Treadmill Decks: 5 Card Stud

Because The Treadmill is a boring place to be.

The idea behind this deck; use as many stud removal effects as possible to force opponents to play 5 card stud.

This was initially triggered from some comments in the Discord's general chat around Sun in Yer Eyes being a very strong card. But after looking through the card pool (and looking at some of DrTraveler's lists in the deckshop channel), it morphed into what we have here, which doesn't include SIYE at all.

The central core mechanic I decided to work around was Maurice Croker and Mongwau the Mighty. This immediately punishes any 1 starting stud dude lists, putting them into 5 card stud (while you get to play the game with Mongwau).

I did consider doing The Faceless One with Landon Grimes + Maurice, for a 3 dude combo vs. Maurice + Mongwau (and early versions of this was 3/Q/K, which are good abom values), but ultimately leaned towards a high-skill version that made used of the fact that Maurice is a Huckster (and with Mongwau, we have our core Hucksters). Regardless, this would likely be a viable path (and certainly, a better economic start).

To compliment that theme, I thought a fair bit on values, but ultimately landed Q/K primary (16x) and J secondary (8x), as it is high-value, enabling very consistent Soul Blast, and enabling high-skilled hex checks in general.

While SIYE remains the gold standard here, the clubs on these values are still very-aligned with what this list wants to do. Suppressing Fire works for both enabling your own studs and sinking into their studs, Nightmare at Noon is an excellent wide-stud disabler, and Thirst for Blood is a strong stud enabler.

Given we're giving almost all our club slots to the 5 card stud gameplan, we look to our hearts for Cheatin' Res (and CR is very necessary for this list, as both desperation cheating and forced cheating are common when you're forced to play 5 card stud). We get those from Ranger's Bible (with some nice 3 influence dudes in the deck, albeit expensive; Landon will suffice for the early game), and off-value Jael's Guile. There are better CRs we could reach for than Jael's if going off-value, but it keeps us high-value.

With that context, we get into the deck's wildcard: 54 Card Pick-Up. This card is, IMO, not good (or at least, requires too much skill for its value; 11 to boot 2 cards?). But, in addition to its usual toolbox utility, it does a lot of things in this deck specifically that we want it to:

• More on the start later, but suffice to say, it's all low value, so it's an anti-shotgun tech (assuming Dealer).
• Booting opposing dudes enables both Suppressing Fire and Jael's Guile.
• Because we're playing Mongwau, we want to have mediocre Hexes to throw away, and 54 Card Pick-Up fits the bill.

To accompany Mongwau and Maurice on this dark journey, we bring in Black Owl (making the ramifications of a bad draw hand all the worse), Landon (primarily for his influence), and a Pagliaccio (mostly for the NaN synergy: we can now hit their 3 studs with Pag + NaN).

Since the goal is to have Hexes fueling Mongwau, we run a wide suite of Hexes, and Ezekiah Grimme to help find them.

In terms of some shortcomings:

• Cash. This list is dead broke to start. We try to counterbalance that by only including 2/1 deeds on the deed side (outside The Whateley Estate, which is just too good to forgo). The hearts are mostly cheap (though also intended to be discarded to Mongwau, so there's some implicit upkeep there; we vastly prefer the 0 cost hexes to the bin). If you wanted to free up some income, you could forgo Grimme, replace Landon with a 3 cost 1 inf dude, and/or replace the Pag with a Rob. I liked what all those things are doing for the list, so, I instead chose to embrace poverty.
• It's a high-value Hex deck that doesn't run 5 Blood Curses. This just must be bad, but I also feel like I've broken a curse on myself by managing to build a list that let go of the indulgence.