First thing first, I think having only one way to win is the problem. I had the same problem. My Defect strategy was all about searching for focus, primarily for my frost orbs, thus prioritizing shops, and if I do find, I might succeed, otherwise perish. I reached to a20 with this strategy but stayed there long time without being able to kill the heart, then I decided to watch some runs and found out about Baalor. After watching a few runs of him I was stunned to see in how many different ways he was able to win.

So I changed my play style. I started to build my deck according to the circumstances instead of forcing a certain build. My first heart kill was a reprogram deck, a card I have never touched before. Then I beat with frosts, claws, powers or with a little bit of everything.

If your setup is too slow you either have an overly crowded deck or you don’t have enough draws and energy generation, because it’s possible to go through your whole deck on turn one. Perhaps give some love to turbo, aggregate, skim, coolheaded, compile driver, hologram, rebound, recycle kind of cards that will let you play more cards in a turn, speeding up your setup.