London Deputy, 2nd Place (4-2) - Kung Fu 108, 3s 4s and SF

I've been playing a lot of Eagle Wardens recently but I don't think their particularly strong in the current environment. Yes you can get a lot of spirits out to cover casulaties but Flight of the Lepus and It's Not What You Know... aren't great anti-cheating with Den of Thieves and Devil's Joker (Red) being popular and they don't have very good access to shootout actions.

So instead I set my sights on the other new faction The 108 Righteous Bandits. I didn't want to play some form of landslide which seems to be the popular way to play them and instead went for the Kung Fu approach. 108s weakness at the moment seems to be anti-cheating and initially went with using the As value and Pair of Six-Shooters which admittedly stops the ever popular Rapier and other melee weapons but doesn't really do much else so instead I went for Bottom Dealin'. However, you can't run 3x16 with Bottom Dealin' because you're just risking giving your opponent a good hand so my answer is 13 3s, 12 4s and then Straight Flush for shootout actions. With a 3 stud Bai Yang Chen you get about a 70% for straight or better (90% Full House or better if you are willing to cheat) with only a 1% chance drawing better than 3 of a kind with Bottom Dealin'.

The Tao of the Jade Rabbit is great for bouncing in and out sending opposing dude's home booted allowing you to isolate weak dudes with influence and Sun in Yer Eyes and Faster on the Draw can really hurt those pesky stud dudes that you need to maintain the Technique Combo. I think Sun in Yer Eyes is better than trying to run the Tao of the Zhu Baije because you don't want to fail your Tao of the Jade Rabbit pulls with Zhu's Reward and not getting Bai Yang Chen back in the posse and you have to give up Bottom Dealin' in order to keep the Zhu Baije combo going.

I went 3-1 in swiss, winning against 4th Ring Control, Law Dogs and Eagle Wardens but losing out to 108 landslide in the final round of swiss. I was always going to struggle against landslide 108 because I don't run many deeds to pay for my extra dudes and with no way of forcing a shootout the shootout actions can clog up the hand.

I entered the top 4 cut in 2nd seed and beat another Eagle Wardens deck. I lost Bai Yang Chen early but got Nunchucks on Hamshanks and Ramiro Mendoza allowing me to use Hamshanks to send his Spirit Dance dudes home booted and pick off his other dudes.

So I progressed to the finals where I played against the 4th Ring control deck that I beat in the first round. I made a couple of crucial mistakes moving Hamshanks out of the town square leaving all my Kung Fu dudes booted in the town square not allowing me to send a Steven Wiles home booted and I didn't include Randall in my posse allowing me to go home booted after my first round loss in the shootout. After many rounds of fighting I couldn't draw a good cheating hand even though I presume my opponent had no cheating resolutions left (and I was sitting on 2 Bottom Dealin') and lost all my influence and the game.

So 2nd place overall. Sad not to win the Jackson's Strike mat but happy with my overall play. My only possible changes would probably to play Kidnappin' over Shifu Speaks since I rarely used Shifu Speaks since you cycle so much anyway if you get into shootouts you don't really need the extra Kung Fu and Kidnappin' helps against those pesky landslide decks and probably against 4th Ring decks packing a lot of hexes.

I managed to record quite a few games from the tournament. They'll eventually be appearing on my youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1yryfZYk0nE7c9DmMw4YkA