Hellstrom Gadget-Dogs: Two-Fisted Justice

Howdy Pardners! For your consideration, I present the top 4 deck I piloted at the Evil is a Choice tournament at Gen Con. I had hoped to post this sooner while my memory of the matches was still fresh in my mind, but unfortunately that wasn't meant to be, so I apologize if this is a bit thin on the match details.

In general, this deck did a lot better than I thought it would. The key to the deck was building up to having one or more dudes with a Hydro-Puncher and a second melee weapon in order to generate a stud presence. Once this was established, it was fairly straightforward to wait for some decent action cards and then start getting aggressive.

The hardest part of running this deck usually revolved around deciding whether to boot a dude and/or boot a gadget for the ability on the dude/gadget vs. holding back to be able to use Darius Hellstromme's ability in order to collect the control point. As three of my five matches before the cut to the top 8 went to time, having those one or two extra control points from Hellstromme was valuable.

My two losses (one in swiss and the loss in the top 4 match) both came from Prodigy (shakes hydro-puncher fists at sky). His deck was designed to go off with Showboating, but I was able to more or less keep up between call-out’s with The Arsenal and Kidnappin'. However, at least in the top 4 match, I was unable to keep up with the eventual flood of deeds and lost in the end to his massive number of control points. Otherwise, the deck stood up fairly well to a number of different builds.

In hindsight, the main thing the deck was missing was ways to force callouts. The Arsenal is great for this, but the deck currently has no ways to make dudes wanted. Maybe a job for Andrew Burton, Framed or The Evidence, but what to cut? Similarly, a few more Kidnappin's would probably have been nice to include. Finally, sitting on 8’s, a number of opponents assumed I had Cheatin' Varmint. The deck is notably absent of cheatin’ punishment, although I’m not sure it was really an issue.

A few deckbuilding notes: My original posse included Travis Moone instead of Jacqueline Isham. I was concerned about having mediocre opening hands as it was critical to start putting gadget weapons on dudes as soon as possible. However, at the last second I ended up adding Jacqueline to the deck in favor of a second Outgunned and started her almost every game with almost no issues. If there was no opening hand gadget, there was likely one in my discard pile for Janosz Pratt to grab in case of an aggressive opponent. On another note, the draw structure was originally 3x16 at values of 7, 8, and 9, but I decided to loosen it up a bit in order to include a couple of extra weapon gadgets (Aetheric Shockwave Inducer) for the purposes of playing to Hellstromme’s strengths, and a couple of Unprepared’s (because Unprepared) and an Outgunned (because bullet rating was not going to be an issue and to mitigate the weaker draw structure). Having a weaker structure meant winning more lowball hands, which also ended up being important. For example, being able to trigger Janosz before my opponent had a chance to boot him or blank his ability. In another aspect, Ambrose Douglas is going to be an auto-include in just about every deck I can put him in - having a discard outlet with the ability to generate an influence that you don’t have to pay for during upkeep is fantastic. Finally, in my second match against Prodigy, I ended up starting "Thunder Boy" Nabbe instead of Jacqueline, as I knew I would need the influence to keep up. This definitely hampered my economy, but it was doable given the slow opponent and may have worked if I had seen more Kidnappin's.