Bags and bags of tags [Brighton SU CO: 1st place, undefeated

TLDR;

Undefeated (5-0) at Brighton Startup CO. You win by scoring, generally with SanSans. Depending on the runner, decide if you can spam the board with assets, or if you need to protect some/all of them. Play lots of Oppos to keep the runner poor (and if not, or if they are now both poor and tagged - score and win)

This deck could certainly be made better, as my win in the final of the cut was down to a considerable amount of luck (mostly the misfortune of the runner's cleavers being stuck at the bottom of their deck)

Deep Dive:

• Background
• How to play it

Background

This deck was undefeated (5-0) at the Brighton Startup CO in December. It's a fun one to play (for you, not the runner of course - this is R+), and presents some interesting puzzles for how to adapt against different runners.

I started by playing Swiftie's Swans, and Epiphany Analytica deck. It's fun, but it felt very vulnerable to a single Paricia or Scrubber (or indeed it's ultimate fear - Loup). There were things I liked about the deck, and things I didn't. Eventually it evolved into an R+ list to take advantage of a number of cards costing less because of the 2c gain when they take a tag. Keeping the runner poor, or heavily tagged, makes it easy to score out. Of course, with any good deck, I made a few untested changes at the last minute ;)

How To Play It

The runner can only afford so many tags (*fingers crossed no Networking). So load them up with tags, and force them to need to trash assets/upgrades or you can just score out of hand comfortably. Typically this is by either a naked SanSan, but could be a protected SanSan or a Biotic, depending on the opponent and how they play

Federal should be an instant trash for the runner, which is great because now Oppo is online and they have a handful of tags.

Nico is usually best protected, either in a scoring remote if you build one, or just with a single piece of ice. But if the runner isn't running, you can probably install it naked, and once it's ticked once, the runner kind of accepts it's existence and lets you cash out.

Predictive gives you flexibility. You can take money if the runner keeps being a pest and trashing all your assets, or you can use it for card draw if you need to escape R+D lock, or just want to dig for a Freedom Of Information whilst the runner is on 4 tags.