So this implies that T1 you have
a) an ETR costing three or less (Ice Wall which nobody plays, Enigma, Meru Mati?)
b) CW
c) OAI
in hand. Welcome to magical fairyland, where all your dreams come true!
(a rough calculation assuming 3x OAI 3x OAI targets and 3x ETR with rez cost <4 tells me the odds are 6%. The odds of the runner having Faust and D4vid in hand (so you can click for credit, install both, run CW), assuming 2x D4vid and 2x Faust in the deck, which is already generous, is 5,2%)
Its certainly not Tier 1 but when faust first came out I built a comedy HB faust hate deck that used Cybernetics Court, Ashigaru, IQ (with Executive bootcamp to rez it for nothing at the time of my choosing) & Tour guide (recurred with sportsballs) to completely lock it out.
Faust/David/Parasite cannot solve a 9str code gate, a 9sub barrier and a 9 (for arguments sake) sub sentry at the same time that easily. A good player will be able to dismantle it, as there is very little facecheck punishment, but it was amusing for me.
Why CW ? Why do you think ETR only works ? Inazuma works. TL;DR works. Wendigo works. Eli works also (C1 credit, C2 I-Faust, C3 I-D4, C4 run, end turn most of the time <3 cards @0cr - ending turn 0cr/0 cards vs BS is no elite move.).
Doing this is certainly less dumb than T1 ice hq, ice r&d, OAI outermost R&D vs Anarch, at least you put a condom and you may bluff the runner. And youâre not supposed to try this T1 aswell.
Because when you play BS with Anarch, seing D4 in opening hand may be a reason to not mulligan. You know this, itâs not like youâre supposed to be surprised. Like when playing vs Crim, auto-ice HQ or syphon 50% of the time. You know itâs coming. We all learned to avoid that error in our early days.
Welcome to magical fairyland of everything is 100% win : I personnaly always triple SE in all my games, legworks for 3 agendas and get all my Astrotrains scored by T4. Waiting T1 for CW/OAI/ ice <3 may be a little long, so the game is boring. Itâs a little hard to adapt because I always use clog my hand with halfcombos, and bluffing is a non-component of the game.
I voted to have Faust on MWL but after reading some of the thread, and some thought, I think the real problem is the Corpâs side of things. Someone said they can win corp games in their sleep, and thatâs not very far off from the truth. The way corps can be played right now, where they can rush out 7 points before you can even get half your rig built is painful. However, when your rig is one breaker, you can at least challenge the corp to actually find a scoring window that isnât one piece of ice and a shitty runner draw.
Forcing the Corp to play a longer game so they can defend against Faust can be fine, as long as the meta shifts enough to where other decks are viable. As far as my meta goes, Faust is currently the way to go, and anything else is not nearly as good. The corps simply arenât challenging the card enough yet, and just hope they can close out the game in less than 10 turns. If that changes, hopefully soon, weâll start seeing more variety in runner decks, but I think Faust will still be there as a backup plan because itâs just too good to pass up.
I do agree with some people who have said making it an Anarch card was a mistake; orange cards are the best cards, and if anything, the lack of an influence cost on Anarchs who have the best draw in the game is questionable, even worse when you have the other support already mentioned to death (D4, Parasite, etc.).
Alternatively, the real challenge is giving the other factions cards of similar power. Shaper has a few cards that can put a stop to faster decks, but what does Criminal have? There was the Drug Dealer Gabe that uses DD to feed Faust, but if youâre doing that, why not just play Anarch and have better in house support?
You are right, the first reason applies to credits too: if you donât make money fast enough, you cant get in. However there are far more options for making money than cards. However the second one doesnât apply to credits: there is no credit restriction like there is a hand limit. Neither does the the third: the credit pool is infinite, unlike your card pool.
Sorry, I wasnât suggesting that you try a âkillâ deck as such, but rather a spiky one that drains away their most important resource, cards. If you can actually kill them, bonus! The numbers on waiting out the Runner might not be as bad as you imagine. Imagine a 45-card deck, the Runner having a perfect draw into Wyldside-Adjusted Chronotype-Faust, and the deck also including a Levy AR Lab Access and a Same Old Thing to make sure they get it. Theyâve now got 40 spare cards to feed Faust, and another 40 after recycling their deck. Standard Netrunner theory has 17 as being the magic number of simple accesses to win as the Runner. So if you can make a run cost more than 4.7 cards, you will have the probability in your favour of reaching the 100% Corp win state where the Runner has no cards left and you just score out. Thatâs in addition to whatever your expected win chance is of scoring out/flatlining before you reach the drained Runner endstate.
Now of course one run isnât always one access, so maybe seventeen accesses arenât needed. But also you as the Corp should be agenda shuffling to try and induce runs on servers with less likelihood of agendas, and if you do that well, more accesses will be needed to win. And of course you will have Caprice, Global Food Initiative and The Future Perfect and such to tilt the run/agenda point ratio. Seventeen is a good benchmark where the Corp and Runner are succeeding equally well in tilting that ratio in their favour and so the card tax numbers on Faust are perhaps interesting to consider in that scenario.
