deciphercon-2k
Title: deciphercon-2k
Author: Doug "Phrim" Faust
Date: Oct 12, 2000
Okay. This really isn’t a tournament report per se, it’s more of an everything report. DecipherCon through the eyes of Doug, if you will. :-)
Wednesday morning. I get up early, have a fairly uneventful day at work, blah blah blah. So I get home, pack up the last few items, like my toothbrush, and get some dinner. My plane doesn’t leave until 9:30pm, so I’ve got plenty of time, so I get on a SWCCG chat room, to see what’s going on. It’s pretty empty, only BosskHogg (Adam Kronfeld) and Dalantyr (Heidi Farinholt) are online, and neither are at their computer. I guess it was quiet cause everyone already left for DCon, Heidi and Adam weren’t going, the former because she had some medical thinger to do, and the latter cause he’s lame. :-) So after a while Screwy (Joe Gaus) gets online, and I talk to him for a while, he wishes me luck, and I take off. It’s really a shame Joe couldn’t go, cause I really wanted to meet him, but with him just getting married and stuff, it’s understandable. :-)
Anyway, I get my dad to take me over to the airport, and I check in and everything. Everything’s going smoothly, so I sit down and wait at the gate. There’s a plane already there, so I figure we’ll be boarding pretty soon. Well, I wait and wait and wait, no one that I know is on my plane. It gets past the time where we were scheduled to board, and the plane that’s there leaves. Hrm, guess that wasn’t mine. So I wait some more, and the time when the plane was supposed to leave passes by, and I start to get worried, as we’ve arranged a whole group of people (I-ming Chen, Todd Theiner, John Borders, and Jim Li) to wait for each other at the Orlando airport, and I don’t want to keep people waiting. So eventually another plane arrives at the gate, and starts unloading people from Los Angeles. It’s 11pm when the plane finally starts boarding, a good hour and a half after it was supposed to leave. So they go and board the first class passengers, and then they get on the PA system. Apparently, they never bothered to take the luggage from the LA flight out of the plane, cause it was raining, and they were understaffed, and other crap. So they stop boarding the plane, and say they’ll board in another hour! Damn! So now we’ll start boarding when we were supposed to be arriving in Orlando. I had no way of telling the folks that would be waiting for me, so I kinda figured they’d prolly go to the hotel instead of waiting 3 hours for me. So it’s like 12:30am when we did finally start boarding for real. So the plane leaves the gate, taxis around for a bit, then stops. The captain gets on the PA, and says we’re 12th in line, so it’ll be "only" another half hour before we leave. Blah. We end up getting into the air at about 1:20am.
Fortunately, the plane didn’t encounter any difficulties in flight or at the Orlando airport, so I got right out. I’m looking around for Todd, I-ming, and the guys, but not expecting much, as I was supposed to be there 3 hours ago. There’s only one guy waiting, and pretty obviously not for me. So I walk down to the baggage claim area, keeping my eyes peeled for anybody I knew. I get down there and look around for a while, but I don’t see anyone. All of a sudden, someone shouts out my name, and coming down from the escalator I had come from are Todd Theiner and an asian guy. Well, the asian guy was I-ming, he told me he shaved his head before coming, so I was looking for a bald asian guy, but I-ming was wearing a hat, so I couldn’t really tell. So it turns out that John is already at the hotel, I dunno what Jim did, so the three of us have to find a way to get to the hotel. We find the Mears shuttle window on the 2nd floor, but it’s all locked up with a sign that says to go to the Mears desk on the first floor. So we go there, and nobody’s there at all. I-ming checks behind the desk for any numbers we could call or anything to get service (Mears is supposed to run 24 hours), but no luck. So we go outside and end up getting a cab. We tell the supervisor that we want to go the Doubletree, and he’s like, "which one?". Todd and I-ming are clueless, I remember something about it being in Kissimee, so I say the one in Kissimee, and he gets us in a cab, and we take off. Then the cab driver asks where we’re going, and I tell him the Doubletree in Kissimee. He says, "which one?" "The one in Kissimee." "There’s two in Kissimee." "Damn." Todd and I-ming are again clueless, I kick myself for not writing down the address (I wrote down everything else). I have the number for the hotel, but we’re already driving, so that doesn’t help. I tell the cab driver it’s the one with the conference center, and he says they both have conference centers. So we end up picking one, and the cab takes us to this place called the Doubletree Guest Suites. I-ming is like, "I’m pretty sure this is the place," so the cab pulls up and he runs in to check. Well, the door to the lobby is locked and it’s all dark inside. Hrm. I didn’t think hotels locked up like that at night. So the cab driver takes us to another place called the Doubletree Resort and Conference Center. I know this is definitely the place, but I’m kinda frustrated cause you’d think that when I said "the one with the conference center" he’d take us to the one with "and Conference Center" in its name first. Oh, well.
