Tax, Tag, Tourture (4th @ Northern CA District Championship)

The deck still inspired by this deck. I love the way how Prav asset spam works and playing all your cards naked with tons of advancement counters on them is just so fun.

The main idea of this deck is to tax out the runner with Amani, Oppo and ARES. Jam down as much cards as you can to confuse the runner. They'll soon find themselves having not enough clicks and credits to handle all your tricks. Hearts and Minds help you to score out 5/3 on board and Vladisibirsk City Grid helps you fast advance all other agendas. I chose Balanced Coverage as my second econ asset because it's just much more stable with Federal. Business As Usual helps you put down more and more advancement counters as well as giving the runner some surprise by taking all the Fermenter or Consume counters. It also helps you fast advance a 4/2 on a 1-advancement-city-grid.

I can show the game plan by an imaginary matchup: You install 2-3 cards down every turn with support from Federal, scored an early ARES that kills the attempt to trash your cards, placing advancement counters on every card and scores out some agendas completely naked, triggers Amani to deny all the expensive cards the runner just installed. Oh they ran into your Chekist! They trashed it! Next turn Big Oppo forces the runner to flow tags. Now you pop your sneaky Gaslight among chaos, get that Shipment and install 2 agendas on 2 city grids with 2 advancement counters on it because the runner got no resource to find and trash. Then use that Shipment, so you get a total of 8 advancement counters in one turn, winning the game.

Well, that ideal scenario doesn't really happen often to be honest. They can deny your early econ by running everything and especially by DoF. Although you can duck it by rezzing assets, but this give the runner more information and telling you which card is likely an agenda. If you can't get your ICE on centrals early, they can just rip through HQ and R&D without caring what you're doing over there. Even if they flow tags, if you don't have FOI or tag punishments, you CAN'T DO ANYTHING. Not only your ARES is useless now, but all your ambush does nothing too, and they can just check and trash everything, and focus on centrals. I think I really need to add more tag punishments to this deck, cause I was having a hard time with runners taking 10+ tags. I even lost one game to a runner with FOUR tags where I can't find my ICE on R&D and they're able to steal everything.

Anyways good deck to play. The runner will not be having a good time, win or lose. I hate this deck too, but I gotta play it. Would be more powerful if you cut some assets for more Shipment and Self-Growth.

At last I want to thank to every opponent. Truly amazing games with you guys! Thanks for everyone who lent me card sleeves, tokens, and playmats which allowed me to join this amazing tournament.