Step 1: Make runs, get Datasucker tokens and Desperado income.

Step 2: Lower ice to Atman's strength.

Step 3: Profit.

You want to run, a lot, probably on an undefended Archives or remote. If you run 2 Desperados and 3 of everything else, the combo is going to cost you 7-13 influence. So what do you think is the best faction and identify to pull this off?

I'm leaning Anarch to combo Parasites with the Datasuckers and Djinn to fetch them, but really, this core could fuel just about any deck.

Most people seem to use Kate for this because Shaper allows you huge amounts of flexibility with regards to installing mid-run (SMC, Clone Chip, Personal Workshop), resetting your Atman if the strength is off (Scavenge) and searching for the cards you need (Test Run, SMC). Combine this with Kate's discount ability and you have a very strong deck. Take this out of Shaper and you lose some of the pieces that make it so effective (due to influence limits) and give it to a different Shaper and you'll get less out of their abilities than you'll get from Kate's.

Not saying it can't be done a different way, just that this seems to be the most commonly used strategy for those cards (probably because it's so effective).

Kate hands down. Clone Chip, Self-Modifying Code, and Scavenge are what make the deck really shine and Kate's econ boost on the installs is a huge help. Modded Also helps out a lot.

I guess Andy or Gabe might be able to do it. But they can't tutor and recur like a shaper can.

Chaos theory also makes sense as you can install 3 datasuckers and 3 atman (and as usual replace any of these with other programs as needed) with only the desperado as memory. You also can run a smaller deck to draw these things more easily.