Puss 'n' Boots (Online Marshall Top 4)

A bunch of 'brave' outlaws hiding behind a cat, who lost at least three of her nine lives along the way.

Going into the event I decided to go with my head rather than my heart and choose the more easy to wrangle Desolation Row over the more challenging but more fun Protection Racket, as I didn't trust myself not to get into a tangle playing with that on any one of three online Doomtown platforms. With that decided, I figured I might as well throw in a good few bounty-giving cards, while not relying too heavily on the traditional Kidnappin'. So in went a Bloody Star, and several Antoine Petersons to fish out some Heists. Quarter Horse seemed worth inclusion with so much job potential in the deck, and Vamoosin' was new and looked like a fun way to eject from a bad situation, or to eject a bad opponent. The rest was fairly standard Des Row stuff, plus the Whateley Estate cause it's just great.

The draw structure is 2x16 on threes and fives, with Jacks as a very loose third value, which ended up shooting pretty consistently overall. I did worry that I wasn't including quite enough cheatin' punishment but, if this event was anything to go by, people don't cheat much! If I was ever to use this deck again I think I'd want a couple more Shootout actions - maybe Outgunned would slot in nicely, possibly at the expense of Jackson's Strike, Flight of the Lepus, or one of the Heists.

Swiss, 4-1, 5th Place

I'm afraid my recollections of the five rounds of Swiss are sketchy at best. In short, I had one bye, one win before time, one absolute annihilation at the hands of Adam Whitehouse's Bayou Vermilion Railroad, and two timed wins which a better player than me probably would've closed out earlier. In one of those, against Nathan Wood's Abram's Crusaders, we decided to play to a finish for fun, and ended up shooting lumps out of each other for about 3 hours. Great stuff!

Quarter-final - Derek McConnell's Robo Regulators

I knew that Derek was playing a Calling The Cavalry deck, thanks to Prodigy's Heartless Pieces of Grit! decklist here. This was bad news, as my deck doesn't really have many answers to hand rank manipulation, so I had to hope for a fast start before too many of his horses hit the table. Luckily for me, that was exactly what happened. I won lowball, and drew a starting hand of a Pearl-Handled Revolver, a Sun in Yer Eyes, a Bloody Star, Scratch, and The Whateley Estate - so a bare minimum 4 CP after turn 1 if I played my cards right. Marion got the revolver, and moved to the town square in time to see a Nickel Night Inn spring up on the other side of the street. This was a problem for Allie so I sent Florentino into the square first to draw out the Inn's action. Allie then went to town to earn her CP, while across the street Bobo made an appearance and Chuan "Jen" Qí got hold of a Yagn's Mechanical Skeleton. I figured I might as well contest the Nickel Night Inn with Marion, Makaio and Willa, thinking that at best I'd neutralise that pesky ability and end up with 5 CP at the end of the day, and at worst I'd lose Willa. In the ensuing fight I hit Jen with Sun in Yer Eyes to leave us on the same bullets, and then drew into the classic conundrum of either playing a legal 3 of a kind, or a cheating 5. Fortune favours the reckless, so I cheated and got away with it, winning by 3 ranks. My opponent, unaware of the ridiculously fortunate remnants of my play hand, decided to discard Jen's 2 INF, rather than Aunt Lou's 1, leaving him on 4 INF. He was now booted out with no horses, so I gave Marion the Bloody Star, ran the Desolation Row job, and played The Whateley Estate for a ridiculously lucky turn 1 win.

Semi-final, Jordan Pridgen's House of Many Faiths

Day 1 of this game went reasonably well for me. We got into a big shootout in the Town Square, and my Outlaws managed to shoot Xiaodan Li and Asakichi Cooke at the expense of their own Willa, before the Bandits ran away leaving us free to run the home job. Day 2 evened things out a bit. Makaio died trying to avoid a Curse of Failure while home alone, despite forcing Henry Moran to Vamoose (the only shootout action I saw in the entire game) Then another shootout ensued in the square, killing another Anarchist at the expense of Lawrence. By this point I was down to 3 dudes, and drawing fewer cards than my opponent, so I made the difficult decision to run away - with the benefit of hindsight, I think I should've stood my ground there. Having given up control of the Town Square I spent the next couple of days regrouping at home, hiding from dudes Consecrated by my lowball hands' refusal to stop cheating. Eventually sufficient deeds appeared across the street that I was forced to make a stand. However, I got the order of things all wrong, Kidnappin' Randall when I should've been pulling off a Heist, leaving me a GR short of being able to play Antoine and potentially transforming the board in my favour. Instead, Allie had to run the Des Row job alone with a Pearl-Handled Revolver, and was Unprepared for such a desperate act.