Deadlands / Doomtown survey

[matgb]

Dude. Dude!. Pinnacale have switched to Wordpress as a CMS, and have a nice little survey going. What games have you played of ours, and, um, what would you like to buy next. One of the options is a CCG.

Pinnacle want to know if we'd like a Deadlands themed CCG.

Now, my ever humlbe and loving friends list. Don't all queue up at once. Go tell them yes. Now. PLZKTHX.

And for those wondering what the hell I'm talking about, and those wondering where my icons/personal avatar bloke come from, that'd be it. Doomtown. Best damned CCG ever released.

Which reminds me, really ought to mail them anyway to check out if they can give me any image files for the new DT site I'm sortof building in the background...

Comments

[matgb]

I've, actually, never had a real problem with Start Again, and I've seen decks that can do better playing against it (OK, it helps if oyu can card count when doing so, I can't).

OTOH, I liked Jackelope as is because it's a great limiter on excessive cheating decks. Once played an interesting person who had built a deck that consisted of only aces, 8s and jacks.

He had to ditch his entire deck. Fortunately it was a pre-tournament game, and I sat with him and rebuilt it, else he'd have died. He had the bunnies in his deck, he just didn't twig they'd also be used against him.

Weird how different groups develope; most I'm aware of think the two closest to broken homes are Sioux Spirit Warriors and the original Blackjacks, with most Sweatrock homes also in there, never been that worried about Angels.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Uh, are we thinking of the same Start Again? The one that annihilates your entire revealed hand, utterly and irrevocably?

The one that takes 5 cards out of your deck, either at randomly (lowball) or from your shootout hand, and makes them completely inaccessible?

I've *never* seen a deck that can expect to survive two or three of those in a game unless it's so completely dominant that the game is long over before that point, and the only defense is to *never* cheat.

And part of the problem with Jackalopes was that they were so random that it wasn't much fun - a good, usually non-cheating deck could still lose 3 cards in a row on lowball on turn 1, which is game over. Sure, they annihilated the "all-twos" decks, as it should be, but they were a card where if neither you nor your opponent used them, you were fine. If your opponent used them and you didn't, you either tooled to avoid them or lost - and if you tooled to avoid them, you got destroyed by an opponent who *didn't* tool to avoid them, because you didn't use them.

Finally, the problem is that they really were a relatively rare card, and not all the players *had* the cards to retool their deck to avoid this brand new cheater. If you didn't spend loads of money on cards, you were pretty screwed since you didn't have the alternates.

(Spirit Warriors: It came out after most of the Doomtown playing died, locally. Still, without things like Brawl, it really wasn't that bad. Blackjacks original: What the hell was wrong with that? Sweetrock: Yeah, nasty, but *nothing* like Guardian Angels.)

The Lost Angels home I'm thinking of isn't the original, it's the Guardian Angels add-on home - the one that buffs your blessed by a pile, and holds three cheating cards under it, to be played *from the home* any time you want. *ANY* three cheating cards - and since they don't go into your deck, you don't have to worry about them screwing up your hands.

[matgb]

Ah, right, never played GA properly, I just made sure the card was worded correctly, didn't get to balance it.

But yes, same Start Again. Major tournament in SoCal was won by a player who kept getting hit by it (if you got the Do Unto Others box it was Jason the Kid Young (but Chinese spelling)).

He knew his deck, and kept track of what went by, and rigged his cheatin' hands when he could to ace cards i the right proportion, eventually it came down to a cyclable, legal very high hand, reports at the time say it was very well played. I wasn't there, naturally, but I and others have managed similr tricks (I used to build degenerating decks for a laugh, Stagecoach Office won me so many games).

As for Bunnies, like I said, completely different play environment; it was designed to bring cheatin' down to nothing, and it did. Yes, it could be randomly unlucky at times, but generally it did what the game at thhe time needed.

Which meant that it filtered out of usage, and two years later a 50% aces deck won Origins. I seem to recall writing about it at the time (not here, unfortunately didn't know blogs existed), the way the metagame cycles around.

Unfortunately, only works in a 'perfect' environment, where all players have access to all cards and reports from previous games and events. Which is an advantage I've always had due to lending my cards all over the place and travelling to anything that happened in the UK (blew up a car driving to Kingdom Come)

Will have to play GA, get Chris to abuse it verily.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The really nasty thing is that it's *any three*, so you can play whichever of them you want, at any time.

I'm trying to remember the one - Plague of Locusts? - boot a blessed to ace a dude with a lower value. When you start Elijah and Guardian Angels, this means that you're guaranteed to ace the target of your choice the first time your opponent cheats, especially since GA adds Value to your Blessed.

And, of course, if you don't want to do that you can store a Start Again under that home and use that, or any other cheating card.

(As for the tournament: He's lucky he didn't have one of the critical cards for that legal hand show up in lowball before then, and that his opponent didn't have a That'll Leave A Scar to back it up. TLAS is *always* in any of my decks that use Start Again, to prevent that exact problem and to kill the critical cards from the legal hands)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

PS: Come play online, you'll see some nasty abusive decks.

[matgb]

Will be doing so when I'm settled into London, I hope. But not on this PC, not mine...

[emurphy42.livejournal.com]

The way I heard it, his deck was aced down to nothing - then he declined to pay the upkeep on five dudes, turning them into a straight flush.

[matgb]

That may have been it, I read a fair few reports at the time, but it was a few years back now.

*begins to wonder if everyone is on LJ...*

Did we meet at SoCal when I was over there? I forget.

[emurphy42.livejournal.com]

I think so.

Years back, when I was playing in meiczyslaw's Deadlands campaign, we discussed how some of the PCs would work as Doomtown cards. Mine was Obese and Thick-Skinned, which suggests the following

Reaction: Use this reaction when you take a casualty. Reduce your casualties by one (you shoot him once and it doesn't slow him down) and Billy Bob gains +1 bullet until the end of the shootout (but it does piss him off). If you have any other dudes in the posse, then reduce your casualties by another one (one of them hides behind him) and Billy Bob gains another +1 bullet until the end of the shootout (that pisses him off, too).

Billy Bob may be targeted as if he were Harrowed. (You shoot him once and it doesn't slow him down...)

When Billy Bob uses an ability on a non-gadget horse, discard it. (His horses are invariably named either Useless or Worthless.)