I am no top level netrunner player, but I would consider myself to be fairly decent. I’ve been going over a few deck ideas incorporating flatlining the runner via meat damage. Instead of a massive scorched earth or punitive counterstrike, I’d like to use Private Security force as my main damage source. Along with The Cleaners, it allows me to ping up to 6 damage per turn. This can set me up for a massive scorch to finish them off as PSF eats away at their plascretes. In trying to set up this deck, I’ve run into two main issues: good runners just don’t stay tagged very long, so I get at most one turn of damage before the scramble to clear tags. I’ve partially overcome this with overwhelming them with tags, such as with tracer ICE and midseasons. The other problem is that by the time I’ve scored both a Cleaners and PSF I’m already basically at game point. I’ll put up a tentative decklist once I’ve balanced out some good econ with tagging mechanics. At this point, does anyone see PSF as a viable addition to the tag n’ bag, or is it simply too slow?
Sure, PSF + Cleaners is gg. But that’s also 5 points – if you can score those, why not just AP win?
The sadistic side of me enjoys sitting back and clicking their life away as they struggle and squirm to refill their hands and clear tags.
While that may be true, as long as we’re talking about viability, I think the better strategy would be to just score out the last 2 points. If scoring the points is the better strategy, then maybe there could be a better agenda than PSF.
I suppose if you can land them both of the table then it gives you an alternate win condition, but if you’re already running tags then maybe just running scorched is a faster, more reliable way for the kill. My main Weyland deck runs four 3-point agendas, and the times where I’ve been able to score two of them are almost always times where I have the game in the bag anyhow.
If you have a list you want to share, maybe it could help folks judge how good this playstyle is in your particular deck instead of as a more general thing.
If your aim is to get rid of the Plascretes (which is rather unlikely against a good player anyway) the better way to go would probably be Power Shutdown and/or Taurus, which can be good in other situations as well.
Edit: yes, I am very well aware that hitting a Plascrete with Power Shutdown is quite rare 
If your expecting to have a stupidly large number of credits (not too hard with blue sun), 1x powergrid overload can really change a game up.
The only real way to stop it is to keep up on money with them which can be difficult if you also want to break large ice like curtain wall.
Aside from Argus Security (which may or may not be better), I think Making News/Near-Earth Hub would be better for this style deck since it gets tons of tags, and hence meat damage. Here is something along those lines that they featured on Bad Publicity.
Not, you either burn a house down, or you don’t.
On a serious note, there have been some NEH DRT decks around, and I think that’s the closest you’ll get at “ping” damage, but at its finest it prevents the runner from running at all
I think argus will make it more viable, and if people started playing muresh bodysuit, we’d have a game changer ladies and gents. and maybe once more expose effects, like drive by and stuff that stifles fast advance, clot and traffic jam come out, this deck, with it’s suppressing style of play might be more viable. The Cleaners, plus private security force indeed. why not try to get a data raven token? Get them desperate, and put data raven in front of an ash in front of a central. Eventually, you’ll have a tag at your command. When you win with this deck, you will know in your heart you’re doing good for the game.
I spent nearly all day on OCTGN play testing and tweaking my ping deck out of blue sun and…you’re right. Trying to do too many things isn’t working. Runners clear tags too quickly for you to ping them to death. I’ll try the NEH DRT approach and see how it goes. Thanks everyone anyways
If cybernetics like Net-Ready Eyes become popular enough to make Muresh Bodysuit playable, that would hurt a ping meat damage strategy.