False Lead Jem (Countdown to 2024)

To celebrate the new year, myself and other members of the QTM testing group will be trying to publish daily decklists showing off ideas we've built and explored but didn't end up taking to tournaments for one reason or another. Here's something I've been tinkering with in various forms for quite some time now.

If you're not familiar with the combo, here's a brief overview. If you start your turn with a Clearinghouse in hand, you can install it and advance it twice. With two False Leads scored, you can then use them both to effectively skip the runner's entire turn. Jemison notably isn't a once per turn ability, so each forfeit will place 2 counters onto the Clearinghouse and hence you can do 6 meat damage at the start of your turn, killing the runner.

For reasons I can't fully explain, this combo is something of an obsession of mine. I've tried this in various shells: hard glacier using this as a janky way to win games where the runner can contest your 5/3s but you can score the False Leads; full combo where you want to assemble the pieces ASAP and win very early; tag and bag where False Lead can either work with Clearinghouse or Oppo Research and End of the Line to kill runners. This particular list is a hybrid rush approach, trying to preserve the classic score from remote early, score from hand late gameplan of most fast Weyland decks. Red Level Clearance doesn't just clicklessly draw you cards to help get a Clearinghouse when you're ready to kill, it also works with Oberth Protocol to fast advance.

The issues are mostly twofold. Firstly, the kill package just doesn't synergise that well with many other strategies. False Lead is not a widely playable card and when you're trying to rush out it can feel terrible, and Clearinghouse is universally awful. But maybe more importantly, the kill combo just.... isn't very good. Scoring 2 copies of the same specific 3/1 agenda is difficult, inconsistent, and a huge tempo sink, and even then while the combo skips the runner's turn and so denies a lot of the typical counterplay it still loses to Audrey pitching a Steelskin, a preinstalled Stoneship Chart Room, or Lat if you have 5 cards in HQ. It's just not very powerful for the amount of effort required to make it work.

Trying to make this idea work would eventually, through extended discussions about various options and ideas, lead to the 59 card Meteor Mining Ob that went undefeated at Italian National's team tournament. But I'm still hopeful for this False Lead list to make a splash somewhen in the future, if not on the big stage then at a local CO. The surprise kill potential when people aren't necessarily at their most competitive is huge.