So we get into the hotel at about 4:30am. Fortunately, John arrived earlier and got our rooms. So me and Todd get to the room we’re splitting with Mike Josem and Ben Robinson. Couple of issues, the room only had a king size bed (which Mike of course claimed) and a rollaway, instead of two doubles. And Ben wasn’t getting in until tomorrow, so we’d have to pay more for splitting 3 ways for the first night. Well, whatever. At this point there’s really not much reason to go to sleep, with Day 1 starting in just a few hours. Josem is in the room half asleep, he gives us a mumbled "g’day" and goes back to sleep. So I drop off my luggage, grab my backpack, and head down to the lobby where I saw some people playing. The Terwilligers are down there, so I say hi, and Chris asks me for a game. He wants to try out his Light deck cause he says Light really sucks in the current environment, but my Light deck is better than my Dark deck. I’ve only brought two Star Wars decks to DecipherCon, cause with work and all I didn’t have time to make any more. My Dark deck is Dark Deal with Big Ugly Imperials, basically a lot of beefy guys that are hard to battle draining for lots on Cloud City. My Light deck is my Hidden Base/Strike Planning deck that I’ve had for a while, it drains in space with some capitals and pilot/fighter combos while doing hit-and-run battles on the ground with its 3x EPP Obi, 3x EPP Luke, 2x Clash, 2x Smoke, and a few other trinkets like Mech Failure.
Pick-up Game: My Dark vs. Chris Terwilliger’s (2190) HB/Strike Planning
Well, Chris started the exact same thing as my Light deck, Strike Planning, Squad Assignments, and Insurrection. Hidden Base is a pretty bad matchup for me, as I rely on big drains which can be canceled by the objective, and my starship complement is rather skimpy to go probe. We both get set up, and I’m moving kind of slow, as I don’t have the best of draws. I’m trying to set up, and Jedi Luke with his Saber comes and starts beating up my guys. He deploys Menace Fades and gets it set up with a ship and Jedi Luke, so I’m pretty much screwed. I try to get rid of Luke, but he’s got better destiny than me (and he’s way better at tracking), so I can’t. So Jedi Luke kills lots of my characters, he drains some, and I die. FL-20some
Well, as I look at it, no shame in losing against #2 in the world. :-) My Dark deck definitely needs an overhaul though, it just gets murdered by anything that involves Menace Fades. Anyway, I just hang out for a little while, and soon it’s breakfast time. So me, Todd, I-ming, and I-ming’s friend Omar head to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. They had a little buffet set up, not much selection, but it filled the stomach. So we start talking about how much we’re supposed to tip the waitress, it came to like $7.25 a person (we got seperate checks), and it seems that nobody has any bills smaller than a $10. So Omar gives the lady a $10 and tells her to keep the change, and starts talking about "supporting the restaurant industry" or something. So now the rest of us would feel stupid giving her a $10 and asking for change, so we all follow suit and just give her $10s. So she ended up with 4 25+% tips for a breakfast buffet, she seemed pretty happy. :-) As I’m leaving, I hear someone laughing that sounds exactly like Nathan Brown, so I look over and there he is. So I talk to him and Bob Caton for a little bit, then head out with I-ming. Anyway, registration starts at 8am, so people are starting to line up to get a jump on the line. So Todd goes and gets in line with Omar (), and me and I-ming (we’re both volunteering--and supposedly helping out with Day 1 of SWCCG) go and look for what we’re supposed to do. I see some people I know in the already long line, I say hi to Kim Caton, Scott Lingrell, and Pat Ziagos. I-ming says he has to drop something off in his room, so he goes up, and I see some people walking around in volunteer shirts and find out that we’re supposed to go to the registration desk. So I go up and introduce myself to Kendrick and Sean, they hand me my volunteer packet and I go grab some staff shirts.
