SOCR9 - Leela Killer (4th in Swiss)

Another #NYC collaboration, this is the Mti deck I piloted to 4th overall in Swiss in the ninth Stimhack Online Cache Refresh tournament. As with my previously posted Leela deck, this is a deck created by @groenkaaf that I tweaked to my liking. I can't remember the big differences, if any, but it's probably the number and types of barriers and sentries.

The idea behind this deck is assuming that Leela is your biggest threat and working against her game plan. It was incredibly difficult in this cardpool to find ICE that effectively taxed Engolo... We're looking at Slot Machine not for any subs firing, but for a 3-5 credit tax on Leela. Similarly, Bukhgalter and Datasucker would eat up sentries and even become profitable unless we found enough multi-sub sentries to stack. Finally, the core of the deck is spamming Daily Quest and Embolus for cash, lengthening the game dramatically to force Leela to run out of money and the capacity to recur Crowdfunding.

This plan largely worked as this was more effective than Leela than the Leela was against it. Embolus often created frustrating NPE game states because running on the remote became impossible. This came at the cost of flood, which called for the ridiculous 2x Distract the Masses (I used both almost every game). The highly defensive agenda suite also contributed to the sluggish length of these matches.

Sadaka was pretty nice for killing Baklan. The Crisium did OK at stopping Doof, especially when HQ was well protected. The Thimblerigs were essential for moving ICE around to defend DQ early, but centrals later when the remote had a healthy number of Embolus counters. Envelope was almost as effective taxing as Eli, so maybe another Crisium would have worked better.

Testing with 2x Daily Quest meant even grindier games that were less likely to be financially stable, so Border Control seemed out of the question, though others obviously found great success with BC.

It can't be mentioned enough, huge thank you to @sanjay for an amazing and smooth tournament!