Passive Aggression (6-2 Worlds)

This is my Logos Leela build that performed surprisingly well for me in Worlds this past weekend, going 6-2 on the day. However, my Team Sponsorship NEH piloting skills aren't so good (3-5 at Worlds), so I ended up with 18 prestige, in 88th place. I was initially at table 13, moved down to table 123, and then worked my way back up to table 26 at my peak in the 7th round, largely due to the surprising success of this deck.

On the day, I faced an Argus, two NEHs, a Sync, and four HB: EtF (all of the Foodcoats variety). It lost a relatively close 7-4 game to an NEH in the first round, before I was really mentally into the tournament, and then a brutal 7-0 shutout versus Dave Hoyland's EtF in round 7. Dave was the eventual third-place winner in Worlds, and a guy who certainly knows how to play and play around Leela, so that's no surprise.

While this originally derived from "Thug Life Leela," it's pretty different now. I've trimmed it down to the barest of Logos Leela builds, with a lot of 3x cards so I could up the consistency of my draws. First of all, 3x Gang Sign and 3x HQI were absolutely necessary -- at various points, I've gone down to 2x of both, with a marked decrease in the success of the deck. I put on significant HQ pressure by digging for these early (thank you, Mr. Li and Quality Time), as well as with hand-flooding via well-timed Fisking. It's a passive aggressive deck, like all Logos Leela builds — one just sits back, installing a bunch, get some money, and let them score something out, then Gang Sign (maybe get lucky and snag an agenda), then Logos out whatever you need to take advantage of the hole you've just opened.

About that -- I pulled out a number of things with Logos, but typically Sneakdoor Beta was my MVP. It's still a little shocking to me how rarely anyone ices up Archives vs. a Criminal these days. Other common pulls were Fisk Investment Seminar to continue to layer on more HQ pressure, and Medium, though that never actually hit the table. Frankly, Sneakdoor did the majority of work here, as people simply don't seem to expect it on the whole; it's still a remarkably good card for situational access, especially with a number of HQI already installed.

Second-most MVP card: Film Critic. Everyone advised me to yank this from the deck, and I'm so, so happy I didn't. It doesn't synergize with Leela at all, and so everyone advised me to use the extra 2 influence on something else. I made a perhaps weird meta-meta call with this one — I suspected that with alt art NAPD Contracts as the participation prize, we'd see even more of these in play than usual (as some people like to show off their tournament cards during the tournament). Given the relatively cash-poor status of this non-Desperado Leela build, Film Critic would be useful for that alone. I avoided one Midseasoning with the card, but its main value was circumventing the NAPD cost — I Film Critic-ed at least four NAPDs. Not to mention entirely shutting down the Argus's ability the whole game, by moving all agendas through the Film Critic.

Also, everyone told me to trim a card or two off of it. It's 47 cards! It's admittedly an overly fat Leela deck, but with Faust as the primary catch-all breaker, and the amount of redundancy in some of the unique cards (Kati Jones, Mr. Li, Logos), I figured it was worth going over by a few just to fuel Faust. Happy I did, too; the frequency with which I saw some of those 3x resources was relatively high. I rarely got terrible opening hands, and almost always had something I could aggressively build with, then sit back and wait, and whenever I got extra cards, they fed Faust.

So, here it is. This was my very first time at Worlds, and actually the very first time I'd ever won more than 4 games at any tournament. I'm sure some of my Leela's success was lucky matchups, but I'm thrilled it performed as well as it did.