Card draw simulator
| Derived from |
|---|
| None. Self-made deck here. |
| Inspiration for |
|---|
| None yet |
DaveSea · 95
...this little Wini brought a gun
I wanted to build a Sharpshooter deck with Wini as soon as I saw the card, but I always felt it was a tricky proposition. I reckon you need about half your deck to be skills for Wini to shine, and you need some passive card draw as well, because her ability is acutally card negative. I usually play two-handed solo, and a fighting Winnie would usually be doing most of the enemy management. But it's a bit of a struggle to fit in all the necessary pieces, plus enough firearms to make her a reliable fighter when half your deck is skills.
With her 3 and the unreliable suite of Rogue weapons, you really need to find multiple cards before you can properly kill things. That's quite a lot of running away and stress in the early game, which just isn't Wini's style.
Step forward Underworld Market, quite possibly the strongest card in the TSK investigator box. What if Stick to the Plan, but you could add 10 cards to it instead of 3, put 10 more cards in your deck with no loss of consistency, all for the price of a little randomness and playing 1 resource in the class that's swimming in cash? Crazy good.
Illicit is only a single trait as opposed to SttP's two, but it covers all Rogue weapons (excpt Old Shotgun, but he's a wierdo anyway), plus the two great investigation tools for the class, plus one of your passive draw cards, plus a smattering of other useful tech cards. Sound good? Load up on guns and bring your friends...
Let's run through the cards I put in the market deck:
You could put in an additional copy of one of these weapons, but I found one each to be fine. You will see both of them within 5 turns, and by the time you need more you've usually found the other copies in your deck.
The emergency weapon that doesn't need ammo. This just sits in the market until you need it. Generally you'll thin the market out so there are only one or two cards left in there, and that just means that you can get this into play at the beginning of your turn and start stabbing monsters whenever you need.
Again you could put another copy of this in the market, but generally you find the second copy in your deck before you need it.
- 2 x Disguise
I prefer to have two of these in the market, so that I've got them whenever I need them. Because you won't start off being able to kill everything with ease, this is the perfect panic button card. Thining the deck down to one of these and the Switchblade means you are ready for almost anthing.
- 1 x Fence
Get all these illicit cards down fast/cheaper. So good to be able to run this as a one-of and still get awesome value out of it. We're playing a lot of Illicit assets in the early game, so minimising the action tax is really important.
- 1 x Pickpocketing
Card draw engine goes brrrrr
Great value and another way to get the assets in the market down quickly. It's better to put these on the weapons and Thieves' Kits, because you can discard them by playing other cards into your hands and discard this at the same time. You will almost certainly be looping your deck, so you want get additional value out of these if possible. If you know your scenario doesn't have many humanoid enemies, you might want to run Pay Day in this slot instead.
Using the Market and Fence, you can very quickly get down an investigate asset and weapon, plus card draw and evade tech in the first few turns, and even start pulling off wild combos before you have any right to. In my testing of this, I evaded an enemy, exhausted them for two turns, shot them dead for good measure, drew three cards (I'd committed Manual Dexterity and another card to the test), and then played an asset for free, all for a single action. That is much more Wini's style, I feel.
That's the early game, and the market, but let's run through the key cards in the remainder of the deck.
Delilah O'Rourke is a vital companion piece to sharpsooter. Before you find SS, she bumps up your and means you aren't quite so helpless against early enemies. After you find it, she's a +2 to all your SS actions. This is not to mention her ability to do testless damage to all the enemies you are leaving exhausted with your Disguises.
Did I say +2? Oh yes. This didn't properly register until I started playing with Sharpshooter, but the first ability doesn't replace any + modifiers with + modifiers. It just says that the latter modifies your instead. So all your modifiers are still in play. With a gun, Delilah and SS, you're usually testing at 9, and the second ability on SS means you are testing against whichever is lower between the enemy's fight and evade scores, which usually gives at least an effective +1. The card is incredible, and I'm convinced that the Underworld Market is the piece it was missing. All together now: "The S, the U, the P, the E, the R....".
In this configuration Sharpshooter is an even better Lucky Cigarette Case engine than the classic Lockpicks. LCC is the second passive draw engine in the deck. I'm sure everyone knows how good this card is. Even with Wini's ability and pickpocketing, you do want this extra draw IMO. Although the Market blasts Wini over that early hump in her game where she doesn't have an engine or enough cards to fire off her ability early, it doesn't give you Lone Wolf, Delilah, or Sharpshooter, so you still want LCC to draw into them.
There's a single Backpack in the deck to help pull out the LCCs if they are hiding at the bottom of the deck. It can also fetch extra copies of your weapons or the Thieves' Kit if you need. We're running two Emergency Cache as our basic economy cards because they also work as targets. The backpack competes for the body slot with the last item it can fetch, the Stylish Coat, so you sometimes want to hold off playing the latter for a turn or two if you find it early, just in case you draw the Backpack or enough of your items that you don't need it. The Coat is almost certainly going to make you money as soon as you get it down, so you don't need to worry about holding it for a short while if you don't need resources straight away. The Mauser, Thieves' Kit, Lone Wolf and Watch This all combo with it, so you are going to get paid.