After that all there was to do was wait around. I went to my room and put on my staff shirt (which wasn’t red, btw), and then went down and chatted with people in line and in the gaming room. Originally, they were going to have all 3 Day One competitions in that one room, and there was just no way that would happen, with the number of people preregistered. So they ended up moving the YJ Day 1 into one of the side rooms, but that still leaves us a bit skeptical. The registration line was insane, too, snaking all around the convention center and back into the hotel. They had two lines set up: one for people who preregistered, and one for people who didn’t. Well, the preregistered line was 300 people long, and the other was about 3 people long. So Kim Caton and some other people decided to forfeit their preregistration (I think it was $5 more, and they didn’t get the foil ship), well worth it to skip the 3 hour wait. Eventually they wisened up and made both lines preregistration lines. I’m waiting around, and I thumb through my decks, and I find a Light CC Docking Bay in my Dark Deck. Hmm. I figure it must be Chris Twigg’s, as he played one on me earlier. So I go around and try to find him, Marty says he’s way back in line, so I push my way through the crowd and eventually find him. He says it’s his, he noticed it was missing last night, and was going insane trying to find another; nobody brought spare commons. :-) Then I see the guys from my area, Andy Parks, George Gundry, Tom H-K, and those guys, and catch up with them for a while.
It’s getting close to the time when the tournament is supposed to start, so I go in and find the other guys running the tournament. I find I-ming and introduce myself to Chris Gregg, Joe Helfrich, and Nhat Lai. Everyone’s looking for Juz, no one’s seen him all morning, but Joe says he’s in his room doing something or other and he’ll be right down. Scott Valentine shows up, so now we’re all there except Juz. Eventually, Juz does show up, and the bad news comes: for some reason, the computer people can’t get his laptop with the software he specially designed for DCon to work. So now we’re all waiting on the computer people, and in the meantime we sort all the command cards and decklists, and make sure every command card has decklists, and vice versa. With four of us working on it, it goes along pretty quickly, but we’re still waiting on the computer. The start time of the tournament flies by, with no ETA on getting the computer fixed. I guess around 11:30, the computer finally comes back fixed, so we get 3 people to start entering in the command cards into the system. I turns out we had 170 people, less than who had preregistered, so space in the room wasn’t a problem, but it still takes quite a while to get all those names into the system. Fortunately, Juz had a database of like every player in existance on his computer, so misspelled or illegible command cards wasn’t a problem (and believe me, with some people’s writing it would have been). That gets finished about 12:30, the players are starting to get unruly, so we hurry up and pair everyone on the computer. And then we try to print. Nothing comes out. Doh! Well, if Decipher’s computer people had listened to Juz’s suggestion of hooking the printer directly up to the laptop instead of using a big fancy network, we’d be rolling, but instead we had to go steal one of their printers and hook it up directly anyway. About 1:00pm we finally get started, and we just post the pairings up on the wall and let everyone look at them (*much* faster than reading them name by name). And it starts...
Well, the volunteer assignment sheet said I was supposed to be doing command cards, but there wasn’t really much to do in that category, as it was pretty much all automated. The players filled everything out, signed the cards, and handed them in. All there was left to do was put them into the computer, which Chris Gregg was doing a great job at. So me, I-ming, Scott, and Joe Helfrich (who pretty much took up the role of "head judge", the man knows his rules) went around doing rulings. The rulings differed in difficulty, some I didn’t know, but with 4 people doing rules, we’d just call one another over, and it’d get resolved in no time. There were easy rulings:
"Bossk In Hound’s Tooth draws battle destiny by himself, right?"
and there were hard rulings:
"He initiated a battle so I react with the Spiral, then he declared First Strike, he can’t go back and Sense the Spiral, right?" "But First Strike is supposed to happen before the Spiral can come out because it’s an automatic action, and he didn’t give me a chance to declare it before Spiral was played..."
