There has been some discussion about “Standard” decks (I guess this means shooting/shootout decks) vs. “Non-Standard” decks (I’m not exactly sure what these are - landslide?). A lot experienced and talented players seem to be of the opinion that standard shooting decks aren’t very competitive and instead favor non-standard decks. I’m new to Doomtown and have a very basic understanding of strategy, but hearing top players talk about this saddens me a bit. One of the reasons that I abandoned Netrunner is that at the competitive level, the decks were not fun and circumvented the basic ideas/premises of the game. These competitive decks were often referred to as Notrunner. I was attracted to Doomtown for many reasons, but one of these reasons is that I like the shootout mechanic. Reading that good players might tend to avoid this aspect of the game is somewhat disheartening. Thoughts? Maybe I’m misunderstanding the discussion.
The basis of the game is “have more cp than your opponent has influence.”
While shootouts are definitely the fun way to accomplish the goal, they arent the most direct. Landslide spams cp on the table quickly to make it hard to overcome. Control limits your options to where they cant take enough of your cp, or cant respond to a cp builder like nicodemus whateley.
Most ot the time, this game relies on shootouts that are well timed to exclude some of your opponents dudes when necessary. This also means you might never see the fight between the two biggest dudes on the table.
Vimes,
Although the concerns you raise are valid, the release of Blood Moon introduces two homes specifically (Morgan Regulators and Protection Racket) that will be very strong against the Dudes and Deeds (“Slide”) strategy. This may very well impact the field by producing very tough match-ups for Slide enough to deter folks from playing it competitively.
Hope that helps.
Also if you haven’t seen it yet, there is this wonderfully written article:
I tend to agree with the author’s general points, but it’s worth noting that you don’t have to do everything he says in the article exactly to have a good match-up. Really, the sooner you can (correctly) Identify the Slide strategy, the better your chances.
Cheers.
What you said here sounds a lot like an opinion I expressed recently. BTW I am definatelly experienced, but not really talented :).
Anyway, when I talked about standard shooting decks , I meant decks that focus on fundamentals of the game and their action cards are mainly bullet reductions (direct and indirect) and cheating resolutions, with no other options of manipulating their hand rank.
While slide is a non-standard deck, it is only one of many decks that I would call a non-standard one and most of other ones want to shoot, they just have different approach to winning rounds of shootout, usually by hand manipulation.
I have noticed that players who play often ( I play most of my games on OCTGN) are leaning towards this type of decks. The reason for it is simple, bullets reduction, cheating resolutions and cards that create advantage in the shootout do not guarantee you a success. Often times your opponent who doesn’t have any extra bullets in the shootout who can only change one or two cards is going to reveal two legal four of the kind in a row and this is why you want to add cards to your deck that at least let you tie a round of shootout. Also WD + Longwei and Auto-Gatlings are “immune” to bullet reductions and are very hard to play against.
‘Standard’ shootout decks are fine, and you can generally build them in such a way that if your opponent isn’t interested in shootouts you can play the chess game until a fight is necessary. One of the key things to think about when building the deck is ways to force conflict, eg control point rushing or removal jobs. Decks that are doing something different often (but not always) need a few turns to set up so it’s in your interest to take control of the game early on. Rico Rodegain is incredibly useful for scouting your opponent’s hand for clues on their strategy or to see if you’ve got a good chance of pulling of that Kidnappin’ you drew.
In my opinion there are too many easy ways to manipulate hand rank in the game now. I’ve seen aggressive shooters and hex decks that take advantage of rank manipulation cards and Calling the Cavalry horse decks that look to use weight of numbers to win shootouts, amongst others. It’s definitely a thing to watch out for.
It is also Force Field, TYWM, Point Blank, Puttin the Pieced Together. Genereally speaking I don’t mind hand rank manipulation, we just do not have enough options to counter / stop it.
They’ll sure fix that in the next saddlebags.