Leela Pressure

linuxmaier 711

This is a Leela Patel/Desperado pressure deck. Lots of Leela I see around these days seem to try and play Logos in order to combo her ability into really powerful turns by both opening up a server and grabbing the tool needed to exploit it. However, this doesn't feel to me like how Criminal is supposed to run. As a faction, Criminal are very strong at putting consistent pressure on multiple servers by running frequently and profitably, and the Logos-Leela play seems to almost want to hang back in order to punch hard after a corporate score.

This deck instead wants to put early pressure on and deteriorate the corporate position by scoring agendas, melting ICE and stealing economy. Medium puts a lot of pressure on RnD and combos well with Inside Job in order to punish a corporation for leaving RnD under-protected. HQ Interface also combos with Inside Job to do the same thing on HQ, with Account Siphon putting economic pressure on a stumbling corp. Parasite and Datasucker add weight by destroying painful ICE that gets rezzed during the assault.

Some games will be decided in the first few turns by getting an early score that enables further scores (topdecking an agenda off RnD click 1 then bouncing HQ and running there to get the rest of their flood wiped up), but some corps will survive. Mr. Li helps you build your board state reliably for these games and Kati Jones can come out for faster credit gains when runs stop making you cash.

So far the deck has treated me very well in early testing, with a record like 8-2 against a varied field with a pilot who is entirely new to criminal. It even plays well against Scorch decks despite not running Plascrete Carapace, because Utopia Shard provides protection so long as it's installed (when they SEA Source, pop the shard to have a good chance of blowing up at least 1 scorched earth) while also having benefits against any other deck that relies on card combos.

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