and there were silly rulings:
"If you two don’t stop it, we’ll call you *both* for stalling..." (That was Ray Bordier vs. Kyle Craft)
I think Scott Lingrell gets the prize for calling for the most rulings though, seems like someone was over there every 10 minutes. :-) The first game went pretty smoothly, though I didn’t really get into my groove until the 3rd or 4th game. After the first game, we had 2 drops, and both on the same side, so we ended up with 2 byes (yuck). Turns out my friend Andy Parks got one of them, so I go let him know, he’s complaining because he knew someone who did worse than him, so I have to explain how we had two drops on the same side so there’s actually 2 byes. I chat with some other of my friends while Chris is entering the results, turns out George got paired against TJ Holman first game, and lost in about 5 minutes. :-) Anyway, we’re still learning the process of working the new software, so it takes like 45 minutes until we get the next game paired. After we post the pairings, my friend Craig Berry comes up and complains that his name on the list, we check our things and find out that he was one of the drops. Turns out he accidentally checked the "drop" box on his command card instead of the "don’t drop" box by accident. Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do, because we had already paired, and the players had already started playing. Now that really sucks, and I start spreading the rumor to make sure no one else makes the same mistake. Scott tells me that Heidi is here, and I’m confused cause she told me multiple times she wasn’t coming, but I look over and there she is. So I go over and chat with her for a bit, turns out she got out of whatever medical thinger she had to do, and was going to play in the YJ Day 1. She was saying it only had 41 people, so qualifying would not be a problem (I’d hate to be one of the last 3 though--that would be embarrassing). The next game goes along smoothly enough, but some of the guys at the table start checking the decklists, and are finding ones that aren’t legal. Because of the precedent with the Trek Day 1 (they had already DQ’ed 7 or so people because they had illegal decklists), we pretty much had to follow suit. So the guys at the table start checking every decklist that was turned in, and in the meantime the game ends. They’ve found a good number of players who have illegal decklists, including a few big names like Steven Lewis and Mike Girard. So we’re wondering how to deal with this problem, and we look around for Juz, and he’s disappeared. Apparently, he went off to make some high-level decision or something. So the team running the tournament is dead in the water, so we wait, and we wait, and we wait... A half hour passes, an hour passes, an hour and a half passes, and still no Juz and no decision. Finally, Juz came back, so we start the next round. I think they decided that instead of making the players wait even longer, they would DQ the people with incorrect decklists after the next game, giving them plenty of time to double-check. After that huge wait, though, using the new software finally started to pay off, and we zipped right through the rest of the games without much delay. The only issue was, after the long wait between games 2 and 3, people started assuming that’s how long it always would take, and weren’t there after game 3 when we paired in 20 minutes. So we ended up dropping them cause they weren’t there and had to un-drop those players later because they still wanted to play. Took a little extra time, but really, after game 3 we moved right along.
So the tournament began to wrap up, it was well past midnight, and I hadn’t slept the night before, so I was starting to lose steam. We had a pretty constant decrease in players due to people dropping, which is good because it made the tournament easier to run and pair. Eventually Greg Anderson shows up, which is weird, cause I thought he wasn’t going to make it either. Since it was so late, he helped us run the tournament, which was very cool of him. The tournament kind of ended on an odd note for me. End of the last game, I was sitting down, and I got called over to a game between Gabe Alonso and one of the German players, I think. Gabe was complaining about his characters not being able to move, and was asking if he could use docking bay transit. Turned out his opponent had played Full Scale Alert, and because he couldn’t move, he lost the game that turn. One of the best players in the world, losing because of Full Scale Alert, some random uncommon from Premiere that like no one plays, who would have thought it? Anyway, all the games finish up, and it turns out that 8 players from my region, Coruscant, got into the top 38, to join Pat Ziagos and John Lolli for 10 people! If that isn’t representing, I don’t know what is. I believe first place went to Peter Di Biasio from the UK, and 2nd place went to Dominic Gaudreault from Quebec.
Anyway, Chris Janiak was saying earlier that all the guys that frequent I-ming’s IRC chatroom should get together tomorrow and play an 8-man tournament. So I go around and try to organize it. Heidi Farinholt, Charlie Herren, Scott Lingrell, Mike Josem, and probably a few others too are all playing in Day 2, so I’m going around trying to find people who aren’t. I manage to get I-ming, Andy Parks, Tom H-K, George Gundry, Craig Berry, Todd Theiner, and John Borders to all agree to meet at 1pm in the lobby to play. Janiak, whose idea is was to play, seems kind of iffy now on whether he wants to, maybe he’s scared of us or something. :-)
So I get back to the room, again to find Mike Josem fast asleep. I begin to wonder if he even bothered getting up that day. :-) I got changed pretty quickly and headed to bed, not sleeping for the last 40 hours or so, I sure was tired. So I went to bed, and I woke up to find Mike Josem getting ready the next morning, and getting his deck lists out of the safe (after the insane DQs yesterday, who wouldn’t be serious about their decklists?) :-) I had thought last night that I should get up about the same time as Mike, but I doze for a bit and end up getting up at around 11am; still plenty of time. I took a quick shower, then got my stuff together while Todd took a shower, and headed downstairs. We grabbed some pizza from the hotel food thinger and sit down and eat. Craig comes along shortly, and then Andy and his wife, and we play a game of Settlers of Catan while we’re waiting. Our 1 o’clock meeting time passes, so Andy goes and calls up to the other people and wakes them up, but they’re on their way. It’s about 2:00pm when everyone finally gets down, so we go to the registration desk to tell them we want to run an 8-man. Well, they tell us they only have 8-mans scheduled for after 8pm. Doh! And we had this all planned out, too. Eventually, Bruce comes over, and we explain the situation to him, he says if we can find a tourney director, and we agree to have no prize support, we can do it. At that moment, Greg Anderson happened to be walking by, so I grab him, and he agrees to run it for us (you’re the man, Greg!). So we’re on. We grab one of the side rooms and start...
