There's Death in Them Thar Hills!

Here's the final version of the deck I played for most rounds in the Online Legends event. The plan's a fairly simple one - Jasper Stone only allows your shooter to contribute their bullet bonus to your draw hand, so the idea was to get Zachary Deloria's bullets buffed up with a combination of Weapons on him and influence buffs on Enapay. The Mixer joined the party to protect Zach's bullets from any outside meddling.

The A-3-7 structure stayed the same throughout, with a few minor tweaks between the earlier games (including dropping Owl's Insight which must have been a leftover from when first building the deck with different values in mind!) The largest change was a shift from using The Spiritual Society outfit to Black Hills Guardians. I'd orginally gone with Spiritual Society because it gave bonuses to staying in town square and I saw this very much as a town square blockade deck with Allie Hensman and Hustings as closers, but I realised that the deck was very vulnerable to send home effects like Pistol Whip taking out Zachary Deloria, and Black Hills Guardians means you can return a dude to a shootout once per day.

With the big bullets plan in place, Shotguns seemed like an obvious include in the deck. After the first time playing, following some brainstorming with the other Stone players in a group chat, I added more LeMat Revolvers to give the deck another trick. Because the +2 bullet bonus to your shooter from Stone sticks around throughout the Resolution step, it was possible to get some big hand rank boosts just from using the Resolution action on the LeMat. I only got to pull this trick off once throughout the whole event, but it ended up being the right call as I ended up with a rank 9 hand vs a legal 4oaK (rank 8), where otherwise I'd have only had a Full House (rank 7).

Other than enabling the LeMat trick, I didn't feel like Stone really brought any benefit to the deck, while his drawback certainly hurt. With the deck needing multiple dudes in the shootout (Zach/Enapay/Mixer, plus Rob Wilby for safety), the +2 bullet bonus was actually less than the backup stud and draw. After Stone was used in a shootout, I was a lot more vulnerable to subsequent shootouts. I didn't include something that would enable me to target then ace specific dudes, such as Point Blank, so I didn't see any real benefit from the two control points gained from him across five games - they were either gained in a blowout shootout that ended the game anyway, or wouldn't really have mattered with Allie Hensman in play and freedom to play deeds with control of the town.

I think dropping his cost by 1 is a good move. There are definitely things you can do with him, but he's quite difficult to make work. There are also many things that can go wrong with your plan and there's often no good fallback option if things go badly.