Boomerang Leela - 3rd at York SC

RotomAppliance 2932

This is the Leela deck I took to 3rd in York SC, played on jnet. I fancied a change from 419, who I think is equally good, but could not make other runner factions work, so cobbled this together a few days ago. Initial testing proved positive, so I decided to try it in a tournament.

It's a fairly generic goodstuff Crim deck, but unlike the Engolo/Turtle combination I use to pressure the Corp out of 419, this deck relies on Leela's ability and 3 boomerangs to keep the Corp honest while it sets up the rather expensive rig. Boomerang gets you into remotes early on, or enables DoF out of nowhere, still retaining utility later on for dealing with certain ice, most notably Surveyor. Even against an ice that only costs 4-5 to break lategame, it can be worth reinstalling Boomerang onto it just to keep triggering Corporate Grant.

The reduced MU usage of the rig allows a bit of depth by having 2 Rezekis. The Procos look weird and were a random include to use up 6 influence, but also work well to give you some staying power in longer games. I also tried this deck with 3 Diesel instead, without coming to a conclusion on which is better, so for now I'm just enjoying myself using a card I haven't put in a serious deck for about 2 years.

The deck went 3-1, beating Chronos Protocol, Palana and PE, losing to Blue Sun in the cut. It's still an iffy matchup for crim, alongside deep glacier out of NBN. As usual crim is flexible enough to tech for the meta, with Hernando being a possible addition to help these matchups. Miss Bones is available for asset spam metas, or no one home if tagging and damage matchups are problematic.

Thanks to everyone for a fun event, and congrats to Aaryn on the win.

4 comments
10 May 2020 CritHitd20

Looks fun. Is there merit to adding Hostages so you can free up inf by playing only one ProCo? If so what would you add?

10 May 2020 RotomAppliance

It would be one way to save influence, but it's significantly worse on the first turn, especially without Sure Gamble first. Kati and Hernando would be includes to give Hostage more choice, but I don't like Kati much with Proco. Hunting Grounds and maybe 1 Stimhack are things that would be nice to have, but at that point slots are hurting as well as influence. Maybe going down to 2 Boomerangs?

14 May 2020 CritHitd20

I'm probably gonna play this deck at an SC this weekend. Really really fun getting to pivot between aggressive Criminal play and the more permissive Leela plan. I tried around 5 games going to 2x Hostage 1x Proco 1x TCA and that is very consistent for setting up the draw engine. The main matchup where I dislike that plan is against something like CtM, which tbh looks very good against this deck in general and I don't see an easy fix, maybe Bones but I'm not sure. With the excess inf I'm experimenting with a few tech swaps: -2 Proco, -1 RDI, -2 Rezeki, +1 Maemi, +1 HG +1 Stargate, +1 Turntable And then moving around a few other cards to add Bravados to feed to Maemi. I think these changes improve the deck's ability to interact BUT I'm not positive.

14 May 2020 RotomAppliance

Glad to hear you're enjoying it, hope the SC goes well! I haven't found the CTM matchup especially hard, but haven't faced it too much as far as I remember. If I did, I'd look at Miss Bones or No one home to tech against it.

Between the Grants and just playing a lot of econ, I think the deck can often fight CTMs board and come out on top.