Faust has been making a splash of late, and I think it’s only reasonable I return to Netrunner thanks to a pact with the devil! It’s a fantastic and interesting card, with so much build around me potential and cheap enough on influence that you can really put it anywhere. It’s already making noise in, well, Noise, and seeing a bit of leg here and there around the other identities (I’m really looking forward to seeing if it might be able to do something for professor).

Today we’re going to drop it into Nasir, Cyber Explorer!

Event (6)

3x Diesel

3x Levy AR Lab Access

Hardware (15)

1x Astrolabe

3x Clone Chip

1x CyberSolutions Mem Chip

1x HQ Interface ●●

1x Net-Ready Eyes

2x Plascrete Carapace

3x R&D Interface

2x The Personal Touch

1x e3 Feedback Implants ●●

Program (11)

1x Cache ●

1x Cerberus “Lady” H1

2x Crescentus ●●

1x Deus X

1x Faust ●●

1x Imp ●●●

3x Self-modifying Code

1x Sharpshooter

Resource (13)

1x Aesop’s Pawnshop

2x Armitage Codebusting

3x Drug Dealer ●●●

2x Film Critic

2x Order of Sol

3x Personal Workshop

Faust in Nasir actually doesn’t sound that great, until you include another key card, the newly minted Drug Dealer. Nasir is designed to play off zero credits, and drug dealer gives you incredible efficiency with your card draw if you’re sitting on zero at the start of your turn. Of course, always being at zero credits is a risk since it gives the corp scoring windows, which Faust neatly closes.

We start with the staple cards of Nasir. Clone Chip, Self-Modifying Code and Personal Workshop to turn on mid-run installs with Personal Workshop also working as a way of getting your pricier cards out. Order of Sol gives you a nice steady flow of extra credits to invest on your workshops before they get sucked away by your Drug Dealers. It’s pretty incredible how much economy it can generate if you get it rolling early.

Diesel early game lets you dig for your key cards, late game it fuels power turns with Faust. Levy AR Lab Access– three of them- let you burn through your deck with not a care in the world, however they also present a problem. Once you have three drug dealers installed it’s next to impossible to get up to 5 credits without depending on hitting a big piece of ICE. An Aesop’s Pawnshop and a couple of Armitage Codebusting provide ways of getting there, as well as emergency money to threaten unprotected assets, assist in runs on fully-rezzed servers and so on.

R&D interface and HQ interface provide solid pressure on both centrals, both synergising very well with Personal Workshop. An Astrolabe and a Cybersolutions Memchip get you some memory to fool about with in the mid-late game. I originally had Toolboxes here, but you can break just about anything so the link isn’t a massive deal and you only have a couple of uses for the recurring credits. Often enough you won’t need these, in which case they can just feed the devil…

Playing off zero credits also makes dealing with a variety of money based annoyances frustrating- trashing programs, playing psi games, dealing with NAPD Contract, having your house blown up after a SEA Source. To that end, Imp helps trash assets, Plascrete Carapaces can sit on your workshops until needed and Film Critic helps you deal with all those obnoxious taxing agendas- another really key card that makes this deck work from Old Hollywood. Cache has a weirdly good synergy here, even without most of its usual enablers. Being able to bank even three credits and keep them available for odd jobs is unbelievably handy when you end up lacking big juicy ICE to leech off.

Much of the Shaper toolkit depends somewhat on having a big starting budget, so the support tools in the deck have to be optimized to work off really small credit totals. Sharpshooter and Deus Ex give you some credit efficient panic buttons for ICE like Komainu, Swordsman and Archer, Crescentus works wonderfully to provide you with some extra credits in the mid-late game by forcing the corp to re-rez bigger pieces of ICE. Cerberus ‘Lady’ H1 lets you deal with a lot of the ice that can really tax Faust like Eli, Wraparound and Spiderweb, again with very few credits in your pool. I’m still trying to decide whether Inti is the better choice here, since to get Lady out you really need to have it stashed on a workshop at 1-2 counters. If your meta is more towards the rush/fast advance style of deck, perhaps consider switching out the E3 Feedback Implants for a Clot

Faust gets a lot better when supported with some power-up cards, so a couple of Personal Touch and a Net-Ready Eyes serve to get your Faust to the magic strength 3/4 that lets it deal efficiently with a far greater variety of common ICE. E3 Feedback Implants helps you get through multi-sub ice with a few less cards (and helps Lady deal with Spiderweb, NEXT Silver and so on). It’s tricky to use reliably, since you’re so often starting out on 0 credits. It makes dives into deep remotes of Unrezzed ICE far more manageable. You don’t desperately need any of these, so you can just throw them down when convenient and enjoy the increased efficiency.

Here’s a kind of TLDR summary of what I’ve found the deck does well so far

It has a really nicely balanced early and late game, with strong pressure both overt and in terms of forcing the corp to make tricky decisions about rezzing ICE. Late game a meaty hand, multiple interfaces and a huge back of tricks to play with mean you can keep grinding for the win.

In particular, the tension you force between rezzing cheap ICE which doesn’t really stop Faust effectively and rezzing more expensive ICE which gives Nasir huge economy and the option to Crescentus for even more value is brutal.

You’re really rewarded for drawing hard and often, which means you find your way to the particular tools you need in various matchups extremely quickly.

Being designed to work off low economy means you can survive a lot of bad draws without too much fuss

You can quickly build a truly frightening economy, but one that is deceptively low-profile. A couple of people I played against mentioned they couldn’t believe the deck just kept running and running while building a powerful rig off effectively zero conventional economy.

The downsides are:

Occasionally you just don’t draw your Self modifying Codes or Faust, or your Personal Workshops or, really, any of the tools that makes the deck run smoothly in the top half of your deck. It’s pretty rare, but if it happens against any but the slowest of decks you’re probably not winning that one- though Nasir messes with peoples’ heads enough that sometimes they don’t take the initiative.

Real vulnerability to silver bullets, particularly a well (or badly) timed Chronos Protocol or Blacklist. Swordsman is fairly manageable given the amount of times you can recur a sharpshooter, but I’m currently not packing tools to deal with Turing. There are definitely some simple tweaks you can make to bring in tools to manage these however.

Complex upkeep and timing structure decisions, not to mention using cards as breaking fuel means you’re making a lot of meaningful decisions and this can be stressful or tiring in the long term- probably not the best deck to take to a six round tourney

Either way, this has been the most enjoyable deck I’ve played in a long time. Hope you give it a try and tell me what you think!