Here's the thing about Jinteki. Some of the time they're trying to kill you. And sometimes they just want you to suffer.

Sure, you have a few cards with the potential for a kill: Cortex Lock, Ronin, Snare!. But you also have a lot of cards that, while they hurt the runner, are unlikely to actually kill them. Psychic Field, Shock!, Komainu, Shi.Kyū, House of Knives, Fetal AI, Hokusai Grid.

The "Thousand Cuts" archetype wants the runner to bleed. It forces the runner to realize that they're going to lose somewhere around a third of the cards in their deck over the course of a game. Any tightly-wound strategy player with combo pieces that have to be held in hand, or anything that used cards as fuel (cough Faust cough Aesop cough Apex cough MaxX) is going to find themselves with very little left in their stack to work with.

This is where Harvester comes in. Forcing the runner to draw up to and past their maximum hand size means you are going to have a tough time killing them. But, if the runner was already at max hand size when they hit it, that means that SIX CARDS are going to get thrown in the garbage. SIX. That's 13% of a normal size runner deck.

Of course, that does mean that the runner can churn through their deck faster to find exactly what they need. And this is where your other net damage becomes really useful. See, against a thousand-cuts deck, a wise runner will hold their less useful cards in hand as a buffer so that suprise Snare! hurts less. But if you've just been Harvested, that isn't an option.

But this only matters if the runner is at max hand size when they hit Harvester. If the runner can absorb one of the subroutines without discarding, it doesn't look so great. As a result, Harvester does best in a deck that does brain damage or otherwise limits hand size. Pālanā Agroplex will also help you keep their hands full.

Conversely, if you're in a meta with a lot of Brain Chip, it's probably going to help the runner more than it hurts them. Definitely don't run Harvester and Mental Health Clinic in the same deck.

I've used Harvester as a one-of for awhile in my Jinteki: Potential Unleashed deck, where it seems to fit the theme perfectly, but even there I think it just isn't very good. Early game, they'll gladly toss a few cards to accelerate their setup, and late game, they often won't care either. It doesn't do anything at all if you've already milled them. If they actually want to break it, it usually costs 2 or 3, which would be good for a 1-rez if it weren't so situational. Harvester just gives the runner too much control. Not bad in front of a Komainu though. I think this would've been more interesting if it was actually expensive to break, was a trap ICE rather than code gate, or if the discards were done as net damages.

Devastation Incarnate. Many people don't associate their deck in relations to phases, and when your deck must excel to place yourself in a position that can truly dictate the course of the game. This card is the epitome or early game depression. Komainu used to be the card which provided this opportunity for Jinteki Players, but this card here is may even be better than what it was. You're forcing the other player to draw into their deck and if they had a full hand they may just lose 5+ cards for the turn. Nothing hurts more than arriving at all the cards you want in a turn but all at the same time and in the wrong moment to boot. Slip in a few Viral Weaponization and within 2 turns you could find yourself out a quarter of your deck in 2 turns. That's almost conditions for an auto concession.