Hell on Wheels? (Hartlepool Abomination Series 1st Place)

This deck came about following some musing on the Discord chat about what to play for this event. I was reminded of the idea for a Wretched Legendary Holster deck running mid-values, as with The Wretched, the Holster, a Hydro-Puncher and a La Quema you can get to 9 bullets, which opens up your deckbuilding quite a bit assuming you can manage the set-up. Margaret Hagerty and Prof. Aloysius Roe can both help with your inventin' pulls for The Wretched themselves. However that's not what this deck ended up trying to do.

Because Prof. Aloysius Roe has the gadget keyword while he is in play, I realised the same tower of goods and gadgets would work with him in a less effective but more hilarious way (I imagine his wheelchair becomes some kind of La Quema-drawn chariot). With that being the aim I was more restricted in my values, so the deck became a tweaked version of the low value Morgan holster deck I built for my base set only challenge. With Roe, Margaret and Diego you can still pass difficulty 9 pulls for gadget dudes and horses respectively, so I threw in a Wretched and a Personal Ornithopter too. The prospect of a Shotgun-toting Wretched flying around performing hit 'n' run attacks was too good to pass up.

Morgan Stables is ridiculously good in tandem with the Holster; you don't even need to win lowball if you have a way to move your dude into your posse via shootout play as you can then trigger the home's React and immediately ace a dude before your opponent has a chance to Unprepare (or similar) your dude. I'd definitely consider increasing The Stakes Just Rose to four copies due to the surprise factor of using this card to trigger the React.

On the day I never actually constructed Hell on Wheels. It seemed like no matter how many times my deck was shuffled, the three Doomsday Supplies that were included to help achieve it ended up clumped together and mostly showed up in draw hands. I think I only used one twice across four games. Hired Guns showed up in my hand far more reliably so The Wretched showed up every game and got to fly around shotgunning dudes a couple of times. The low number of deeds was definitely a problem as in a couple of games it took several days before I saw one in my play hand. Lowball wins helped my economy but I couldn't build up as quickly as I'd have liked.

A win, timed win and a loss saw me scrape to second place on strength of schedule, which I certainly wasn't expecting. In the final (against another Legendary Holster - this one a 108 Rabbit Fu deck) I felt my win came about more due to my opponent's bad luck than anything else. He'd gone undefeated in swiss but his deck just stalled out in the final and I didn't feel like my victory was particularly deserved. The other games were really fun though!