LEELAGEDDON

This here Apocaleela went for a cool 2-1-1 yesterday at Goat Park's 14-person store championship. I believe this is a great deck and could definitely get some improvements, so please offer up suggestions.

This deck idea started in Ken, but I found that I wasn't getting that much money from the ID, so I cut the Faust and went with Leela. Apocalypse and Leela are great together because of their ability to wipe the opponent's board state. This makes it great against both glacier and asset spam, and can be particularly brutal towards horizontal decks because of their lack of ice.

Although I made several misplays on the day peppered with my boisterous personality, I had an absolute blast. Many thanks to my stellar opponents for an afternoon full of fun and interesting games! Important Meta Note: It seems the community at large may have gotten sick of the homogeneous worlds meta. I played against 2 shapers, 2 crims, and each of the corp factions (!!). This was the first tournament I've been to where I didn't play against an anarch.

Some thoughts on cards:

• Blockade Runner is good. Not great, but the best card selection mechanic I've used. It helps to bury stuff that I'll need for later, like a 2nd copy of a breaker or Aesop's. The hand-sculpting is a bit Jackson-y, which is great. If you're a criminal event addict like me, you should absolutely try it out. The 1 install means it's easy to reinstall after an Apoc.
• High-Stakes Job is really good with support. Between Muertos and DDoS, I got to use it about 3 or 4 times, and with Temujin I was loaded.
• Paper Tripping was Midseasons tech as I feared the BOOM! But I didn't play against any kill decks, nor did I get hit with HHN.
• Bank Job beat out SoT for the slot, and I only played it against CtM. It's still pretty good as an influence-free Lucky Find.
• Side Note: econ in general is really different now that Temujin exists. I believe Desperado is actually optional at this point if you play your economy well. Doppelgänger is great for clearing off Temujins, Logos is good in less aggressive blue decks, The Gauntlet gives you extra and an HQI in one card, and Reflection gives you cheap-ass . They're all good cards, but have been ignored up until now because of crim's reliance on Desperado.

Tourney Report

Match 1: Rose - Hasty CI

Rose's self-proclaimed "Diet CI" deck was really interesting. She builds up Hasty Relocation + Accelerated Diagnostics plays to FA out agendas. An early Muertos+High-Stakes Job on her vanilla meant I was flush with cash for the rest of the game, and some early Siphons forced her to discard some of her ice. I Apoc mid-game and it becomes hard for her to defend, money up, and build the combo. Win! Rose's Smoke gets a timed win, beating my SYNC deck and putting me at 1-1.

Match 2: Jordan - Off the Grid Blue Sun

I am 2 creds shy of shutting down the 1st turn OAI'd Curtain Wall because Breach is awesome and breaks it for 6. He is able to ice up enough to make it hard for me to gain money, so I slow down and he gets out an agenda in his OtG server. The rest is hard to remember. When he goes to score his 2nd agenda, I think I pulled off an Apoc thanks to DDoS. I might have forgotten to retrieve the agenda from archives. He's able to ice up again quickly and that pretty much drains me of creds. There's a few turns where I'm clicking for creds to be able to play Feint first click - either he rezzes the Crisium Grid on HQ, which cancels Feint's "no access" clause and lets me access and trash the Crisium, or he doesn't rez it, and it counts as a successful run which could lead to an Apoc. He chooses to rez, which allows me to trash but keeps me poor. This pressure stalls him at 4 points. When time is called, I feint click 1 again, and he doesn't rez because of the agenda in hand that could give me the timed win. I don't steal it, but check archives and steal 2 more points. Tie at 4 pts each. One spectator proclaimed this was the "most climactic tie game ever". SYNC falls to Au Revoir Chaos Theory, and I drop to 1-2-1.

Match 3: Mike - Shell Game Potential Unleashed

I'd never played against PU until this game, so I didn't know what to expect. All the face downs looked like both Snare!s and Psychic Fields to me, so I just focused on centrals. His low ice count means I'm able to slow him down economically with siphons and eventually ruin his shell games with an Apoc. I ultimately avoid most of the net damage through careful play and find the last agendas. Win! SYNC benefits from Geist's poor draw and I squeak out another win, bringing me to 3-2-1.

Match 4: Brian - Virtual Tour CtM

This game was live-streamed on Twitch! Too bad I got swept. My friends sent me a screenshot of my opponent legworking the bollocks out of my hand*, so...there's that.

This game had huge economic swings as I eclipse 40 at one point but ultimately go broke. Mike's Mumbad Virtual Tours do some good work in that department. I have no CtM specific hate, so my strategy was just to out-money him to avoid HHNs and things and hope his ice is porous enough that I can threaten centrals all day. He has horrible draw and has to cycle through a few jacksons before his political assets show up, so that gives me a lot of time but unfortunately R&D doesn't show me any points. He feeds me a GFI in archives early-ish, so when i ultimately apocalypse his board and end the turn tagged, he can immediate EoI. In hindsight I should have paid the trace, but feared going totally broke. I ran out of money anyway once he immediately rebuilds his board. He probably anticipated the apocalypse and kept all the good stuff in his hand ;-). Anyways, a SanSan and 2 turns later he's scored out. Loss. His Geist and my SYNC stockpile mad moneys for awhile before I blow it all trying to drain his creds with HHNs. I finish the day at 3-4-1.

Okay, that's enough of me babbling. Stay true stay blue and all that.

*did not mean to sound sexual