Stop Sign (1st place, Oxford SC)

Having rather unexpectedly won the Oxford SC, I figured I should write up these decks. Also after we played in round 5 of swiss Run Last Click's Eady asked if he could look through this list if I was knocked out before he left, but I wasn't, so here it is Eady!

I was unsure what Runner to take to Oxford for a long while, with a decent Sunny Lebeau: Security Specialist and a strong Hayley Kaplan: Universal Scholar both likely choices, but both had variable fast-advance matchups, and I'd been doing extremely well testing a post-MWL Fastrobiotics so suspected others would have also. I'd been playing a pre-MWL version of this Leela Patel: Trained Pragmatist deck as my nominal Tournament List for months last year, but hadn't been able to attend any tournaments where I could try it out "for real" during that time. Based on my familiarity with it and my expectation of lots of fast-advance (they don't get any extra clicks to play around Leela's ability with), I eventually chose to go with this.

The Deck

The idea, as with any Leela Gang Signs list, is to force the corp to slow down and respect your rig. If they don't respect Leela Patel: Trained Pragmatist early game, you Account Siphon and beat down from there. If they try to play around Leela early game (i.e. play slowly), they don't respect Gang Sign and HQ Interface, meaning you can keep even on score and Siphon.

The real kicker - and the reason this comes to an ugly, ugly 46 cards - is Hades Shard. I switched this in alongside a Plascrete Carapace to address dropping Utopia Shard as my flatline combo defence. If the corp manages to play around both Leela and Gang Sign, it's likely because they're overdrawing with Jackson. This creates another dilemma: if they don't respect Hades, you win on archives, straight up, but if they do, you save a click (and potentially money) running Jackson or Archives and your R&D Interface works overtime.

Film Critic is there because I run a bunch of important resources (Gang Sign chief among them) so can rarely afford to go tagme from Midseason Replacements and I'd rather host a Future Perfect than have a 1/3 chance of triggering Leela. Also in case anyone runs Argus Security, because holy moly does Gang Sign not like Argus Security.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Were I to make any changes now, I'd consider just dropping the Emergency Shutdown which did nothing all day for a leaner 45 cards.

More substantial changes that could work include switching the Lucky Finds for two R&D Interfaces for extra (and earlier) R&D pressure, dropping one Sneakdoor Beta and the Emergency Shutdown for High-Stakes Job because it's the new cool, or Security Testing if that goes horribly wrong.

LATER EDIT!

I've been running a version which goes...

-2 Lucky Find

-1 Emergency Shutdown

-1 Same Old Thing

-1 Sneakdoor Beta

-1 Mimic

-1 Faerie

+1 Desperado

+2 R&D Interface

+2 Security Testing

+1 Mongoose

And it feels a lot better.

This brings us down to 45, gives us a bit more Desp consistency on top, and you don't have to feel bad burning a Special Order on a Faerie because Mongoose serves your early facechecking needs just fine. You may also consider swapping one of the Desps for an Employee Strike as a reasonable counter-current and a switch-off for some of the corp ID abilities that frustrate this deck - the tax of RP and IG can be a serious problem, especially those newfangled Museum of History lists which are highly resistant to Gang Sign if you can't easily and quickly trash that card. If your Gang Signs ever do anything in the game, though, Employee Strike gets switched off too, which seems kind of bad.

In short, Desperado = good, Employee Strike = make things marginally more annoying for a particularly difficult opponent. Different strokes for different folks.