Thanks for checking in, always great to have your observations. Cheers for creating such a rich environment.
I was pleased to see a wide variety of decks in the top 8, even if the final was Regulator on Regulator. Also interesting to see three Full Moon Brotherhood - almost none of these showed up in the last few Sheriffs - perhaps people just took time to get to grips with it? This then has intriguing knock-on effects: do people stop playing Jake Smiley? Or perhaps weaken their draw structure to build in an alternative start (as one Edinburgh player wisely did)?
I've not filed my report yet, but my opponent in R2 (Chris) was packing lots of headlines, he used both Siege of the Orphanage and An Accidental Reunion during our match-up.
- I saw quite a lot of people using Faithful Hound and Sammy Cooke to gobble up/steal horses. However, even then it was perhaps a little hard for them to keep up with Maggie Harris - you're probably spending more GR than your opponent and not seeing as much horse hate as they can pump out horses.
- Other players had tried to meta against cavalry by using their own Horses - I had significant success with Law Dogs 3,8,K and using Pedro during testing. It gave me lots of cheap horses to boost my rank and eat casualties while I chipped away at the Morgan deck's dudes with Shotguns/Point Blank.
- I suspect that many of the players using high value spell decks were put off using their own headlines by a justified fear that they would lose low-ball to the horse deck and be left with dead cards in their hand. The horse deck would generally be a lower value deck than the spell deck (two of which were in the T4).
- We debated putting together an anti-horse hate deck (with A Fight They'll Never Forget and low values) in the Edinburgh group, but shamefully decided on a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach for two of three of us.
- I think the upcoming Shan Fan Showdown from Epitaph will help against horse hand rank boosts as a react speed Headline that stops hand rank boosts.
