the deck, catching everyone surprised. Use it in crucial runs, where they have your actions calculated for the next round. Corp rarely takes additional clicks into consideration. Sometimes it even makes sense to play Amped Up/Deja Vu/Amped Up, for one click more. This is the run where you Vamp and then captialize.

Your strategy is to avoid running R&D so that they won't rez anything taxing. Threat remotes and keep HQ under your control so that you can Vamp in the right moment. With several clicks from Amped Up, you can then install Medium or two and see several cards on top off R&D.

This deck is somewhat hard to pilot. Your starting hand will vary against different corps. You want Wyldside and some econ. Faust is a plus but not necessary. Your key decisions is to when to lose some cards to Faust in early runs and when to press early, rather than set up your solitaire game for couple of turns. It has 49 cards for some redundancy and Faust fuel.

In a retrospective, I would probably get +1 Amped Up and -1 Deja Vu, as I didn't need that much recursion. I was thinking about Showing Off (last Medium run), but it's essentially a "win more" card in this scenario and didn't increase my chances that much during testing. I wasn't sure about Levy - I can drain most of my deck, but rarely all of it (with e3). Where Levy helps is when you're out of Deja Vus and desperately need some recursion (that Legwork, or Vamp or econ) or a save from a bad second mulligan.