We said 4.7 was the tipping point of the Runner having enough accesses in the game to have a 50% chance of winning on simple accesses. So five-card Faust servers will give a Corp advantage. Thatâs a few, but not ridiculous. Itâs Quandary-Wall of Thorns, or Spiderweb-Wall of Static, or Yagura-Fire Wall, or simply Archer if you can sneak out a cheap agenda!
If you can also do ten damage over the course of the game, the average Faust run-cost for a Corp advantage shifts to 4.1. If they have two copies of Levy AR Lab Access it stretches out to 7.
Can you build a Faust-unfriendly deck on those numbers? Maybe. Are the numbers so ridiculous that itâs not worth thinking about? Absolutely not. Will the deck have other non-Faust counters? Absolutely. Should we be able to build a deck that is good against everything? Absolutely not!
So if I run through Wraparound with Faust every single turn for a single access, Iâve still got a 50% shot at winning before running out of cards? Nice.
Yes actually. I think the game would be better if rushing out the first agenda was something you could have some surety with, because then the text on agendas would matter.
You could include a 4/2 with an interesting ability and have games where it makes an impact. A faust meta (and the preceding shaper bullshit and all-the-siphons metas) means the only viable agendas are 3/2âs, those with defensive abilities prior to being scored*, and Nisei Mk2 (and then only in the most taxing of decks).
*Iâd argue Oaktown has a defensive ability - it defends you from tempo loss.
To be precise youâd have a better than 50% shot of having enough theoretical accesses to win. Your expected win rate would have to deduct the probability of the Corp scoring out or killing you beforehand.
But essentially, yes. Although a Marker in front of the Wraparound would put you on the back foot!
I think thatâs stretching the definition of defensive to the point of meaninglessness.
I donât want loose decks, you should maybe tighten yours up? 
I think people should learn who to play decks and which tactics and choices work and are most effective in a given situation. Iâm utterly perplexed by your suggestion that someone should learn how to lose! I manage to lose quite often playing new decks with no help or experience at all.
Usually i donât have problems with faust out of faction, specially when i play batty gold hb . The problem is in faction, the numbers are bad (1 card + 1 str no 2) but worst is the choosing of faction, clearly that should be a criminal card (and 4 inf probably).
Sure, but what I was getting at was this:
Given that I can run through a Wraparound over and over again - possibly the worst possible way to squander cards for accesses as I can imagine - and still have these odds, Iâm prepared to say that the numbers of waiting out the Runner are far worse than I ever imagined.
A Wraparound? You expected to be able to be able to install a single two-credit piece of ICE as an entire game plan? We obviously have different expectations. 
Wraparound is awesome. On itâs own it almost skews the game in the Corpâs favour versus Faust! The fact that it needs another card (pretty much any card) to go with it to defend all game long doesnât seem unreasonable to me!
Itâs a valid comparison. When Katman hit the scene the community scrambled to find a way to deal with it. People were building decks with specifically varying ICE strength and were still losing.
I donât know if I agree with @Podoboyz99 in that âhateâ cards were released, more so the corp got a lot more tools and ICE that allowed them to either move faster or mitigate the benefits of fixed strength breakers. The intense setup time for the Katman rig was always the downside but at the time there just werenât solidified corp decks to handle it.
The big differences are the speed at which you can Faust+D4 and handle anything with the exception of swordsman. Even if you hit a swordsman, are you really that upset that faust is gone? 3 credits is not much of an investment and there is no reason to play less than 3 faust in orange.
Iâd say its defensive because its a 4/2 without the downside of having to pay for it.
It doesnât provide an one-time ability or ongoing utility after you score it, it mitigates the risk of the corp putting it in a remote and advancing it, unlike money agendas that pay out after youâve scored them.
If you want to rephrase it to constructive (helping your boardstate) agendas, offensive agendas (damaging the runners boardstate), and risk-mitigating (rather than defensive, ones that will perform an effect scored or not) agendas thatâs fine. Oaktown is both constructive and risk-mitigating.
But Iâll stand by the point that the power of runner anti-rush tools means only last category is playable.
Completely agreed. Especially early game, Oaktown has the best defense an agenda could ever ask for.
I think that âdefensiveâ should refer to agendas that have abilities that give a relative advantage to the corp if accessed or stolen. Global Food defends itself by awarding one less point and NAPD defends itself by requiring credits. Quantum Predictive Model and 15 Minutes are more situational examples. Non-defensive agendas like Oaktown can obviously still give advantages (eg, tempo), but to call them defensive agendas doesnât make a lot of sense.
Then you either need to expand the category, or make a new one for Oaktown.
Saying âonly defensive agendas and Oaktown are playableâ is of course perfectly correct.
ABT, Astro, and other agendas are more than playable without being defensive.
3/2
edit: but @Dis already singled out Nisei MkII, so we might as well add Oaktown to the âvery specialâ category as well. 3/2s, defensive agendas and then Oaktown and Nisei.