Metropole Grid: I Made Some Istakes And Now I Have Egrets

Scorpi12 266

This is the Tao deck I built for Andrej's stream last week! You can view its catastrophic failure here: https://youtu.be/GJ3HLismm1g?t=6678 .

There are changes to made to this deck to make it more playable. Starting with the breaker suite, I might add a bit more diversity there in order to cover an abundance of Barriers or Sentries. Flip Switch could easily become Political Operative in the upcoming meta. Red Team I mostly just included for the sake of the stream, and that influence could go towards breakers without really affecting the deck's wealth. Prepaid VoicePAD is there because, as I finished building it with a lot of events (and no rezekis - MU was getting a bit tight with Egrets), it just made some sense - now that I take a second look, I really don't have enough events. Either I should have gone more heavily into events (Dirty Laundry, etc) and used Anniccam as my console, or played even more installables (Daily Casts, etc)+ and kept Pantograph.


Still, there are a few choices here that I think may be a part of many Tao decks to come:

If your plan is to arrange the ICE so you have a path of only Code Gates into a particular server, then Egret certainly helps accelerate that. Once you have Egret, Rejig lets you reinstall it for a surprise run elsewhere.

Forged Activation Orders gives you information to use with Tao's ability; so can the "expose 1 piece of ice and run" option in Deuces Wild.

Contaminate is there for use with Conduit, of course. Either on the turn you install Conduit, to ensure a deep dig out of nowhere, or just after the Corp purges, when they think they're safe.


There are other upcoming cards we've now seen spoiled that could work in this deck, as well. Botulus will work well with Pantograph (install it on the Corp's turn, so it has two counters by the time it gets to you). DZMZ Optimizer will of course come in handy, as much for the extra MU as for the discount on programs. Tread Lightly will be great, if Tao goes the route of swapping all the unrezzed ice onto one server.

9 comments
27 Mar 2021 Zerothmaxima

Now he has to play it on stream! If this isn't victory, i don't know what is.

28 Mar 2021 Conduit23

@Zerothmaxima lol got 'em

28 Mar 2021 Shorty

Both the Forged Activition Orders and Deuces Wild for information reasons are so smart for Tao. His ability won't fire too often and somehow you need to make sure that you get the most value out of it. Nice deck Pat, hope to see a bit more of Tao soon!

28 Mar 2021 scd

“A deep dick out of nowhere” is... quite the phrase.

28 Mar 2021 Scorpi12

“A deep dick out of nowhere” is... quite the phrase.

  • THAT WAS A TYPO OH MY GOD
28 Mar 2021 Scorpi12

Ahem. Alright. That's fixed. Thank you for pointing that out.

Anywho - I did end up re-making this deck a few days later, without focusing too much on Gateway cards. I replaced Pantograph with Aniccam and added more events (Dirty Laundry, etc); Flip Switch indeed became PolOp.

Thanks all for enjoying the deck!

28 Mar 2021 scd

Ha figured as much! Funny typo tho.

29 Mar 2021 RTsa

Fixed here, but it's on front page now, though! :P

2 Apr 2021 Baa Ram Wu

I for one disagree with Andre and think the missing ‘M’ in Istakes is what makes the name so good! A+