Game 1: My Light vs. Todd Theiner’s () Carbon Chamber Testing
I really don’t know what the heck his deck was supposed to do, but it didn’t really work. I gave him Madine to be a captive, and we started. I set up in space pretty fast, and his space just couldn’t match mine, so I was draining for lots in space, canceling his drains, and making him pay to draw. In other words, I was draining and he was sucking. He took General Madine out of the cell and moved him over to the Interrogation Room, so I landed EPP Luke and EPP Obi on him and cleared the site and freed him. I’ll just say the game didn’t last long. FW+20ish
Highlights: My deck ruled
Lowlights: His deck sucked
Game 2: My Dark vs. Craig Berry’s () TIGIH Mains
This game is kinda a blur for me. I think he was playing TIGIH, but I could be wrong, might’ve been Hidden Base without flipping or something. Anyway, the game went like this: he deployed a guy, battled, people died, repeat. Like EPPs and stuff. Anyway, I think I set up Dark Deal, so my power was usually bigger than his, so he ran out of guys before I did. The game was over in like 10 minutes. FW+6ish
Game 3: My Light vs. Andrew Parks’s (1914) SYCFA TIE Swarm
I’ll just say that TIEs are not the matchup I want with this deck, usually I aim to drain in space while battling on the ground, but if I have to battle in space, things usually go poorly. Anyway, he drops a TIE Interceptor down at the Death Star Docking Bay first turn, so I drop EPP Luke on it first turn and kill it. So he just deploys some systems and draws, and I manage to draw lots of systems in my hand, so I flip real early, deploy the Falcon at Kirdo III, and move it over to his Death Star. He sets up a Dreadnaught and a couple Interceptors at his Endor (he converted mine), and I reinforce at the Death Star. Eventually, I have the Falcon with General Lando and Colonel Cracken at the Death Star, and Wedge and Elrhyk Rue at Kiffex, plus Luke at his Docking Bay draining. He drops a bunch of ships including the Death Star Assault Squadron at the Death Star (yikes!), so I Hyper Escape away. We’re both draining, and he drops a whole lot of ships at Kirdo and battles Wedge and Elyhyk (I forget why they were there), he plays APTW, I blow up an Interceptor with my XWLC, but the damage is really large (I think one of those new Squadrons might’ve been involved), so I pretty much lose my ships. So he’s stuck at Kirdo and his Death Star with his TIEs where he can drain for zero, and can’t move them because he lost all his Dreadnaughts. Pretty funny, actually. But I’m short on ships, and he eventually deploys the Executor and picks everyone up. A late game Lateral Damage on the Falcon pretty much decides the game, as I have to lose 20 Force in one battle. FL-somethingteen
Highlights: Getting his TIEs stuck where they couldn’t drain. 1/1 drain -1 locations rock!
Lowlights: Playing against a space deck. My deck hates space decks.
Game 4: My Light vs. Andrew Parks’ (1914) EBO
Well, with my Dark Deal deck, games with EBO are pretty much just a race to see who can outdrain who faster. Sometimes I win, sometimes I don’t, usually heavily dependent on my draw. Anyway, we both get set up in about average time. He gets his Hoth out and shuttles Commander Luke up on Artoo in Red 5 to drain there. I get Vader, the Emperor, etc., set up on Cloud City and get Dark Deal out. He gets out some more systems, including Kashyyyk and Kiffex, and we both start draining for tons. So we drain and we drain and we drain. He replaces Commander Luke with Jedi Luke, for reasons that are completely beyond me. We’re both running low on Force, and I have Bossk In Hound’s Tooth in my hand. So I look around for a place to attack, and he doesn’t have enough to draw battle destiny at Kashyyyk, but with the text, neither do I. So I decide to attack at Kiffex, knowing that I can Sense his Organized Attack when it comes. So I try that, he plays Organized Attack, I Sense, and he Senses my Sense, which is now easy with Jedi Luke. So I end up swallowing a bunch of damage there and kill nothing. Anyway, we’re both still hitting each other hard, so he lands Jedi Luke at the Hoth Docking Bay, and transits him and a bunch of 2/2 scrubs over to the Cloud City Docking Bay, and puts Boushh undercover in front of the Emperor. Well, it works out that if I don’t kill him this turn, he’ll drain me out during his turn. But the way he’s got it worked out, I can’t do enough battle damage to kill him, so I die. FL-somesmallnumber
Highlights: Beating up Jedi Luke?
