The Pragmatic Soul Reloaded (2nd 5-0 Perth Regionals 2019)

3-0 in Swiss, then an ID. 2-0 in cut.

It's a weird thing preparing yourself to go to a regional championship when you're Dev and Playtest Coordinator for NISEI and 90% of the Netrunner you've been playing the past 8 months is playtesting for new NISEI sets. You kinda forget about the current meta things, forget about rotated cards, keep wanting to jam new cards into your decks.

So I called upon the assistance of my playtest team, and the kind folks of #UK in stimslack, and decided upon an Argus with my typical stupid jank addition (Psychic Field, went 2-3 on the day and I probably shouldn't have taken Argus when this out of practice) and that I was definitely going to be playing Leela.

During a great chat with @paulyg about Leela lists and his current test list, I was reminded of an old version of my take on Waltz Leela from back in 2016: https://netrunnerdb.com/en/decklist/33107/the-pragmatic-soul-top-4-rockingham-west-aus-sc-

Excalibur is around right now, Hunting Grounds is great tech again IP Block, my list already had 2x Datasucker, and folks have been playing around singleton Engolos a lot lately. Also Amina is fantastic and being able to play it while still having AI support is excellent, so why not bring back my favourite Icebreaker in the game and play Atman?

The rest of the list is pretty standard. NOH, Bank Job, Critic and Hunting Grounds as tech cards. I skipped Caldera because I wasn't too scared of grind and NOH can suffice for just not dying to big chunks of net damage. Embezzle is amazing and I felt great every time I played it. Falsified also saved my bacon on multiple occasions. Blueberry Diesel is definitely underrated, and combined with Paragon and TCA this deck has a tremendous amount of filtering ability to the point that I often felt really good spending a click to draw a card that was exactly something I wanted.

Every game with the deck felt great, almost electric. Was just a constant gameplan of laying down pressure and then keeping it up until I had enough of a tempo lead to rebuild my board back up and prepare for the corp's next moves.

Overall I was super pleased with the list, though I did kinda regret cutting Kati in my game during the cut against an RP. Not sure what I would've cut for it though, as I felt the rest of my tech choices were too important to skip on, but it's absolutely a consideration for next time I play with it.