Abram's Holy Toolbox

Finished a respectable 5th out of 12 players at the Huddersfield Servitor Series event. I decided I'd play this because I haven't played a 'proper' Blessed deck for ages and there are some cool new Miracles. With Abram's Crusaders granting bonuses for both Miracles and Melee Weapons, I decided I'd try out the new Headline, Shan Fan Showdown! - a great meta card if you're plagued by the likes of Calling The Cavalry and Hex Slingin'. Jacks also just got an efficient new deed and a cool new Deputy, plus the value is home to Rapier, a very efficient Melee Weapon. That settled one value.

Looking around for other Blessed Deputies (there aren't many), I decided I'd go for 10s as a secondary value. Deborah West covered both keywords, and Gang Yi provided another Deputy. With plenty of high value dudes Max Baine (Exp.1) seemed like a good choice, able to provide a discount for my generally expensive dudes. Jael's Guile provided both another Melee Weapon and also a Cheatin' Resolution, and Unprepared is doubly useful for a Melee deck as it can boot opposing guns.

That didn't leave me with much room for Miracles if I wanted a third shootout value. However, with Father Tolarios and the new Legend card, Ezekiah Grimme, I had a solution. I could include a selection of useful off-value Miracles to help deal with a variety of situations and dig for them early, getting my cool, powerful effects in to play and strengthening my draw structure while doing so. The rest of the deck was rounded out with some useful cards that worked with what I already had, while not being too expensive to get in to play when they showed up so they wouldn't stay in the deck and ruin draw hands in shootouts.

This structure would help with lowball wins early on but after a couple of turns would be able to reliably hit Full Houses and Four of a Kinds in shootouts.

Blessed starting posses are still quite squeezed for ghost rock. While it may look light on influence, I figured that with Andrew Burton's grifting, Grimme and Tolarios I should see a couple of Miracles on the first turn. Giving Andrew and Tolarios a spell would boost them by 1 influence, and Rev. Perry Inbody could receive a spell and the Deputy keyword to similarly benefit. With economy being tight, Agent Provocateur rounded out the posse to provide early game influence and home defence before making way for one of my expensive dudes.

The order in which Tolarios should search for Miracles will vary depending on the matchup, but Confession should be first, so you can keep generating bounty to use his ability. Give the spell to Tolarios, and then have Perry unboot him after he casts it. It's also useful later in the game, when its second ability can be used to move bounty from dudes to your stash - a nice bonus in a deck that generally won't see much ghost rock.

The one spell choice that may seem a bit odd is Lay On Hands over Get Behind Me, Satan!. This is because Shan Fan Showdown! blocks casualty reduction, which prevents Get Behind Me, Satan! from working. As Lay On Hands reacts to casualties being taken it still functions in a Shan Fan Showdown, so despite being trickier to use in general it has its place here.