Nasir's Faustian Consciousness on Drugs

So, you hook up your hacker brain to a Collective Consciousness, take a bunch of mind-enhancing Drugs and make deals with the Devil to break some ICE. Poor Nasir has certainly hit the trench in his cyber explorations...

I wanted to build a jank deck using Collective Consciousness but ended up with this deck that actually seems to work quite well, and is really fun to play. Later Deck searches revealed I'm not the first one to come up with the three card synergy but I did build it entirely from scratch.

The game plan is to just have Faust out, hopefully with a consciousness or two, and just run into unrezzed ICE while holding 0 most of the game. Troublesome ICE gets derezzed multiple times over to give you more Faust fuel and to tax the corp, paving your way into an R&D lock. Any money is generally spent on installing stuff from your Personal Workshop, before your Drug Dealers are onto the fact that you're loaded.

A lot of stuff in the deck is devoted to deal with shit when you're completely broke all the time. Film Critic deals with annoying agendas and saves your junkie ass from Midseasons. If any mischief is suspected, it's best to always use the gerbil owner's talents. With all the clickless draw in this deck, you can always spare the extra 2. Scrubber is crucial in countering Ash and other nasty assets/upgrades. Kati Jones is your personal "oh shit I really need money" bank - usually not needed, so just 1x.

The deck is fun to play because it comes at a lot of problems from weird angles and throws a wrench into both players' thought patterns. It can also take up early aggression provided you get a Faust out quickly. It makes a lot of expensive ICE essentially useless (e.g. Tollbooth) but struggles against certain cheap ones (e.g. Lockdown). With two Plascretes and Deus X it's reasonably hard to flatline despite being always at 0.

A few notes:

Double Levy instead of 1 + Same Old Thing because this deck can actually need two recycles. Sometimes life gets tricky if you're holding them both and playing against thousand cuts... Making space for the Same Old Thing would be nice.

I initially had Gordian Blade and Inti as my counter-AI counters, but after clicking through Elis for the umphteenth time I decided that Lady is just the better fracter. Likewise, it can be difficult to actually find money to break stuff with Gordian and I'm pretty R&D focused, so Cy-Cy makes more sense.

Leprechaun instead of extra memory, because Collective Consciousness has nasty memcost and it doesn't hurt too much to lose them even if your Leprechaun gets sniped. Still not sure about this though.

I initially had 2x Emergency Shutdown but I desperately needed the influence for Scrubbers. I kinda like keeping the one to derez a troublesome ICE that I had to leave rezzed earlier, but I'm not sure. This is definitely 2 points of influence that could be freed up.

There are certain things this deck theoretically struggles with. Multisub ICE that has to be broken, especially Komainu and Hive, are downright painful. Data Raven is also annoying to deal with. Genetics Pavilion and City Surveillance can be troublesome. You really can't float tags.

So far my only loss with this deck was due to really stupid piloting: Access HQ, see Midseasons, then run at a possible agenda anyway without Film Critic out (and it was in my hand too, lol)...

Possible additions:

I have considered Qianju PT for this deck. The click cost isn't too bad, and it can be really helpful to deal with Data Raven, SEA Source and stuff like that, even City Surveillance in a pinch. Another possibility is Hunting Grounds as that would help to deal with most of few the problematic ICE, with Hive being the nasty exception. Parasite could be a thing, but it's really only good against low str ICE and the memcost can be tricky.

Emergency Shutdown is a definite flex slot, and I'm also considering dropping one Self-modifying Code because the extra cost of 2 is actually often too much to handle, and with all the draw in the deck most stuff is found pretty fast anyway. For the same reason I don't want to go down to 1x Faust because finding one "naturally" is so much better. Dropping one Astrolabe can be argued.