Circus Resistance - Sydney Sheriff version

2015 Sheriff

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Circus Resistance	1	4	3

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Donny 125

Winner of the Burwood NSW sheriff event 22nd August.

Oddities makes for a deck that's hard to beat - the challenge is converting your resistance into game wins. This deck has two main engines for victory - Allie (2x, because you really want to see her at some point) and Hustings/Avie XP, letting you pull guys with influence away from their friends and murder them.

The draw structure is two blocks of 16; there are 8 2s as well which occasionally gives you a pair to round out a full house. However, the intention of the deck is to cheat early and often, pulling cheating 4oak or 5oak and soaking through your opponent's cheating punish with The Brute (or hitting them back with your own Bottom Dealin'). Soul Cage is an excellent addition from NaN, giving you even more ways to recycle people, mainly off your opponent's lowball.

The economy is worth highlighting - it starts with 5 hard influence (+1 in town square) and no upkeep. You can bring in another 7 dudes with no upkeep, really letting you swarm the board without requiring a lot of deeds in play to feed your troops. In some matchups (notably 4R control) playing your own deeds is very dangerous, and you should only ever really drop one for Avie to sit in.

This is not a blitz deck. Your high starting influence and great economy means you shouldn't need to rush into fights (or even into the town square); I typically dodge early fights unless I have the hand for it.

Your closer is Hot Lead Flyin', and ideally the game will come down to a big shootout when you have 8+ dudes in the town square and a couple of HLFs in play. Cheat, let your opponent knock your hand rank down with cheating punish, ace The Brute and drop as many HLFs as you can. Then cheat again, and again, happy to tie fights as needed to attrition your opponent's posse out of the game.

12 comments
Aug 22, 2015 mplain Very interesting and original! Why Travis and not Freddy? How useful is Hot Lead Flyin' in a deck with so many 6's than only trigger off Arnold? And how good is A Fight They'll Never Forget?
Aug 22, 2015 Donny Travis is the ideal shotgun platform - he's the only starter with two bullets. He's also entirely expendable and cheaper than Freddy, and isn't part of the draw structure for the deck. Hot Lead Flyin' is massive, even when it only triggers a single casualty. You're playing an attrition deck, and every dead guy counts. You don't need to ace their people, just get them off the board. A Fight... was experimental, as I only got my hands on NaN a couple of days before the event. It was decent, netting me a couple of control points through the event - one game I won after running home from a shootout with Allie and Bobo between them packing more control points than my opponent had remaining influence (and no deeds in play). It was partly meta for Nightmare at Noon, however, alongside the Winchesters; NaN can really hurt this deck because your studs have low bullet counts and you don't really want to fight a long drawn out battle with no studs, so you need to abandon the town square after one round if it hits. You have more static influence than most Oddities deck so running away isn't game over, but if your opponent can reliably play NaN each shootout you're not in a good spot unless you have answers.
Aug 22, 2015 tbowers13 But if your opponent plays Nightmare at Noon you won't be able to respond with A Fight They'll Never Forget. Both of them are Headlines and there can only be 1 Headline played per shootout.
Aug 22, 2015 mplain `@tbowers13` yes, and if he plays A Fight They'll Never Forget first, then his opponent won't be able to play Nightmare at Noon. With this deck's structure, I'd expect it to win lowball a lot. `@Donny` if you're okay with Hot Lead Flyin' only making a single casualty, then why not play Takin' Ya With Me? It's pretty much the same thing, and it's often easier to trigger. Also, what do you think about adding 1-2x Hiram Capatch to the deck to put pressure on the opponent's economy? Or do you find enough hard influence for that, midgame?
Aug 23, 2015 Donny `@mplain` has it right - the meta is to play your headline first, and yes, you win lowball reliably against shooter decks and their 3x16 draw structures. TYWM is decent, and I've played it in similar decks, but HLF is at worst a TYWM (given Arnold will be there) and it has >50% chance of causing a lot more damage. The bullet requirement on TYWM is actually also quite difficult sometimes, especially against shooters running bullet reduction (where you most need this sort of React).
Aug 23, 2015 mplain `@Donny` bullet reduction doesn't really affect your capacity to play Takin' since it checks for printed bullets... Unless your casualty stays on the board if saved by Arnold, in which case it does matter, yeah.
Aug 23, 2015 tbowers13 @mplain I guess, but it only really helps you if you win lowball and they have N@N in hand at the same time you have Fight. It'll help sometimes, I just don't feel it'll happen often enough to warrant playing the card just because your opponent might be playing N@N and you might win lowball during the turn they have it in hand, assuming you also have it in hand that turn as well.
Aug 23, 2015 Donny `@tbowers13`it's not -only- there for NaN; it also gives me a control point for acing people, which is helpful for a deck that has limited ways of getting control points on the board. It's definitely a borderline slot, but as a utility card it does two helpful things for me (and I don't mind it acing itself since it's not one of my two key numbers).
Aug 23, 2015 Donny `@mplain` Where are you reading about printed bullets on TYWM? Is there an errata I'm not aware of?
Aug 23, 2015 mplain `@Donny` it's been this way forever, it's in the FAQ. Basically, you play Takin' not immediately after you discard/ace a dude, but after the 'taking casualties' step ends, and by that time the dude is already in the discard pile or boot hill. The game doesn't remember if they had any bullet modifiers at this point. Also, tokens are removed from the game right after being discarded or aced, so the game cannot trace their bullet rating at all, and uses 0 by default.
Aug 23, 2015 Donny Ah OK. Bullet modifiers on living guys last until the end of the shootout, and I wasn't aware that dying wiped them. That presumably means that if your Abomination dies in round 1 of the shootout, and you Soul Cage him back in during round 2, he loses all modifiers (positive and negative)?
Aug 24, 2015 mplain `@Donny`absolutely. There is no card memory. When a card leaves play for whatever reason and then re-enters play, it's a brand new card.