The rest of the deck are all skills and a single copy of Sleight of Hand. I found I wasn't using my second copy of it, but YMMV.
This is the 29xp version of the deck that I built to do final testing in Fortune & Folly. I think you could build a >20xp version, but you would need to bring the L0 .25 Automatic instead, or another L0 weapon, and I don't think that really shows off the full power of the deck.
This is an adapted version of a deck I ran through TSK with several overhauls to try and make it work, so I'm pretty confident it's well tuned. I've published a suggested L0 version as well, which is where I'd start in a campaign. The order of upgrades I'd use to get here is included in that decklist.
Suggested upgrades/variants
-
All In would probably be the next upgrade I'd pick with this deck. It might be degenerate, but I don't think you can have too many cards with Wini. Just cyle that deck like there's no tomorrow.
-
Daredevil, and Copycat offer an even more tricksy and possibly less OP build. If I was running Daredevil I would chuck out Momentum and Opportunist, and run All In so that all the skills in the deck were stone cold bangers.
-
2 Momentum and Opportunist(2) would give a slightly more reliable build than the above. But are we really here to make Wini more pedestrian?
-
If you need to deal with some very substantial enemies, running Sawed-Off Shotgun is probably a good idea. You definitely would want to run two Slight of Hand though, and almost certainly some more combat boosts. Probably a copy or two of Contraband as well.
-
I think the deck would run well in solo, althought I've not tested it. I'd add in one Lockpicks (to be used in the same way as the Switchblade if you run out of Thieves' Kit suppplies) and drop one weapon to accomodate it. Breaking and Entering would probably also be helpful.
-
I don't think the deck needs Streetwise, or any big money tricks, but it's rich enough that you could consider some of them as well. Streetwise would probably be good in a solo/cluever variant to make sure the Thieves' Kit wasn't struggling with any high shrouds and/or manage basic investigates easily.
Addendum
After some further testing of this, and a 19xp version, for a standalone scenario, I would suggest a few changes:
Drop Switchblade - once the deck is up and running you cycle through the deck and weapons quicker than you use up ammo. An emergency weapon felt necessary in the early unrefined versions of the deck, but isn't in the finished one. I found three guns in the market and a fourth in the deck to be plenty.
Drop the Backpack - if it didn't conflict with fine clothes I would probably have kept this in, but it too often either gets in the way or ends up being a dead card. The market gets most of the items you need and pickpocketing. You'll find an LCC soon enough, and the real constraints on the deck are resources and actions to play down the elements of the engine in the early game, not finding the pieces.
Add two Backstab(3). These let you fight with your good stat before you are properly set up, can one-shot a lot of enemies. They scale brilliantly into the late game, when they will usually come back to hand and increase the deck's ability to really pump out damage. You can play one as your 3rd action after you've used both sharpshooters. If you arrange to have two in hand, with extra action shenanigans, you can even play another as your 4th action for a 10 damage turn (12 damage if you use Delilah's ability too).
Switch two Emergency Cache for two 2 Sneak By. Without the backpack to tutor them, the action compression and icons make the latter a much stronger option.
Drop Momentum. It's a great card, and ideally you'd have two in the deck, but we need that extra xp point for the Backstabs.
Switch two Opportunist and add two Overpower. That 3 combat score needs all the help it can get before Delilah and the Sharpshooters are in play. Unlike Backstab, which is helpful in the early game and really strong in the late game, Opportunist fires unreliably until you are set up and is decent when you don't really need the cards anyway. The neutral skills give you double the icons and draw a new card if you simply pass, which is much better than Opportunist occasionally coming back to underwhelm another test with its miserable +1.
Add one Swift Reflexes. If you can't see afford to pay for the extra action when this comes to hand, you will never be sad to see the double agility icons.
Optionally, if you are leaning more into fighting and less into flexing you could drop one copy of Thieves' Kit for a second copy of Swift Reflexes. You could also drop one copy of Overpower for it instead, if you feel your team can help to manage enemies for the first few turns when you haven't got yourself properly set up.
Lastly, a bit more detail on piloting. From the market you want to get the following as soon as possible:
Once you have these three in hand you can fish for a copy of "I'll take that!", so you play your gun at the first opportunity to evade. The Fence and Disguise need to be played normally, so they should generally be the priority for your resources and actions, but both of them will make the other easier to get down.
If you see Pickpocketing alongside any of the above then it's fine to pass on it until it comes round again, but otherwise it should be the next priority from the market. The second "I'll take that" is always good, so you can get down a second gun when you need it, but you can also use it on your LCC or Stylish Coat at a pinch, if actions and resources are tight.
If you can manage to get all of the above into play you'll be laughing. Delilah, Lone Wolf, LCC and both copies of Sharpshooter obviously need to go into play as soon as you see them, but just with the pieces in the market you should be able to handle the early enemies and get enough card draw and economy to spin the rest of the engine up.
The only real fail state for this deck is getting mobbed by lots of enemies before you are ready to deal with them efficiently. It will be more fragile if it's the only enemy management in a party where the other members have literally no evasion, particularly if there are a lot of early enemies and/or a very small map. It's less of a bumpy ride than most other Wini decks I've played, and once it is up and running I found it extremely powerful.