Tag Sale

This deck is built around Midseason Replacements but often wins without it. Sometimes you'll land a Midseason and win with Scorched Earth or Psychographics, but you can also win by leveraging the fear Midseason generates to (fast) advance agendas.

Explanations for some card choices:

• Only 2x NAPD Contract. NAPD is great and if this deck needed to run 22 AP it would run three of them, but running 3x AstroScript and 3x Beale is necessary for the FA backup plan, and having 4 1-point agendas is very valuable because it gives you more opportunities to land Midseason in the first place.
• 2x Archer. There are arguments for making these another Scorched Earth, but you don't need help winning the games where the runner is tagged. There are games where for one reason or another you just never land tags, and a well-timed Archer can be very useful for winning them.
• 2x SanSan City Grid. This deck wants the ability to fast-advance and so SanSan is great, but it's not your focus and you don't usually want to see two of them. Some games you actually get to use it directly to win, in others it's a 5-credit tax the runner feels obliged to pay.

Until you land a Midseason it's hugely important to have a lot of credits so you can threaten one. It's rarely worth it to ice up a remote early, and even if you do put ice on a remote you almost never want to actually spend money to rez the ice there unless you're very certain it will let you score an important agenda. Remember that this deck operates on a card that requires runners to steal agendas: don't be afraid to let the runner get some early accesses if it might give you the opportunity to tag them.

The ice is meant to be hard to build an efficient rig against. If the runner is accessing multiple cards from R&D every turn you're going to have problems--if you need to spend money on ice, do it on the R&D ice. Wraparound is usually not particularly useful there, but even your other ETR ice is reasonably taxing.

Magnum Opus is your worst enemy because you just can't win the credit fight over the long term and you're likely not going to be able to threaten landing a big Midseason. If they have one out you need to work more aggressively to score agendas and one strategy is to start to play more horizontally. Opus is an initial tempo hit and you can use ETR ice to score agendas early in the window before they manage to get their whole rig on the table.