This is the deck I won the Shadowfist World Championship game this year at GenCon Indy. I would say this is the deck I decided to bring, but that's not exactly true. Going into Indy I was torn between bringing a known reliable deck tweaked with some new cards, or bringing a new deck based almost entirely off new cards. I had decided on the latter in the form of an Abomination deck, but in the wee hours before the tourney some wandering demonic imps caused me to lose said deck, with the remaining time before the main event I dug this one out, did some tweaking, and came up with:
The Long Strange Journey of Young Li Mao
By Brian Smith-Sweeney
3 x Kunlun Clan Assault
2 x Wah-Shah Clan
3 x Students of the Drag
2 x Hacker
3 x Redeemed Gunman
2 x RedBat
1 x Sky Dragon
1 x Shung Dai
1 x Monsoon
2 x TingTing
2 x The Seven
1 x Golden Gunman
1 x Tom Donovan
1 x Taggert
1 x Hoosegow Jackson
5 x Violet Med
2 x Fortune of the Turtle
4 x Final Brawl
3 x Is That All You Got
3 x Golden Comeback
2 x Dirk Wisely
1 x Liquored Up
3 x Back for Seconds
1 x Just A Scratch
1 x Yipee-Yi-Yo-Kiii-YAAAH!
5 x Proving Ground
2 x Whirlpool of Blood
1 x Hot Springs
1 x Stone Dolems
1 x Petroglyphs
1 x Kinoshita House
1 x Fox Pass
TOTAL: 63 cards
This is a slightly tweaked version of the first deck I made when I got my Seven Masters vs. The Underworld cards. It's pretty clear that the Seven Masters and the Dragons have a lot of solid synergies. The Seven Masters offer the Dragons alt power gen (Pocket Demon/Violet Med), event protection (Fortune of the Turtle), and more versatility with interesting hitters and the swiss army knife that is Kunlun Clan Assault. The Dragons give the 7M character recycling (Golden Comeback/Got), Bite defense, and lots of cheap events to feed the beast that is Red Bat. Red Bat exploits all the best from both worlds: he's 5-body which makes him bait for Is That All You Got?, he's Independent so he's always ready to come Back for Seconds, and you only need one 7M resource to put him on the table. Give him some Fortune of the Turtle, and he's a game-winner. Heck, you might even get to drop him for free in the late game.
The name of the deck comes from the original thematic element. I liked Li Mao and the idea that he went from being a Kung-Fu scrub to one of the Seven Masters, and I wanted to build that storyline into the deck. It worked pretty well with him in it (both versions, of course), but I like to keep modifying my decks, and slowly and surely he got pushed out for other things. For GenCon I decided to include some of the new Shurikens and Six-Guns stuff, so with I laid the old deck out in front of me and made some quick changes: I swapped Ghost Wind and the Big Bruiser to make room for the Seven and Hoosegow Jackson, and Thunder on Thunder and a few other things for Liquored Up, Just a Scratch, and Yipee-Yi-Yo-Kiii-YAAAH! Most had a minor impact on the deck play, but the Yipee gave a much-needed boost a few times. And The Seven was the game-winner for the final, so they certainly earned their keep!
The deck play is mostly straightforward: get your hitters out early and often, recycle 'em, and lay down the smack. In between Brawl your opponents to deny them the win. KCA can also provide win denial, or recon by revealing sites, or even punch-through when you need to get through a pesky interceptor. There are some subtleties to the deck play though. The amount of Independent, for example, gives you plenty of opportunities to launch follow-up attacks and it took time for me to figure out how not to over commit. The last attack in the GenCon final was a good example of this: I had to use TingTing to draw out denial rather than go directly for a winning attack, so that I could Gambit with a Student of the Dragon. That in turn gave me the power to pull out the Seven, and with no real interceptors on the board I was set. There are times the deck can pull off enough Independent tricks to take two or even three sites in a turn.
Let the buyer beware: I attempted to compensate for the last-minute card changes by swapping and re-balancing the foundation characters, but the resource ramp is still not quite right. The deck plays slower in the beginning as a result than it should, which worked out perfectly at GenCon but won't necessarily always; I pulled out my wins up until the final by the skin of my teeth and with a fair bit of luck.
And as a final note, I'd like to give a big thanks to all the folks at GenCon this year. This was my first time at a major con and I'd never met most of the Shadowfist players there, but I felt very welcome nonetheless. The competition was incredibly tough; just about every player there could've ended up in the finals, and any one of the others that did could have walked away with the title. A big hat's off to Ben Barnett, who forced all of us to step on his neck just to give ourselves a chance at winning. Overall I had a great time putting faces to names I'd only seen on the mailing list, and I very much look forward to laying and receiving some smackdown again at Indy in 2007!