Earlier this week I all but finished building the Doomtown Cube and it’s now fully documented, sleeved up and ready to be played.
I started this project by covering the concept, talking about the early thoughts for the structure of the cube and the outfit starter packs, I wrote in a bit more detail about building out the Deeds (diamonds) part of the cube, but then stopped and hit a wall with building the cube – I basically just didn’t have sufficient cards. I was selecting 75 deeds from about 90 cards, meaning the cube was basically “my collection” and as a result contained some cards of dubious power level and utility and was not very well balanced.
This theme continued for all card types. Some key areas for cards that were missing from my collection included:
- Full complements of A-K were missing for many outfits, meaning I couldn’t muster a nice clean set of 13 dudes for every outfit starter pack. Similarly, I lacked outfit homes – some entirely (I had no Collegium faction at all).
- Draw smoothing cards that would allow players to avoid the somewhat common situation in Doomtown where you get stuck with a hand full of cards you can’t play, and can only discard and draw one card per turn. I used to play four copies of Lady Luck (a 0 cost Action that lets you discard any number of cards at the end of the turn) in my best decks, and was hoping for more cards like this. Also useful in the same vein are cheap, unconditional cards with small effects that you can just play to cycle your hand. I didn’t find much of either of these.
- Build around cards that could form the basis of a clear direction for the draft and strategy for deck building. I’ve learnt from reading enough Mark Rosewater articles about designing Magic that these sorts of cards can be important “sign posts” for a draft. I had in mind the likes of the Investment Broker (spend 10 ghost rock to gain a control point), the Jail, or the New Town Hall. But not many of these really showed up and sometimes I didn’t have enough support cards for the ones I did have.
- Tutors that allow players to fetch specific card types from their discard, boot hill or deck. These could be particularly useful in a singleton format like cube.
- And finally I was also missing sufficient suit and value combinations – for example, I had hardly any Q Dudes (spades) or Q Actions (clubs).
To address some of these gaps I’ve turned to eBay (picking up whole faction decks and singles), scavenging from old friends and buying off individuals on the Doomtown discord server. After some months, I had enough cards to make some meaningful decision about what to put in the cube and have enjoyed the process immensely.
Rather than doing a blow by blow of every suit or card type as I intially thought, I’ll restrict the write up to some overarching process notes and structural thoughts.
Spreadsheets to the rescue…
Pretty early on I built out a Google sheet that contains a database of every Doomtown card published, and has functionality for flagging and analysing whats in my collection and what goes into the Cube. Building the list was a minor challenge in it’s own right, as no single source had quite got everything, while the need for analysis came about because I found it very difficult to understand the makeup of the Cube I was putting together just by looking through cards and making piles of things on the floor. The sort of analysis I found useful and built into my sheet was:
- Analysis of the statistical strength of Dudes, based on their cost, upkeep, bullet rating and influence compared to Dudes with comparable costs and upkeep. Obviously, this will never be perfect because it doesn’t consider rules text – but it does give me a basis to make decisions on whether Dudes make the cut based on raw power or if their special rules need deeper consideration. It also meant I could roughly guage the power of each Outfit in their Outfit Starter Packs.
- Analysis of the output rate of Deeds compared to the typical Deed at each cost band. This suffers from the same pitfall as the Dude analysis in the sense it doesn’t take into account special rules, but as above I still found it a useful point to consider.
- Classification of Actions and Goods based on their effect, to avoid putting in too many of one particular type of effect.
- Counts of values and suits to keep the overall cube composition on spec.
Cube Structure
Speaking of the composition, the eventual cube has ended up being quite different to the original concept which was 75 of each suit split “roughly” evenly between the values (for example, originally anything from 4 to 9 Deeds of a given value was acceptable). Instead I’ve ended up aiming for virtual parity betweenthe values, because I think value drafting will probably be an important part of the experience (by which I mean, favouring specific values to improve pull actions and shootout hands) and it would not be fair to drafters if the distribution isn’t even.
I also gave up on even numbers of each suit. Dudes (spades) got less representation in my cube, because all players already have access to 13 Dudes in their outfit starter packs. And I upped the number of Actions compared to Deeds and Hearts, because Actions are often the engine of a deck and mostly universally applicable.
In the end I ended up with all 10 classic Doomtown factions, each with 2 outfit dudes in the cube itself, which pushed the % of Dudes a bit too high. More importantly, four of the factions require dedicated support in the cube hearts – the Whateleys, Sioux Union and Flock all need a specific spell type, and the Collegium needs gadgets. The presence of all four in any give cube draft meant there would just be too many hearts. So I ruled that in any given draft, one of these four factions and one of the other factions would not be playable – and their support cards would be removed from the cube.
That means in any draft, the final cube composition is currently:
- ♠︎ Dudes (53 cards, 16% of cube)
- Drifters x 37 (11%)
- Outfit dudes x 16 (5%)
- ♥︎ Hearts (82 cards, 25%)
- Goods x 34 (10%)
- Gadgets/Hexes/Miracles/Spirits x 48 (16 of each in use, 15%)
- ♣︎ Actions (91 cards, 28%)
- ♦︎ Deeds (78 cards, 24%)
- Jokers x 2
Rarities & Curiosities
There was never an A value dude for the Texas Rangers among Doomtown cards available to the public. But there is an A value Texas Ranger card that was actually printed – it’s called “TLC” John, and was designed by 2006 World Champion John Yarbrough and printed in very limited quantities for John and, I gather, some of the Pinnacle/AEG staff. Based on this, I imagine it’s the rarest Doomtown card out there.
Before I became aware of “TLC” John, I created a custom A for the Rangers. The Rangers need more harrowed dude support when using the Dixie Rails outfit, and I liked the idea of Camille Sinclair becoming harrowed, and building on her normal version I imagined her harrowed powers involved draining power from enemy terrors. She got a copy of the harrowed power “Mirror Mirror” and the ability to steal bullets from terrors (as opposed to just increasing her own bullet rating when facing off against Terrors).
Available card lists for Doomtown Classic list three jokers – Joker, Fools Joker and Deaths Head Joker. But there’s another Joker out there too – a promo card distributed with Inquest magazine. I can only imagine the Inquest Joker is the rarest card in my collection (until I track down “TLC” John!)
Law Dogs only ever had two homes printed, vs three for all other outfits. The print at home “Law Dogs: Mob Justice” rectifies this. For me it’s critical as I don’t yet have a copy of Hunter’s Office. Mob Justic led to me tracking down several deputies and changing my original line up of dudes in the Law Dogs OSP to ensure Mob Justice is a viable alternative to the core set outfit that rewards throwing wanted dudes in Jail.
Blackjacks J and Texas Rangers K still elude me. Experienced Spike Dougan was apparently a “chase card” – I guess which explains why I can’t yet find it on eBay.