Marty's Leelasucker 3rd Place Black Lion Games Store Champ,

Please see my corp deck write up for an intro over here.

In the run up to the Intercity tournament, I was testing a lot against Marty in order to get his criminal deck down. I’d played a lot of Leela previously, and Marty wasn’t too sure about it. Obviously he did something right as he ended up going 4/1 with it on the day! I asked him if I could borrow it to use for Store Champs and he happily agreed. I’ve linked his deck in the Derived From box.

I needed to tweak the deck for MWL; some quick testing revealed that simply swapping 3 Desperados for 3 Doppelgangers wasn’t quite going to cut it! Sadly breaker suite was where the influence had to come from. I’ve been keen to try Mongoose, so I swapped in a couple of those to replace the Mimic, I downgraded the Gordion to a Zu.13 (and hoped I wouldn’t play much Foodcoats) and, probably most sadly, dropped the Yog altogether. I actually forgot to add in another backup decoder as well, so I was playing pretty close to the edge. Finally, I grabbed a second Plascrete. I hate to die. Yeah, I’m running at 47 cards, what you gonna do about it?

First Round: Iain McAllister, Sol

So, first round I was sat down over from a friendly face. I know Iain is broadly running a glacier-ish NBN deck with added difficulties from currents; I was worried that a Cerebral Static would shut off my in built advantage against NBN Astro-training. Iain dropped an early Targeted Marketing, though, wisely picking Siphon. This meant I sat nearly the whole game with 3 in my hand! I got my breakers set up quickly, and I sniped a couple of agendas out of the remote. Shutting off the Siphon money tap slowed me down, but Iain’s lack of agendas (I think he had a real drought) let me slow down and rack up a huge amount of money on Kati. Double RDIs let me hit RnD for two agendas in a single access and the game.

Second Round: Iain Fairclough, Biotech

Biotech can be a little tricky, you’re often worried about Net damage as crim as you’ve got little in the way of recursion. Iain scores a Nisei early on by flipping his ID, so I at least know I don’t have to panic TOO much about hand size. I squeeze out a Nisei from RnD early, then I think an agenda from Archives? I’m not sure. I run into an empty iced remote with a bank job. Iain rezzes an Ashigaru which I suspected was there, so I siphon and shutdown the next turn, leaving Iain flat broke (he later notes this would have been the right time to use his Nisei token...). I hit RnD and see Future Perfect. I’m just starting to think about the Psi game, then realise I’ve already won.

Third Round: Jonny Lockhart, NEH

This isn’t a bad match up for me, but Jonny is a great player. I make the mistake of leaving DBS up too long (I honestly just forget to do it most turns, it’s the ‘5th click’ action), so he pulls the agendas he needs. I’m on 5, Jonny is on 6, it’s a race for the last agenda. I hit HQ a few times, finding out later I missed two agendas, Jonny clicks for 2 creds and scores 15 mins next turn. Fast and furious!

Forth Round: Peter ‘Interns’ Henderson, NEH

More NEH! I’m not exactly sure what kind of NEH Peter is running, so I need to be careful. I’m a little worried as I run RnD first click and take an exploda. I think this lets me bounce HQ ice and run there for an Astro as well. This game goes pretty quickly, with Peter Fast Tracking for Astros and jamming them behind a wraparound I can’t get through. He lands a SanSan in there and I can’t both dig deep enough for a Corroder and keep the pressure up. Finally I Inside Job it, killing the SanSan with both me and Peter on match point. I’m floating the tags from 3 Siphons here, and Earthrise gives me a Femme. Worried there’s another SanSan behind the Wraparound, I Femme that and run... only to get an Exploda he was looking to score next turn.

Cut Second Round: Gregg Powell, Titan

I played Gregg at the previous Store Champ where he was my only Leela loss of the day to his Blue Sun Grail deck. Time for payback! Gregg gets a couple of early agendas, a Hostile Takeover and an Atlas. I play it safe to begin with to avoid the SEA, but Security Testing and Desperado lets me over take in econ fairly quickly. I take one agenda from a server and another from HQ, and I’m fairly sure he doesn’t have any more in hand. Atlas token for another HT is possible, but that would work in my favour as Leela. Datasucker has 10+ tokens on it, and I get an RDI down. I camp RnD, Mongoose doing some work, and eventually take the last agendas for the win.

Cut Third Round: Seamus Hyphenated Macleod, Argus

Theoretically not a bad match up for me, but Seamus squeezes out two early agendas before I see an Inside Job to stop him. A double advanced Atlas goes in the server on a Casting Call, and here I basically get tunnel vision. We spend two turns fighting over the agenda, which is thrilling netrunner, but leaves me at the end of it with a scored Atlas, about 6 tags, and 2 cards in hand. Seamus promptly scorches me through my Plascrete. This is probably the only game where I feel I’ve seriously done myself down, I feel letting the Atlas go was probably the better idea and focussing elsewhere. Still, Seamus played brilliantly as always, and I’m in third, so I feel pretty satisfied on the whole.

I was generally pretty pleased with Leela. The NEH match with Jonny probably could have gone my way with a helping of luck (and if I'd remembered to trash DBS), but I won my two other matches against NBN. Leela is generally as good as anyone against NEH FA, she has run-based econ in Dirty Laundry, Security Testing and Bank Job, she sets the corp back if they score quickly, and has classic Crim remote sniping tools. I think I was probably lucky not to hit more HB as she’ll certainly have a tougher match up (and I was especially lucky not to come up against someone using MY HB deck).

Mongoose is really the only new thing I tried, and overall I liked it. With some datasucker support, it’s good-but-not-mimic-good, and considering the MWL restrictions I’d rather have Mongoose + Desperado than Mimic + Doppelganger.

Considering how out of practice I felt, I’m very pleased indeed with my placing, and even more pleased to win a Leela mat and box (yes, I kept the box) while playing as her. Big thanks to the Edinburgh crew for sticking round and supporting me against Seamus (Urgh, that guy), to BLG for hosting and keeping it all running smooth (cheers Steve and Stu!), to David for deck testing, to Ronan for Leela commiserating and advice, and finally to Marty for support, ideas, but mainly for letting me steal his decks. What a dude. Awoooo!