By Clint Oldridge and Andy Holt.

There were two UK National Championship tourneys this year, 3- and 4-player. The 3-player event was held in September and the 4-player in July.

Sam Roads (Cardiff Cartel) is the 3-player champ, Clint Oldridge (Cardiff Cartel) is the 4-player champ.

First, some highlights, or series of random memories, of the 3-Player championship tournament as reported by Andy Holt:

* The shop having taken the trouble to use some Chinese Lanterns for decoration.

* A total of 21 players including Happy - he recruited Clint, Ron, and myself as extra judges so that there was always one judge outside a game.

There are a lot of tournament formats that have been invented for Shadowfist, and they all have names that sound cool, but aren't always as helpful as they might be. Here are how the official ones go:

by Matt Woolley

Fear is the mind killer. Fear leads to Anger. Anger leads to Hate. Hate leads inevitably to Monkeys. But more important than this, fear leads to dreadful games of Shadowfist.

You can guarantee that many players will assess the board in terms of what they can lose, rather than what they have to gain. This kind of fearful mentality slows the game down and promotes the kind of waxy build up that generally makes for dull, uninspiring games. The players who pretend to have nothing useful in their hand, play with a one-column site structure, burn for power and leech power off the other players need to be shown the error of their ways! We need champions to dispense with this kind of play. We need heroes with a gun in their hand, a foot on the throat of the nearest Guiding Hand player, and maybe a slight facial tic. We need you!

Let’s get something straight right away – there is no rule in Shadowfist that says you have to attack left, and anyone adamantly insisting you should attack left is either an idiot or playing you for a sucker. There is a well-meant piece of play advice that says: “Everything else being equal, attack to the left.” This article deals with finding out if everything is equal, or “reading the board”, and how to make the most of your attack.

Ideally, you should know at all times who is closest to winning or furthest ahead. If you attack the leader, other players are more likely to assist you or at least will not interfere with your attack. There are several visible indicators that are used to identify who is currently winning: number of Feng Shui sites (FSS), power generated per turn (from sites, edges or characters), power in pool, and fighting on the board. Finally, the card pool of the faction that the opponents are playing has to be considered, specifically how easy it is for the specific faction to generate power from events and how easily the faction can turn power into fighting.

by Bruce Neiger

This article, presented in two parts, with an “intermission” and an afterword, describes the “Mostly Harmless” and Netherworld Return deck types. I have given the Tim Linden’s Netherworld Return deck, published on Stephan’s Shadowfist site, an “honorary” entry into this category as an “unrelated ancestor”. I hope he doesn’t mind.

The Mostly Harmless deck type has taken on several faces at this point, each inspired by the others. The core concept, however is to combine alternate power generation with large hitters and (almost always) with cheap recursion. All except the Netherworld Return deck also combine Red Bat with a large number of free or low cost events, quickly yielding very large Red Bats.

Brian's Guide to Drafting

Navigating the Netherworld by the Seat of your Pants

In these beleaguered time, where no starter decks are available for purchase anywhere, demo decks are a crucial way to get new people to play our beloved game. If you have always wanted to contribute to the recruiting effort from your collection while cleaning out your closet at the same time, here are a few guidelines for building a decent demo deck.

The Purpose of the Deck

… is obviously to introduce new players to the game. Ideally, the decks should be fun and easy to play, and showcase some of the strengths of Shadowfist. You want lots of characters, and lots of free stuff, so that the new player feels like he can influence the game at all times. You don’t want tricky decks. You don’t want decks that are poorly resourced. And you absolutely don’t want any cards that are hard to understand, or that (even worse) have been errated and don’t do what they claim they do.

By Brian Bankler

Fermat’s Last Stand
Event
[Pur] [Pur] 1
All Characters you control gain +1 Fighting until they leave play, then take one damage.

When I opened up my Shurikens & Six Guns cards, I stared at this. Then I banished it to the back of the box. With so many good cards, why bother? Later I recognized the amazing potential.

This gives one fighting per character. But you suffer one damage per character, so it’s a wash. If you can’t avoid the damage, it’s slow. Many characters ignore the damage, though.

• Any character with Toughness is safe, which includes Void, Twisted Horror (if you have an edge) and Morphic Spirit (if you have a second faction).

200 Guys With Hatchets and Ladders
Edge
Cost: Asc Asc 2
Limited. Smoke all non-Unique Characters you control when this card leaves play. When an opponent plays a Unique Character, you may return up to X 1-cost Characters from your smoked pile to play. X= the Unique Character's cost.

While not a very powerful card on its own, this card from the Seven Masters set screams to be abused. In this week’s article, I will go into some obvious and non-obvious combos for 200 Guys With Hatchets and Ladders (200G from here on) and show how the card can be used to maximum effect.

The first thought that I had when I saw this card was: how much fighting can I squeeze out of this edge? Getting back 4 fighting when an opponent plays Ting Ting is nice, but doesn’t really help an awful lot, so something has to be done to multiply the effect. The most obvious combo is pump cards: Fanaticism, Stand Together, Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting, Armies of the Monarch instantly come to mind as ways of getting more than 1 fighting per power spent by the opponent, and there are some characters that can easily be 2 or more damage for 1 power, such as BuroMil Grunt, Manchu Soldiers, Little Grasshopper, Consumer on the Brink, Simian Liberation Army and Fire Woman. The true potential of 200G becomes obvious once you realize that you can merrily sacrifice any character that 200G returns (unlike Inauspicious Return), and most abusive card to combo it with is Thunder Squire. Together with Thunder Captain, you can return to play up to 7 fighting (with Fanaticism and Stand Together) per power the opponent spends. Who, under these circumstances, would want to play a Unique character anymore? Who indeed… and that is where the weakness of a deck built exclusively around 200G comes in: it is extremely easy to play around. In fact, several tournament caliber decks don’t even need to rely on Unique characters any more, leaving you with wasted card slots. So when you build a deck around 200G, you have to take into account that you will likely have to win without it ever going off. You also have to either protect 200G (say, with Manchu Bureaucrat) or have enough Unique characters of your own that losing the 200G doesn’t take you out of the game.

By Michael Stadermann

Dog Soldiers
Thunder Braves
Cost: Mon 3
Provides: Mon
Fighting: 4
When this card turns to attack, you may unturn a Power-generating Site you control. (No card can unturn another card more than once a turn.)

Today, we’ll take a closer look at the Dog Soldiers. This SSG card comes with a combo card in the same set: Mah-Jongg Parlor. But while the Parlor is a good card even without the Dog Soldiers, the Soldiers themselves seem a bit bland. In this article, I will talk about the right type of site for the Dogs, and look into ways of making them better at what they do.