After having played Skorpios: Toybreaker, I couldn’t help but think back to my old favorite archetype, and see if I could make a tag & bag deck work with Skorpios Defense Systems. The remove from game ability can affect the Runner’s grip as well as anything else, so why not? This brings me to Skorpios: Kneebreaker – a deck all about tagging the runner, then flatlining them.

The agendas in this deck are all about making the runner’s life worse if they get tagged.  They all support the later game where the runner is going to have an easier time keeping cards in hand to avoid being flatlined, The Cleaners allows just one more meat damage if needed, while Crisis Management and Private Security Force allows me to kick the runner for a little bit more if they get tagged.  With all three in play (clearly endgame is near,) the runner is staring down the barrel of eight meat damage if he/she lets a tag slip.

Not surprisingly, the assets for this deck fall into two categories: economy and tag & bag.  My economy is the same as I used for Toybreaker, with the notable addition of NASX.  I’m not sure that it was really needed, but a little extra money doesn’t hurt.  Lt. Todachine, Mr. Stone, and Zealous Judge are all there to enhance the meat damage.  Mr. Stone + Zealous Judge, in particular, gives me a private security force (for an extra credit) with the added bonus of the runner having multiple tags.

I wasn’t really sure about the upgrades in this deck.  K. P. Lynn is something like a half-Data Raven in faction which seemed appealing, and Prisec is something like an only-installed half-Snare! that can be installed on top of something else.  Both of these half-measures seem like they should work, but I think I need to either double-down on this strategy or swap them out for something else.

Nothing really surprising in my Operations, though Housekeeping again just felt mean.  It hung out most of the game and tended to encourage the Runner to keep more cards in hand, and install them all at once; this gave me a lot of tempo as a result.

I haven’t really changed up a lot of my ICE since Toybreaker, with the exception of adding some tagging ICE like Data Raven and Virgo (swapped out for Sagittarius.)  The biggest problem I had with my previous game though was not drawing my ICE.  This makes me think that I need to add one or two more ICE to this deck to help me get out of the gate.

Overall, this deck ended up working reasonably well, if a bit slow for tag and bag.  I don’t know if that was a result of poor draw or if the extra five cards I added slowed it down so much, or if it is something else.  One thing I may try to do is cut this down to 44 cards (one of which will be an agenda) – this may help the cards that I only have one copy of show up a bit more, and make Jackson Howard a bit more meaningful.