Won a Store Championship today with Cerberus’ Leela list, though it did lose 2 out of 5 games. I only played NEH once and it totally owned in that match. I had severe trouble in my other matches which were 3x glacier type decks and PE. PE I lost, because, well, I just don’t handle PE well, period. I run too reckless, mostly, and this time got flatlined for it.
The glacier decks were tough, but went well twice mostly because I got Kati out early and got insane amounts of money from her. In the match Against EtF glacier I didn’t find Kati however and got almost completely shut out. I did manage to steal 5 points, but it never felt like I was going to win it. After the tourney my opponent told me that the hardest match he had was against my Leela though and he was constantly scared of Legwork and/or R&D pressure. So I guess I did something right even though I didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere.
Seeing how much glacier and taxing ice corps there were, I would change the list a little. I want a Sneakdoor for sure to put pressure on all three centrals. I’d probably cut down on Account Siphons or possibly drop them altogether. They didn’t do all that much today apart from 1 match where they totally won me the game. Tough choice. Sec Testing is another thing I’m on the fence about. It did very well in some matches, but against glacier decks where the opponent actively works around it, it was totally useless.
I will continue to test, I guess. Strangely, card draw was almost never something I missed. This decks gets its rig out insanely fast, with 2 fracters, 3 decoders, 6 killers AND 3 special orders and the rest is just drawing for money and multi access tools, which I almost never had problems with, except when I had Desperado and Sec Testing, but couldn’t use them and couldn’t find Kati.
Anyway, lots of rambling, but I wanted to thank Cerberus for his Leela list, I like it and will continue to play it for a while I think, but with a few slight adjustments to account for my meta.
Cerberus, what are you thoughts about Legwork? Every time I play it I find the anti-synergy it has with Leela’s ability (the addition of non-agendas to HQ mid-access) kind of frustrating and I feel like I get many fewer multi-agenda hits with it than I would with Andy.
But I see that you’re running 3, so perhaps I’m just suffering from a biased perception here. Do you see this as a problem at all?
Well it’s unquestionably 5% worse than Andy, with 5 cards hand upon first access. Does that mean you don’t run legwork, I doubt it. What’s the alternative don’t run hq mutiacess and have worse odds throughout?
The upside is that a lot of glacier decks will install advance an agenda in a remote. you can get the one from HQ, bounce the advanced one there and access that too…happened twice today. And completely circumvents the remote ice plus caprice and/or ash.
The alternative is HQI. I wonder if Leela might be the place it’s the right choice; I feel like with her ability I’d often prefer 2 2-card accesses than a 3-card and a 1-card access, for example. (Obviously the maths isn’t actually that simple, but still).
But probably only if I’m running Sneakdoor, and even then it still might be wrong, which is why I was wondering what other people’s thoughts were.
I think folk have covered a lot of the good points about bouncing agendas in remotes etc but you are right it can work against you in some situations. I still don’t think HQI is the right call, its too slow and telegraphs too much for the current meta.
I think my current build still needs work, I’m likely going to go to 2 Legwork, 2 Sneakdoor. I’m also thinking of dropping a LF for a Zu. Having a breaker with no drawbacks is very useful, I dropped an R&DI for it at Store Champs going to 2 but I don’t think that was right.
Grogboxer made an interesting point somewhere else about dropping Emergency Shutdown. It is a card I rarely use. Going to test.
Yeah, ES always seems like a good idea, and when you’ve got the chance/clicks to make it happen, huzzah, but to make it work with her ability you need to hit HQ, play it, and THEN score an agenda to bounce the ice. Otherwise there’s no real benefit from Leela as opposed to, say, Gabe or Andy – where it’s usually not played half so often, it seems like.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I sleeved up Stealth Leela to see if this thing works. It seems like the only people who have tried it out did so with a Logos variant, and I want to see how it fares in a more aggressive Leela deck.
