Duel of the Faiths (Doomtown Online Launch Event)

I wanted to do something with Arielle Moriah and the new and improved Lay On Hands and Soothe from the Weird West Edition. This led me to looking at Frontier Feud, as once I had Lay on Hands in place I could send a dude in to a one-on-one fight fairly risk-free - I think Ricochet is the only card that could cause my dude to leave play. If my dude had to be saved with Lay on Hands, Arielle would unboot with her React and be able to ready them to fight again with Soothe. This sounded like total jank but something that would be interesting to play, so I went all-in on it.

Frontier Feud making your opponent call your dude out made me think Jacqueline Isham would be a good dude to start. She's useful for early defence, and then can get into Feuds later in the game and maybe take out an opposing dude or even get me a CP.

I then looked at ways to buff her up to make her a formidable solo shooter, and as I already had Blessed, Benediction and Sword of the Spirit seemed like good bets. All this needed a fair bit of setup, so in came Ezekiah Grimme, and with lots of cards that booted my dudes I decided to go with 108 Gracious Gifts, as I didn't think that House of Many Faiths worked as well with the idea behind the deck (even if it would work far better with the deck name).

A quick test game on the eve of the tournament exposed a flaw in this already overly complicated plan, in that against passive decks Frontier Feud didn't get me CP anywhere near quickly enough to threaten their influence. I still wanted to play with the idea so I made some quick tweaks and added one each of Meet the New Boss and Election Day Slaughter to give me a couple more options.

One thing that became very apparent in my first game in the tournament was that if I didn't see my Miracles early on, I wasn't well set up to play aggressively and had to hang on where I could. Another problem that soon became apparent was that quite a lot of my stud dudes were Blessed, so if I got one of them into play and wanted to have them spearhead my attack, I wouldn't be able to boost their bullets with Benediction as it would increase their Blessed skill instead. I was also lacking Melee Weapons to make studs with Sword of the Spirit.

I did find that being able to send any dude out to fight solo without any real worries was actually really good even without jobs and callout cards. Opponents had to decide whether to boot backup dudes into fights at my deeds and leave town square open or weakened, knowing I was just sending one dude in and they weren't going to leave play pretty much whatever the outcome.

This version of the deck didn't quite work, but I think shifting the values around would help it perhaps perform a little better. I'd definitely swap the Q stuff for Ks and just keep a couple of Soothes around as off-values. Brother Petrovic would make a solid replacement for Gabriel Prior for this strategy, and I think due to how his React is worded you could use that before Reacting with Lay on Hands to drain your opponent's Ghost Rock. Election Day Slaughter is a bit more versatile than Frontier Feud (and cheaper), and there are other good options: Point Blank to play attrition, Test of Wills to boot opponents out, or The Winning Agenda to help dig for Miracles faster. I'd also consider swapping the 8s for 9s for some good non-Blessed stud dudes as well as backup Blessed and Scattergun. Epidemic Laboratory would give a clock option. The presence of Lay on Hands would let you run it with a solo Blessed and there are a couple of ways in the deck to unboot the dude after the job.

I ended up with a record of 2 wins, 1 win at time, 1 loss and 1 loss at time. The games I won were ones I was able to get my Miracles in play early enough to start throwing dudes into solo fights and chess about with Soothe and Walk The Path. My losses were a game where I took too long to get set up and couldn't do enough fighting later on to catch up, and to an aggressive deck that kept attacking me coupled with me drawing no Miracles and whiffing with Grimme too. I'll hold off on more detailed game write-ups as some of my opponents may still have games to play or even have made the top eight. Details will be sketchy at best anyway with this event having taken place over 5 weeks and I neglected to make notes. Despite the deck not quite working I still managed to have a series of excellent, tense and enjoyable games. Thanks again to everyone I played against!