Morgan Regulators Ranger 2020 T4

Here is the deck I took to second place at the 2019 European Marshall, back as a meta check for the 2020 Online Ranger event. It continued to perform well, going 5-0 in Swiss and winning one game in the T8 before being defeated in the T4 by Jordan Pridgen's excellent Blessed House of Many Faiths deck. While from a competitive play point of view losing causes much wailing and gnashing of teeth, from a playtest perspective the result was pleasing as an opposing Scattergun helped do significant damage to my horse/sidekick attrition strategy. :)

In the T4 game I correctly guessed my opponent didn't have any cheatin' punishment, but could only manage a legal four of a kind while Jordan had a legal five of a kind. I took the risk as he had seen one joker already and the risk spectacularly failed to come off. Given Jordan had emptied his hand and I'd failed to remove Randall with my kidnappin', I now faced a deck that had played out lots of cards on T1 so had its miracles, a weapon and some deeds while I'd lost two horses and Henry Moran. I limped along from there and managed to discard some opposing dudes, but rapidly got overwhelmed by opposing deeds. I should have attached a horse to Jarrett Blake so I could swap in if my opponent opposed the Maggie Harris job I risked. Jordan opposed, pulled in his other dudes with Walk the Path and Twilight Is Upon Us, a neat play! While I letting avenged myself on two of the three dudes that opposed my job that turn Jarrett Blake got booted out by an unprepared. If I'd attached a horse to him Morgan Regulators would have unbooted him and I might have been able to chess match to stay around for another turn with plenty of ghost rock in the bank to hire any dudes I drew. A lesson in playing properly as you don't know when you might have a route back in!

This is a fairly standard Calling The Cavalry deck (boo, hiss).

Conscious that not every value/faction has easy answers to calling the cavalry, as this deck demonstrated. It is still something I feel the need to consider when building a shooting deck, whether it is how to get rid of opposing horses (Pistol Whip and Point Blank here) or how to answer it with other decks. As my vanquisher showed, we're starting to get more answers like Magnum Rounds (which I ran in a recent Law Dogs deck that did well before dropping out at the cut to T8), Virginia Ann Earp, Valeria Batten or the slightly wider range of headlines now available. Or even Shan Fan Showdown! and Pete Spence to fetch your melee weapons!

My vanquisher's Scattergun was a good tool against horses too, killing off Cavalry Escorts easily. It would also be a good tool against the Decimator Array, a card often seen at the top tables.

As ever, thanks to Pinebox for organising a great event and to so many for taking part.