Cassette Beasts: awkward middle stage

My tapes aren't strong enough to win consistently. Do I want to pick up and start using something new? I'll need to grind a while to catch up and I'm not strong enough to win against strong enemies so that I can "leech" my new tapes to quickly catch up. Maybe it'd be a good time to grind up my tapes so I can deal enough damage for direct damage fights to be faster than status stall and for my tapes to be tanky enough to not get one-shot from full health.

Which tapes do I want to keep using forever? Cassette Beasts makes it very easy to reuse stickers, so it's only a question of whether I have the tape I want as the foundation. There are certain bootleg tapes of species and type that I want to get but for now all I can do is meander around and hope I stumble into something good enough.