"Jobslide" NA Championship top 8, top Sloane

This is the deck I ran at Gencon this year, finishing 7th in Swiss and top Sloane.

Jordan Caldwell requested stories, so here goes:

Elliot Smithson had a plan: give up the outlaw life and build up Gomorra. With his buddies The Fixer and Antoine Peterson, he figured he could open enough Saloons and Casinos to Establish(in') Who's in Charge. Clementine Lepp would work the bar and an Agent Provocateur with a surprisingly large inventory of rare, investment-grade fiddles to sell was brought on board to supply initial funds. Everything was humming along nicely until some abominations with hammers showed up and started smashing things...

It is essentially a slide deck that relies on jobs for extra economy and control points. You really want Clementine in a Saloon both for the influence boost and so that you can safely use the Protection Racket box ability at your own deed for at least the first day or two - you'll often have one in your starting hand, but if you don't use The Fixer's ability to grift one. If you don't need a saloon, your best options are Fiddle Game followed by Establishin' Who's in Charge.

Plan to keep The Fixer around - you've got 6 GR to start, so even though all your upkeep goes to him you'll have plenty to play with. Usually after the first turn or so your economy will kick in and you'll have plenty of money to go around. Agent Provocateur both functions as protection for your dudes at home and as a body to run Fiddle Game - she never leaves your home when running the job, so it works fine.

Keep one side of your home free to play Cliff's #4 Saloon once you find it and use it to make The Fixer a stud. Draw structure is fairly loose, so you don't actually want to shoot if you can avoid it, but opponents tend to assume Sloane == good shooting and play cautiously around The Fixer's four bullets (especially if he's a stud via either Cliff's or De Annulos Mysteriis). Your goal is to build out a bunch of deeds so that between Fiddle Game and the deeds you've got a ton of money. Force your opponent to spread out to cover them, and then run Establishin' Who's in Charge wherever they aren't. Remember Elliot can unboot himself if he leads, so as long as you have a target where you can't be opposed he can run the job by himself, cover the cost for you, and still be mobile for later in the turn.

Antoine Peterson is key - as one opponent said, "that guy does a lot of work!". Move around, get your opponent's dudes out of position, and run home booted. Then Antoine shows up, giving you influence, a job, and unbooting a dude that your opponent thought was done for the turn. If you're careful and time things right, you can run Establishin' 2-4 times in a turn and still have most of your dudes unbooted, which makes for a big swing.

Mugging is not something you want to do often, but is useful for neutralizing goods/spells and sometimes just to boot a dude home. I won one game by Mugging with a stud Fixer in a situation where she had to defend and managing to pull a legal four of a kind.

Cheating in lowball can really ruin your day by discarding your fiddle games if your opponent has reliable cheating resolutions and has realized that the deck isn't that strong a shooter. In my first game against Rich Carter he got out Jael's Guile early. Whenever I had a cheating lowball hand (which happened more often than expected), he would use the hammer even though it had no effect in itself just to discard the Fiddle Games. The same thing happened with Fetch in a later game.

Full Moon Brotherhood causes problems as well by shutting down Clementine - you have to be much more careful about when it is safe to Protection Racket with her, which cuts into your GR. It didn't help that out of 6 games in the tournament, 5 of my opponents were Brotherhood :(.

As far as changes - I'm thinking about dropping a dude or two, it was very rarely worth the money to play Milt or Rabid Rance. I originally had 4 Someone Else's Problem in the deck but during testing found it wasn't as useful as I expected. With 2 I don't remember if I ever drew one across 6 games, but I also can't remember ever really wanting one. I might drop them altogether; if I do I'll probably switch values from 10 to something else as well.

Railroad Station or other movement would be useful in order to jump on opposing deeds when your opponent is camping in town square. It would also be good to tighten up the draw structure just a bit so the deck presents a more credible shootout threat.

Overall, had a blast as always - everyone in the Doomtown community is great to play against, regardless of how the game goes!