EU Marshal 2016 - EW Blockade Top 8

Man I love blockade decks. There's something about sitting 6 or 7 stud and a handful of draw in Town Square that just feels amazing :)

I've been doing this quite effectively out of 108 for the last few months using Xui Yin Chen to turn 6 chuds into studs. However I failed to cut using the deck at our recent Outlaw so had a crisis of faith with the deck. People have gotten wise to my shenanigans so I realised I had to try something else. I've been fiddling about with Turtle's Guard for a while but haven't really been happy with anything so I took to DTDB.co and decided to search decks that used it to gain some inspiration. I wasn't let down. Dave Hammond (@Kollatt) had piloted not only Turtle's Guard toa 2nd place finish at an Outlaw, but Turtle Guard Blockade! This was the deck Iwas looking for. I had a quick look through, it felt solid and did everything I want a blockade deck to do.

Rather than just take the list and play it I reached out to Dave to a) make sure he was cool with me running it (never hurts to let a creator know) and b) See if he had any thoughts post event on any changes.

The only thing Dave really thought the deck was needed was a Rico to be able to scout for slide gainst Wordly Desires. 108 original and MCC Original are good shouts at guessing correctly. Desires though, that home is so versatile it could be doing anything and guessing wrong costs you games. We must have spent a good hour deciding who to cut to fit Rico in. I don;t know why we both seemed to think we had to switch a dude out for him. HOwever eventually it dawned on me that I could just drop a Mountain Lion. Problem Solved.

I also opted to switch a single tusk for a single whiskey flask. Since you have guys sitting in TS doing nothing for a some turns, the flask gave them a purpose and added yet more card draw to the deck. Tusk gets you a card when you play it, but if you're not planning on moving Whiskey Flask can be a serious workhorse for card draw (it was).

I wasn't sold on the choice of 6s for the deck and I looked at 5s. My plan was to switch out the less useful 6 value dudes and deeds and ad in the Professor and some better deeds and also to swap One Good Turn for Fiddle Game to pick up the income slack but Dave was adamant that 6s HAD to stay. Honestly the jury is still out for me on that one. Yes OGT is also draw, however landing a fiddle game gets it out of your deck so you;re drawing 1 deeper from then on anyway. With the benfit of hindsight I'd probably overrule Dave on this (Sorry Dave) and gone with the Fiddles. I only really got cash off these in one game, with TS so heavily guarded it would have been no problem sticking the fiddles out. They also thins your deck for draw structure by not going round and round.

3s and 4s are solid values for all card types so I was happy with those.

So all we really ended up with was Dave's deck and 2 swapped cards.

If I can remember my games I'll post a round breakdown later.