Knife Sable (3-1 @ 401 Games October GNK)

What started as a gag deck ended up becoming my most reliable runner deck of the year, able to score an assassination victory in nearly every game! My Corp deck also went 3-1 in this GNK but is much less entertaining. Final result was #2 in the tournament, tied with #1 at 18 points but lost on SoS. The general strategy is to always draw, draw, draw until you can get either two knives or one knife and a The Wizard’s Chest. Prioritize drawing over everything else. This is very much a rush deck, and you need to find and score the first knife within the first few rounds of the game in order to have the momentum beat the Corp to scoring out. I would frequently spend 3/5 of my clicks in the first few turns drawing until I hit a Diesel or a Jeitinho. Sometimes I would install 2 The Class Acts back-to-back and end up with 10 cards in hand, which is totally fine. Overdrawing is usually not an issue since 1.) you can play knives from the trash, 2.) this deck is built with plenty of redundancy, and 3.) you can always just play every run event in your hand until you are back down to hand size limit. Also, being almost flatline-proof is a huge bonus! Early game you will need to rely almost solely on run events to rush knives out before the Corp can ice up all three centrals. Aumakua is the endgame plan to get the third knife out once there is too much ice to Inside Job/S-Dobrado your way through. You can more or less ignore remotes other than to charge Aumakua or to stop the Corp from imminently scoring out. The single copy of Pinhole Threading is a contingency in case the Corp has wised up and installed Manegarm Skunkworks/Anoetic Void/etc. to stop the last knife. If you have already scored two knives and have Aumakua on the board, you're usually set. The games that I lost (in practice and during the tournament) tend to be ones where I struggle to get the first knife out. Swift and Hermes are equally good choices in this deck, although I prefer Swift since I find that all of my wins occur early game before Hermes has had a chance to proc very much. Running max 2 copies of a console and no other hardware is essential to getting a knife out of The Wizard’s Chest every time. This deck became much more reliable after I cut the Boomerangs and started relying solely on turtles and bypass. There's also some room to take out econ and replace with more copies of Earthrise Hotel or other source of card draw if you feel that you are not reliably drawing through your deck. I removed Diversion of Funds from my list because I found that losing the extra click messed with my ability to score a knife in the same turn, but it's a viable option if you time your runs carefully. Career Fair is also a possible option, but I never found that I was short of cash to install resources. In the future I may experiment with Security Testing to avoid unwanted accesses (agenda points do nothing for you, but Snare! still hurts!). All in all, this was a very fun deck for a change of pace, and very worth it just to see my opponent's reactions when I pulled out the knives!