HoMF DMH (Doomtown Online 2023 Q1 League)

I put this deck together so quickly for the league top four games, I didn't even have time to come up with a snappy deck name :D I don't think it quite deserves one yet as there's plenty of room for improvement.

House of Many Faiths (HoMF) received a seemingly unintentional buff in its Weird West Edition printing, as the updated text no longer requires you to have a dude with a Miracle to use the first part of the ability. Of course, I wanted to try this out with Dead Man's Hand as the home was already noted as being good for that structure (and sadly, my old favourite The 108 Righteous Bandits isn't Weird West legal).

What I should have done was check before the semifinal whether this change had been captured in Doomtown Online. However, I only decided to build a deck with HoMF about 10 minutes before my game was scheduled.

It hadn't, though I was lucky enough to draw one of my two Miracles early on in both games I played and so could still make use of the home. I feel that being able to do the card cycling bit without doing the movement bit will be quite a boost to a home that already was pretty good. It's definitely something to keep an eye on.

The deck itself isn't anything particularly special, and I could make it better. For use on Doomtown Online I'd definitely put more Miracles in it! I think I'd cut Aces down to being the tertiary value, and beef up the Fives. The Ace Dudes are fine, but I'd drop The Mayor's Office as it's too risky early game, probably drop Dies Irae since I only put it in because it's a Miracle, and maybe drop one of the Six-Shooters too. I'm not sure on the Establishin' Who's in Charge/Murdered in Tombstone split. I like Establishin' and it helps with the relatively low number of Control Points, but Murdered makes studs and helps you find Cheatin' Resolutions, which is really nice to have. The deck doesn't have enough dudes with high bullets for Make 'Em Sweat or Polite Inquiries to work well.

Oh, and Soul Cage can go. While you can do a neat combo with E Gui, it's quite situational and the deck wants stuff it can get into play easily, so no 3 cost goods.

A couple of Sentinels and another Benediction are definite adds, and I'd borrow some dudes from other factions to flesh out my Fives and drop a couple of the off-value ones. Maybe swap Bai Yang Chen (Exp.1) for Reverend Bob Hungate to get an emergency Blessed who can be played against passive decks for higher upfront cost but less upkeep and more influence. I'd need to find space for a couple more deeds as well, looking again at boosting fives and eights.

Despite its problems the deck served me well in the semifinal against Antaiseito's Saved By Grace, where I was able to use my movement advantage to make him split up his dudes and then pounce on the isolated ones. HoMF plus The Joker's Smile putting Jokers back in my deck helped me hit a couple of Dead Man's Hands in the big town square shootout that decided the game.

In the final against Prodigy's Morgan Regulators things didn't work so well. Regulators is always a tough matchup for a deck like this as the home's reposition and unboot makes movement tricks harder to successfully pull off, and the limit on influence can hurt when you want to spend a while building up. I didn't want to fight him early because I could tell his deck had a tighter structure and I wasn't drawing the cards I needed to fight, or do much else - I recall a lot of dudes and my Jack deeds showing up in my play hands. It made dealing with his early aggression tricky, and then when I did get to shootouts nothing went my way there either. I was able to replace losses, but it seemed like he had an answer to pretty much anything I could do. He said that he got very lucky with the cards he drew after the game, and watching his recording of the match afterwards he really was! Eventually his deck ground mine down to take the victory.