Wondering if this might develop into something . . . . .
I’m toying with the idea of building a Fearmonger Mad Scientist\Abominations deck. Dabney Scuttlesby and Roderick Byre (so far) would be in the starting posse. However, Dabney can only invent Mystical Gadgets, which limits him to: Diable en Boite, Holy Wheel Gun, The Wretched, Devil’s Six Gun and Clown Carriage. I know this won’t be a seriously competitive deck build, but I thought I’d try something fun to play.
What else would help this build?
When out for blood drops, Valeria Batten XP helps.
I’m working on (emphasis WIP) a Popescus “Into the Mystic” deck first out of FMB, and looking a head to Bayou Vermilion Railroad.
Valeria Batten base version can invent Mystical gadgets, no need to wait for Out for Blood. If you want to use Wretched, then Margaret Hagerty would be my choice for main Mad with Roderick or Valeria backing her up.
You can do some fun stuff with Soul Cage and Wretched, and Fearmongers has great options for starting dudes you can ace to the Wretched (Pagliaccio and/or Funtime Freddy would be my recommendations). You could even go for a more basic 6/Q Soul Cage Abomination list but use Holy Wheel Gun instead of Claws and potentially Clown Carriage as a fun movement tool. If you wanted to get real weird with it you could run Clown Carriages and a couple other horses (Pedro, Roan, or Guide Horse probably) and play Calling the Cavalry or other horse actions.
I’ve played around with Fearmonger Mad Science a bit.
Here’s the deck I’ve been using, it seems to work quite well and is fun to play.
I’d go with 6/9 for sure. There’s room to add some MS into your deck there and there are two guns at the same values you can invent. Aboms love 6’s with Buffalo emporium, bobo, harvester and more. You could even run summoning or Tech Exhibition for the potential control points. Once you’ve got a few power aboms on the table, you should have what you need to win shootouts with raw power.
I’d mix in some Kings after that to get the recursion you might want out of Ivor and the awesome cards such as Nightmare at Noon and Essence of Armitage.
I like how you dudes think!
Would Doyle’s Hoyle help at all? Some of the gadgets seem to be of lower ranks . . . . . . .
This really depends on how you build your deck. You can build it to guarantee pulls, or with some cards that fail some pulls and just accept that sometimes you will whiff. If you end up with a structure that is consistently 1 point behind for Gadget difficulty pulls, I would recommend Marty over Doyle’s Hoyle (note that Marty can only be attached to actual mad scientists, so Valeria will just have to deal with missing pulls). If you only have a few off value cards that fail pulls, Doyle’s Hoyle can help patch that up, but generally it isn’t worth the card slot or the (rather expensive) cost if you can be doing something proactive instead. However Doyle’s Hoyle does become slightly more attractive if you are using cards that care about Mystical goods, since it does fill that role.
Doyles Hoyle is a tough one. It costs 3 GR normally and there isn’t much of a way to improve that that wouldn’t be spent better on something else. However, if you find yourself a few card slots short, it might be just the right move. General Store and Pawnshop can both cheapen your costs. The new Vermillion Railroad outfit for fearmongers also reduces the cost by 1 on your first mystical card each turn.
The auto 10 is a great way to cover your butt when you have some low value cards hanging around in your deck that you just can’t get rid of. It’s also a great way to see some of the highest pulls you might ever see with Jose Morales if you’re up for some fun.
While i would agree that this kind of deck is probably not going to be that competitive there are some fun things that you can do. I would argue that doing something that Fearmongers can do that other gadget factions cannot is key to giving the deck purpose.
So i would start with something like this: https://dtdb.co/en/deck/view/36019
Just abuse recursion and jobs to create high impact low cost situations that your opponent has to deal with while creating a wall of free and low cost abominations to stay in the game. Thematic and fun if nothing else.