Emergency Shutdown, Lucky Find, and Dirty Laundry were the victims from the supporting cast in the icebreaker suite changeover. I decided the full stealth suite was a bit combo-tastic for my tastes, and as everyone pointed out above, Leela is not Andromeda - the fewer moving pieces the better. So I’m all-in on Datasuckers now instead of Cloak to support the Silencer/Switchblade rig. With a full set of Datasuckers, that leaves the door open for Yog.0 as my primary code gate breaker, and I splashed for an Atman with all that spare influence from dropping the Lucky Finds.
I’m just scratching the surface with testing and tweaking, but the early results (however premature) are encouraging. I got four plays in with my latest build of the deck today against four different players, with two wins against NEH AstroBiotics and two wins against Red Coats/ETF Glacier. The deck is slower now… not from the Switchblade package itself, but from the loss of Lucky Finds and Dirty Laundry. If I don’t have Kati set up early, my economy can really drag in the early game now. That said, the late-game is much improved with the new suite, AstroBiotics didn’t have a chance and I was keeping up with the HB decks despite there being 2-3 ice deep on all servers and ELP on the table. Nowhere near enough plays to call this viable and start flaunting my deck list, plus I still haven’t gotten a game in against the RP Glacier decks that killed my Leela list posted above, but I’m enjoying the build a lot at this early stage.
It’s a tool to solve certain otherwise problematic things, like a rezzed Janus on RnD Wanting to make it work with Leela’s ability specifically is locking yourself into a combo mindset unnecessarily.
Most times, the way I use ES in my list is the following:
They go for scoring a 5/3
I Legwork
if I hit an agenda, the advanced card gets bounced, ES isn’t necessary
if I don’t, I shutdown a piece of ICE in the remote and go for it
Technically, if you were in a trolling mood, I guess you could argue that the synergy with Leela’s ability comes in the form of letting you not play the Shutdown in some cases, thus making fewer copies do the same amount of work.
I’ve only played two games against RP so far but I won both of them and Emergency Shutdown was key in both games. I agree that following it up with a bounce is not likely but I have found it helpful in the harder match-ups.
As an aside a card that I’ve found works better with Leela than anywhere else (but still probably not well enough to be viable) is kraken. By bouncing an unrezzed ICE you can ensure you hit a rezzed one. Still very situational though.
How’s everyones opinion on TME instead of RDI? I’ve found I don’t do that many accesses on R&D that I really need it, and a lot of games I would have been fine with TME instead. I’m currently going with 2 RDI and 1 TME to test it. Also, using sneakdoor instead of sec test has been great fot me. It puts more pressure on archives and helps against RP too, and I find the sec test engine is not really necessary un this scenario.
That’s one of the things I’m testing right now. Overall, I feel like TME is better against decks where you want your multi-access to feel like more of a surprise, whereas RDI is more of a tool to pressure the corp. Right now I’m trying out switching from 3x RDI to 2x RDI and 1x TME. I really like the pressure RDI puts on the corp as well as the consistent multi-access it provides if the corp can’t answer it with more ice, but there are times where I need an agenda NOW, and TME feels better for that for me. I like having that as at least an option in the deck, but I haven’t played enough games with it to really tell one way or the other if the change is significant.
I may try out desperado to replace the current Logos based build I’ve been using. It has been successful but my runs are not as aggressive and Logos allows me to pull out valuable cards for the new situation that arises such as medium or a 1x running interference, which is actually really good as 1x against glacier builds. I may cut the HQI and add in Legwork because of the telegraphing; however, I don’t mind sometimes because that leaves other servers protected less.
Sneakdoor helps in that situation and I have 2x unscheduled maintenance current which really disrupts some corp plans, especially blue sun. I’ve enjoyed Leela though, It has been a nice change of pace from playing anarch for so long.
Could we get a digest of links to everyone’s recent builds (perhaps up in the OP)? I’ve been rocking this super-fun DLR build for a while and I want to experiment with something else :). #lazyNetrunning
How are you finding Running Interference? In principle I really like it as a way to snatch points from a glacier deck. But the upfront cost is pretty high.
Wanting to make it work with Leela’s ability specifically is locking yourself into a combo mindset unnecessarily.