Lowlights: Getting Bossk clobbered in a battle I initiated...
Anyway, I had gone 2-0 for the first two games and was in first place, but losing the last two put me in like 3rd or something. The whole tournament was kinda weird, because we started with 8 people, but 2 dropped after the 2nd game to go make decks for Highlander, and 2 dropped after the 3rd game to go play in the JPSD tourney. So we finished with 4 people. Maybe there’s a reason they weren’t doing 8-mans during the day, although having almost all the games going to time didn’t help people’s schedules any. So I was going to go play in the JPSD tourney, but I didn’t feel like dropping, cause dropping is lame, so I just stuck around. So at this point, I follow Greg around and we meet up with Scott Valentine, and I decide to go to dinner with all the Yavin guys. While I was walking, Doug Taylor asks me if I want to play in an 8-man with him at 8pm, I say sure, because I want to play some more games, and it should end in time for the Squadron Member only tournament at midnight. So I drop my stuff off in Scott’s room, and Scott, Greg, me, and two other guys whose names I don’t remember (sorry guys) head off to McDonald’s for dinner. We meet up with Pat Sullivan on the way and he eats with us too. So we’re eating and talking, and then I look at my watch and it’s like 7:57. So I mention it to the guys, so we all go, and I rush back and get my stuff and try to find Doug Taylor for the 8-man at 8pm. The key word here is "try". So I’m running from one end of the building to the other, trying to find Doug Taylor, and no one has seen him. A little kid comes up to me and says they have 7 people for an 8-man and asks if I want to play. I check to make sure it’s not Doug’s 8-man, then continue my search. About 5 minutes later, it’s like 8:30pm, and I decide to go play with the kid, because if I don’t start now, chances are I’ll miss the SM tourney, and I’d rather not waste the entire evening looking for Doug to play in a tourney that won’t finish on time. So I go back to the 8-man room, and become the 8th man for that tournament, but there are several people who aren’t in the room any more. So some people go out to look for them, and then the people that were missing come back, and now we’re missing the people who went out to look for the people who were missing. Eventually, at about 9pm, everyone is actually in the room, so we start.
Game 1: My Dark vs. ???’s EBO
Okay, I’m usually good with names, but not after conventions where I get a total of about 12 hours of sleep over 4 days. Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, EBO vs. my Dark Deal is just a big ol’ race. However, he only sets up draining at Hoth. So he’s draining for 3 at Hoth, and I’m draining for like 10 on Cloud City. You do the math. (Okay, so I think the game was more interesting than that, but my memory is failing me.) FW+20some
Highlights: Draining for loads.
Lowlights: Getting drained at Hoth. (Well, it’s something, right?)
Anyway, around 9:30pm, Doug Taylor walks in with his group. I’m like, "Where were you guys, I’ve been looking for you forever..." and I tell them I’m already playing in an 8-man, and they’re like, "You abandoned us..." I seriously don’t know how they’re gonna get done by 12 though.
Game 2: My Light vs. ???’s Hunt Down Dueler
Again, with the name, I don’t know, sorry. Only two opponents’ names I didn’t remember all weekend. I think it started with a "C" if that helps. :-) Anyway, wasn’t really expecting to play against Hunt Down, since JPSD isn’t legal yet, but I could deal. I get my systems out pretty quickly, but Visage isn’t being a good thing, so I put Colonel Cracken and EPP Luke down at the Holotheatre to cancel it. Well, Vader comes down and duels Luke, so I take 5, and leave Colonel Cracken in a heapload of trouble. I don’t know how it happened, though, but I only lost the ensuing battle by 4, so I just ICBW’ed the damage. I think he didn’t have any destiny to draw or something. And I was saving that ICBW expecting like a battle damage of 20, with Force all saved up and everything. Oh, well. He put down Security Precautions pretty early, so he keeps deploying ships and probing. Meanwhile, I’m draining for 3 at Kessel. But twice after he deployed and probed, he just moved his ship in front of my ships at Kessel to block the drain, and got them beat up but took no battle damage cause of SecPrec. Works for me, the less ships he has the better. In the meanwhile, he moves his Vader over to the Death Star Docking Bay, where he can get his drains canceled by my HB, but he flips Hunt Down and plays another Visage. So I play Honor. Eventually, he does find my Hidden Base, but I go beat up his ship. And his drain with Vader still doesn’t go through, as I put Boushh there. So now he’s doing little if any damage to me, and I start to spread out in space and drain, and the game ends shortly thereafter. FW+20some
Highlights: The beatdown against Colonel Cracken being small.
