I'll have 2 inside jobs, a S-dobrado large, click 6 with extra ice, no recursion, 2 sentry breakers, one with bullets and a sharp blade.

Yes yes, I know what you're here for, Is knife finally good? I'll tell you all about it. But first a message from our sponsors:

tbu3k on being asked if he believed in knife: (some kind of) ehhhhhh, mid (response).

With the sponsors out the way, the answer is yes, knife is good, great even I'd say. It's fairly doable to win anywhere from T5-7 if you draw well. Should you however try and push to win that early? In a few cases, yes but mostly no.

In order to understand how and why it works, I feel it is important to know how/why I got here, and individual card choices. Plus, maybe it'll help new players go about how to iterate on a deck (or at least how I go about doing it)

The 🅱️eginning

Syd7 was the first person to play a knife deck to a good placement about a week after RWR. I briefly glanced at it, thought to myself "neat" and moved on.

NANPC Boston being on the horizon, the person who got me into netrunner wanted to dive back into the game.

While helping him make the changes he wanted, I managed to delude myself into believing.

However there were some glaring problems. Matryoshka is just... Bad. Most of the games that I played ended up me feeling like I do not want to install a single copy of those. Secondly, Syd's list didn't have enough bypass. I found myself knifing successfully with bypass, so it was important to go to 6 inside jobs* + tributary made the numbers on matryoshkas extremely bad.

And then SBT came in to save unsuspecting crim enjoyers (not that anyone still believed in crim anyway). With NANPC Boston about a week away, I managed to sell two people on knife, with me going back to being a doomer with hoshiko. With tributary gone and with 6 inside jobs, maybe the breaker suite was fine.

Spoiler alert, knifers didn't do well at Boston and the deck was put down for a while.

Shortly after, Solomir managed to do well at continentals with cute shaper breakers & knife. But they just didn't speak to me and I'll admit I never tried it. But it did seem like using real breakers was important.

Making meta calls is for nerds (it's me I'm the nerd)

OTG was around the corner and I was extremely down on what runner to play. I did not want to play tree ari simply based on principle. I ended up putting in real breakers, (shibboleth, tycoon, 2 revolvers) and career fairs for the matryoshka slots and called it a day. I also cut bahia for nuka because I needed more draw and a sec testing to dodge punitives.

While I did fine at OTG, it still felt too slow, like I was fighting to breath every single game. I was also a bit bummed as I had extremely good win% into most of the corps that made cut. Sebk won the event with Venti which I felt I had a great matchup into (and he also managed to dodge my PD). You weren't dodging me at Philly. Back to the drawing board!

The problems currently were getting through jinteki glacier, econ, earthrise being a dogshit card, daily casts being too slow and no tempo installs slowing me down. Hermes is absolutely not the right console, no matter the fact that every jaded oldhead is Leela-pilled and would sink on that ship even if Endurance was unbanned. Anyway, the future is now.

Hermes out, Swift in. Nuka out, bahias back in because we need the tempo install. I briefly tried Window of Opportunity for tempo knife installs. It felt fine but Chris Dyer's abomination (Border Control) was a pain. Enter baklan. You will pop the BC right now or say goodbye to it.

We need to go faster. We need to make more money. I put in 3 laundries in hopes to make runs and credits at the same time. But that turned out to be a bad call as everyone will ice all centrals after the first knife and you normally want to bypass. This meant that laundries sit in your hand as a dead card Since I lost to NEH twice at OTG, I put in 2 NFLs and an asmund to speed it up and save my bacon. It was also important to cut a revolver for a carmen as jinteki glacier is pretty good.

Some consideration was given to eshutdown, FAO, more baklan, maemi, ghosttongue and some such but the answer was simply to have another sec testing. No card costs more than 2 to install (Besides carmen and class act), install all you want, put all the good crim events in and it seemed to be getting somewhere. Sec testings fixed the punitive problem, stealing agendas is cringe anyway.

The derez package didn't seem like a good idea as they will have enough money to rez ice if you're tycooning too much. The breaker suite is also ass on purpose. You use them at best twice the entire game. Most of your wins will come through bypass or faceplanting into non-ETRs. But when you do need them, they're cheap, have relatively okay numbers (shibboleth haters are too credit value pilled, the value is that I'm in right now and that's the game).

In all previous versions, you were guaranteed a knife off wizard's chest because you only had one other hardware in the deck. That changed with alarm clock. Discussing knife with Limes on a random jnet smurf of mine, seeing him try knife out of Los (you can either do cute things or win, pick one) and alarm clock, the value of the latter was amazing. Especially with sable, enough that it was worth it to take gambles on wiz knives.

This meant that you can no longer cut mutual favor as it is the only shuffle effect you have in your deck which is important to control where your hardwares end up from class act triggers.

How to Play

By now, you must be convinced knife is good and that you should simply knife them.

🚨🚨 WRONG 🚨🚨

You are not playing knife, you are playing reg crim. Don't get too focused on knifing just because you can. Assess the threats the corp is pushing, is it worth just annoying the corp by running a remote so they can't rez a central ice and you can knife without problems? Are they pushing agendas they will protect? There is a fine line in deciding what your wincon is. Just because you have knives in your deck doesn't mean you should use them. Sometimes it is the correct choice to camp remotes.

Got a knife or two in and made the corp panic? Perfect, they have fallen into your trap and double or triple installed their best ice on centrals, leaving their scoring remote wide open. Click for 4c, pass. The game has been won.

You will also need a way to track your clicks. It is possible to have ran all centrals and still have 4 clicks remaining. This is essentially running hotter. You have all the time in the world to knife them and they can't do anything about it. The expressions as you are about to hit the 3rd knife are priceless.

Knowing when to install your breakers is also extremely important. It's a tough call against SDS but entirely doable. Sometimes you want to install a breaker just to give corp the information and have them commit ice on servers you didn't want to run in the first place.

P.S. Run uniced servers first against HB on the turn you're knifing due to ablatives.

NANPC Philly Games

I told Sebk he's not dodging me today. Got paired as knife into venti R1. I goofed and preemptively used a NFL , costing me two entire turns on knife and a massive tempo loss as I hit a forced connection and eventually flatlined.

R4: Ben Mason on Punitive RH. Kept him honest by making him discard his entire hand to anoetic protecting a regensis. Sure, score your 4 points. Now, you've lost all tempo and I'll knife you while you're busy drawing up.

R6: Ben B on PD. Another victim of the blade. He had a bad draw and I capitalized. I'm in ID city now.

Cut R2 (lower bracket): Ben B, we meet again. I was minding my own business knifing in peace but ended up touching 2 Ikawahs. Fine, I'll play the cringe way. Install revolver, inside job remote cuz there was desperation in the air and touch the offoff.

Cut R3: Sebk, we meet again. This time, I will not misplay (and I didn't), I stuck to my word of not letting you dodge me this time. :P Always a pleasure talking & playing with you. Some of the most intense games I've played.

R5: Lower bracket finals against bblum. They got the memo and knew what needed to be done. I was outplayed for a good bit despite getting 2 knives in. Had a single shot but azef knocking out shibboleth was game.

(More NANPC Philly info in my corp deck, up soon.

Shoutouts

Where does the deck name come from you ask? I'll leave you a little reference.

This deck would not have seen the light of day if not for contributions from Griffin, Redino987, aureates, cranked, rongydoge, coldlava & Cicada.

❤️