Leela Patel, v. 1

The initial version of my Leela Patel deck had 55 cards, which was ridiculous. And, when playing it, there were indeed some cards that I never played; unfortunately, they actually largely served useful roles, they just were the wrong cards. So I swapped out two copies of HQ Interface with two copies of Legwork, and two copies of Crash Space with two copies of Plascrete Carapace. That last swap did at least mean that I didn’t have any resources that I would be really sad to lose, so I got rid of my Decoy, but otherwise, that didn’t help with the card count.

Nels suggested that I didn’t need the Dysons: his attitude is that Sneakdoor Beta (which is the main memory hog) is useful for a time, but then you discard it once you need memory pressure. The thing is, with one Sneakdoor Beta, I couldn’t even count on that; so I ended up removing the Sneakdoor, one Dyson (the second may go away soon), and also one copy of Emergency Shutdown (because my HQ access isn’t particularly reliable now). And with no non-event multi-access, Demolition Run was much less useful, so I replaced it with a Parasite.

Here’s the current state: 51 cards, so it’s still bloated:

Leela Patel

Leela Patel: Trained Pragmatist

Event (20)

• 3x Account Siphon
• 2x Dirty Laundry
• 2x Emergency Shutdown
• 3x Forged Activation Orders
• 3x Inside Job
• 2x Legwork
• 2x Special Order
• 3x Sure Gamble

Hardware (10)

• 2x Clone Chip •• ••
• 3x Desperado
• 1x Dyson Mem Chip
• 2x Plascrete Carapace
• 2x Prepaid VoicePAD

Resource (7)

• 3x Compromised Employee
• 2x Security Testing
• 2x Symmetrical Visage

Icebreaker (8)

• 1x Cerberus “Rex” H2
• 2x Corroder •• ••
• 1x Faerie
• 1x Femme Fatale
• 1x Mimic •
• 1x Passport
• 1x Yog.0 •

Program (6)

• 2x Crescentus
• 3x Datasucker • • •
• 1x Parasite ••

15 influence spent (max 15)
51 cards (min 45)
Cards up to The Valley

The main problem that I’m having now with winnowing it down further is that it’s actually doing surprisingly well! (And I am very glad I have three copies of Desperado.) I definitely don’t feel like I’m getting my icebreakers out quickly enough, but I’m also feeling that I’m messing with people enough even without a full breaker suite.

So I’m really not sure what to do next. Get rid of the remaining Dyson? I haven’t actually used Crescentus yet, though I’ve seen some situations where I was a credit or two off from it setting up a perfect combo; maybe get rid of one or both of those? (But it still seems like derezzing is useful for Leela, and I just got rid of one Emergency Shutdown…) It seems ridiculous having both three sentry breakers and three code gate breakers; but if I’m feeling that I’m not getting to my breakers enough, then reducing those might not be the right tactic. Security Testing is nice but hasn’t paid off hugely in practice; maybe ditch that, or Symmetrical Visage? Maybe ditch one copy of Account Siphon, though the counterargument there is that three of them increases the chance that you’ll get them early, where they are by far the most useful? (So maybe ditch all three? But keeping the corp broke is very useful, especially if I want to play Forged Activation Orders.) Heck, maybe deal with my icebreaker-finding troubles by adding in a third Special Order?

I dunno: I think that, for now, I’ll keep on playing it and try to figure out more about the core of this deck.