Queensland State Championship winning deck

Maximum Butt Kicking (53 cards)

Foundations (10):
5 Brave Villagers
5 Student of the Dragon

Hitters (9):
1 Wu Bin of Turtle Island
1 Shamanistic Lieutenant
1 Nomad Army
1 The Spirit of Kongxiangsi
5 Big Bruiser (RW version)

© Roberto Campus, Mike Jackson, Richard Kane Ferguson, Inner Kingdom Games

Events (21):
5 Equal Opportunity Butt Kicking
4 Dirk Wisely's Gambit
3 Final Brawl
3 "Is that all you got?"
2 Fighting Spirit
1 Ashes of the Fallen
1 Final Sacrifice
1 Thunder on Thunder
1 Back for Seconds

NFSS (1):
1 Secret Warrior Training Base

FSS (12):
4 Ancient Stone Arch
4 Mobius Gardens
2 Stone Dolmens
1 Festival Circle
1 LaGrange Four

The title comes from having the maximum number of Equal Opportunity Butt Kicking and Big Bruiser cards (subtitled "Kicker of Butts") legally allowed.

This deck's goal and strategy is to make sure nobody ever gets an advantage over you in terms of power or characters. (The working title was "The Advantage Engine").

The Ancient Stone Arches and Mobius Gardens are two incredibly powerful cards which between them make it difficult or impossible for other players to gain a power advantage over you by using Sites or Events. They can get power, but every time they do so you get power as well. If they don't get power, that's okay too. We're still even. It closes off all the game-paths were others get ahead of you on the power curve and beat you down, and that's a very large chunk of the game-paths where you lose.

The power people do get they often spend on characters, which you can kill extremely cheaply with Equal Opportunity Butt Kicking (henceforth EOBK) and Final Brawl. Then when the coast is clear you bash in their sites for the win.

Big Bruiser and The Spirit of Kongxiangshi both have solid synergy with EOBK, since the Big Bruiser weathers it fairly well and The Spirit of Kongxiangshi has Regenerate. Nomad Army is there for slightly cheaper beats, Wu Bin of Turtle Island is there just because he's awesome, and Shamanistic Lieutenant was there because I was metagaming against the possibility of Leonard King playing his Lotus deck.

(Leonard played his Mostly Harmless deck instead, but I saw so many Arcanomoths that I was definitely not sorry to have the Magic Cop on board).

My breakout star was Secret Warrior Training Base, included at the last minute on a whim and which I now have a lot of respect for. It turns out that it has great synergy with board-clearing effects, as well as with "Is that all you got?", and it turns 1-cost foundations which are normally a bit of a dead draw in the mid-to-late game into cost-effective threats.

If I had my time over I'd give serious consideration to switching out three or four Big Bruisers for Steven Wu and The Golden Gunman, and switching out "Is that all you got?" for Golden Comeback. Spot removal or denial was the one thing that caused this deck serious problems, and characters that couldn't be Killdeered or Imprisoned would probably been more effective for me. The Shamanistic Lieutenant did work well, but I think for general-purpose play Dirk Wisely would be greatly superior in that slot because on a cleared board he's a huge menace (especially with Secret Warrior Training Base).

This deck isn't much fun to play against, so it's not something you'd bring to a casual/friendly/social/

muckabout Shadowfist session. It doesn't have any cool combos or anything, really. It's just a stack of extremely powerful cards with a power engine that is very hard to overtake, and it wins by killing all your characters before you can do anything fun with them.

Cheers,

Kevin Lowe