I’ve been playing Law Dogs with Miracles for the past couple weeks, and every time I build a deck I struggle justifying the use of The Arsenal over the basic outfit.
The ability to call out wanted dudes is basically a reverse of the core outfit. There you have a built-in ability to put bounties and you need some cards to call out wanted dudes (Bounty Hunter, Clyde, Judge). The Arsenal has a built-in call-out mechanism, but you need to play cards that make dudes wanted. Before, it was only The Evidence, and it’s not a very good tool as it aces itself after a single use. Now we have Andrew Burton and Confession.
Andrew Burton is rather interesting, he basically gives you the ability to call out a dude at home on the first turn - provided that you have another blessed, or a mad scientist, and a miracle or gadget. Problem is, he’s Blessed 0, and that significantly limits your ability to cast miracles (they all have different difficulty levels) And if you want to also play Rev.Perry Inbody, then you essentially pay 6 gr for 0 influence - it’s problematic to make a good starting posse with these two and still have enough influence and stud bullets.
Confession seems like a reliable way to make dudes wanted every turn, but it has two problems: first, your blessed needs to boot (probably in the town square) to cast it, so you cannot call out the newly-wanted dude on that same turn (unless you have another Blessed or manage to unboot the first one; it’s easier with gadgets). The second problem with this spell is that it’s off-value, and you probably want to be playing other cards off-value too, like Lay On Hands and Faster on the Draw.
With so many restrictions imposed on Miracle decks at the moment, requiring off-value and support cards and limiting the starting posse, I usually end up with a deck that, uh, doesn’t shoot very well. Extra mobility and call-out options help against Clowns and Landslide, but when I face an aggressive Sloane or Law Dogs deck, one that doesn’t turtle at home but is rather eager to start a fight itself, then all my ability to hunt down dudes becomes unneeded, and the sacrifices I made to pay for it become all the more visible – and painful.
As for The Arsenal’s ability to call out unbooted non-wanted dudes, the only application I see for it is in games vs. Clowns: my Blessed dude goes to the town square, gets paralysed, but still threatens the enemy hucksters. But the thing is, with Micah and Shadow Walk, they don’t really need to go through the town square…
I didn’t test any gadget builds of The Arsenal, they should have less problems with spreading gadgets between multiple dudes, but they have even less ways to make dudes wanted (no Confession, and the Evidence is in the same slot as Force Field and Flame-Thrower).
So, my question to you fellow players is: Did you manage to build a Law Dogs miracles/gadgets deck that is actually better with The Arsenal than with the basic outfit? How do you fare against aggressive shooty decks? And what’s your starting posse?
but I think the Arsenal can be the right home for such a build.