Lowlights: Too bad I was all set up to ICBW a major beatdown...
Game 3: My Dark vs. Clay Ramey’s (1831) TIGIH Falcon
So he starts TIGIH so I figure he might be playing Speeders, and I draw mostly interior sites, so it’s all good. I take a bit of time to find Vader, but eventually I do, so I go capture Luke and haul him to the Cloud City Docking Bay. He gets out Kessel and puts Captain Han and the Falcon there with Squadron Assignments. Here’s where I get to be a bonehead. The key to beating a Falcon deck is to *not* battle the Falcon, unless you have like a deck that’s all space and have some huge armada. But I guess I didn’t really realize he was playing a Falcon deck at the time, he only had Captain Han on the Falcon, any deck could do that. So I land Bossk in the Bus and Zuckuss in Mist Hunter on him. Bossk gets Barriered. I have a Sense in my hand. If I weren’t a scrub, I would’ve used it. So I’m still not scared, cause with Zuckuss around he’s still not getting destiny. So I battle. He plays I Know and fetches EPP Leia. Lovely, so instead of him getting no destiny, now he gets 3. Of course, I still have that Sense in my hand, but I’m still a scrub so I don’t use it. So then he plays Punch It! I finally wake up and play my Sense, but he Senses it (gee, all that stupidity for nothing). So he’s got a decked-out Falcon and draws 5 destinies against my Zuckuss. I really forget whether or not he played Legendary Starfighter, cause it really didn’t matter. Bossk had nowhere to run, so he stuck around to get beat down next turn. I either lost then, or shortly afterward. FL-24
Highlights: Well, now maybe I’ll remember not to play like an idiot in the future.
Lowlights: Battling the Falcon, I should know better than that cause I used to play a Falcon deck...
So I was talking with Charlie Herren like the next day or something about this game, and he was like, "You battled the Falcon with a Dark Deal deck?!" Boy am I stupid...
Game 4: My Light vs. Clay Ramey’s (1831) Non-Dueling Hunt Down
So, what’s with all the Hunt Down decks, anyway? I manage to get a pretty good draw, and flip Hidden Base fairly early. He comes down in space and starts probing, and blows General Lando in the Falcon up early. He tries attacking my group of ships at Kessel, and fails pretty badly, and I play Legendary Starfighter on Wedge. Meanwhile, he puts Vader down at some docking bay, and I get EPP Obi and Colonel Cracken down to cancel Visage. Unfortunately, I’m a scrub so I keep forgetting to remind him to lose to Legendary Starfighter and making him spend to draw. But my drains at Kessel are really hurting him. Eventually, he does find my Hidden Base, and that happens to be the turn I remind him to spend to draw (and he’s like, "Why"?). But I’m still draining for more than him, and now I’m remembering the Legendary Starfighter, so I win. (There had to be more to that game, but my memory only goes so far...) FW+somethingteen
Highlights: Actually playing Legendary Starfighter; I’ve had the card in for like a month and had never used it before. :-)
Lowlights: ...and then I simply proceed to completely forget about it for like 5 turns.
So anyway, no one went undefeated in the tournament, and there were 3 3-1 players, so Clay won and I got 3rd. I can deal with it though, with my rating being in the doldrums, a 3-1 performance will almost certainly help. At this point, it’s just about midnight, so I head over to the main room for the Squadron Member only "secret squirrel" tourney. Basically, they gave us 4 Reflections packs, and told us to make a 40-card deck using any cards in there, Light or Dark. So I go open the packs with Greg Anderson, and I pull a bunch of silly stuff like the Rancor and This Is Just Wrong, and he pulls a foil Son of Skywalker. There’s really no organization to the tournament, we just played whoever the heck we felt like playing. So since Greg was right there, we played a game, and Scott Valentine and Joe Helfrich came over to play a game beside us. And it begins...
Game 1: My Pile vs. Greg Anderson’s Pile w/ a Foil Son
He starts the Hoth: Ice Plains, and I start out with Tosche Station, and the first thing he does is put a Leia Seeker there. Doh! I really don’t have characters to waste to set off the Seeker, and I can’t put down all non-pilots and still draw destiny, so I just deploy the Cloud City Lower Corridor (Dark), with the 2 Force icons facing me. I needed Force pretty badly, with him screwing my Tosche strategy and what-not. He tries to play the Death Star: Trench, but me, Scott, and Joe are all like, "You can’t do that" at once. Kinda funny, since the four of us were all helping out doing rulings for Day 1 of Worlds. So he deploys the Cloud City: Interrogation Chamber (with the side that says "Force drain +1" facing him), and throws a whole bunch of schmoes at my Lower Corridor. I deploy the West Gallery and try to attack to attack him with Jerrol Blendin and some other guys, but he draws something insane for battle destiny (it was either a 6 or a Visage), so I have to lose all my guys except one, who runs to the West Gallery. He kills my guy at the West Gallery (with another Jerrol Blendin, in fact), and moves back over to the Lower Corridor. I have TK-422 in my hand, but there’s not an Imperial on the table, just aliens and rebels. He deploys Son of Skywalker to the Interrogation Chamber. I try deploying a Bothan Spy and some other guys to his Hoth: Ice Plains, but he comes down with a bunch of guys and beats me up. I have enough non-pilots to come down at the Tosche Station without setting off the Seeker, so I do so, thinking his Seeker will help protect me. He comes down with Blizzard Scout 1 there with guys inside and kills some of my guys, I try to feebly reinforce, but he comes down with a bunch of non-pilots next turn and takes me out. So basically, he has control of the entire board now, so I lose. FL-abunch
Anyway, in the middle of the game, Joe’s like, "It costs 1 for creatures to attack, right?" and me, Scott, and Greg all simultaneously go, "No!" I think all of us were pretty brain-fried as far as rulings were concerned... At this point, the hotel staff was kicking everyone out of the main room so they could collect up the tables or something, so we had to leave. At this point, MaryGail walks up and starts talking to Scott, and once I figure out who she is, I introduce myself. We go into one of the side rooms to figure out something to do now, I want to play Settlers of Catan, but Scott wants to get in another game of Secret Squirrel against me, so I play him, and Greg plays I-ming.
Game 2: My Pile w/ a Bubo vs. Scott Valentine’s Pile
I start out with Tosche Station again, and he starts with Jabba’s Palace: Audience Chamber (Light, I think). I throw somes guys at Tosche, and he goes and beats them up. I deploy a Wookiee and a Skrilling to his Audience Chamber, and he deploys some guys there. So I deploy Bubo there and munch someone, and then battle. Shortly thereafter, Bubo clears the site for me, and I basically sit there and drain for 2 for the rest of the game. He saves up and gets some drain for 1 system out, and puts the Executor there. I’m pretty much ignoring that, because as the only starship I pulled was a single X-wing, and I decided not to use it. Anyway, the rest of the game is fairly uneventful, we fight some battles on Cloud City, but my steady drain of 2 in the Audience Chamber pretty much wins me the game. FW+some
At this point, we all go over and talk to MaryGail and Alex Tennet, who somehow is exactly like I expected him to be. Heck, I guessed it was Alex Tennet even before I heard the name. *shrug* Being the shy guy that I am, I somehow neglect to introduce myself, but he told me later he knew who I was anyway. So anyway, Scott’s saying about his name being in plaid on MaryGail’s site for giving her so many Stormtroopers, and she’s saying Ivan gave her so many Stormtroopers (why didn’t he come, anyway?), so I start to feel kinda bad about only giving her 12 or so. So anyway, we start talking about British humor, and British hygiene (*shrug* again), when I ask I-ming if he’s seen Todd lately. He said the bunch of them went off to play some Lord of the Rings game Andy had. Hey, wait a minute, I was supposed to be playing that too... This was a game Andy had invented and was trying to market to Iron Crown Enterprises (makers of Middle Earth: CCG), who were actually going to produce it, but then they lost their Tolkien license because of the new movies. So I went off to try to find them, but they didn’t seem to be anywhere in the convention center, and they weren’t at the tables in the lobby. So I called up to Andy’s room, and there wasn’t anybody there. So I tried going to mine and Todd’s room, but all I found was Mike Josem sleeping (again). So I went back downstairs and called up to Tom H-K’s and George’s room, but all I got was Tom’s wife Blythe, who said she hadn’t seen her husband, and that he was supposed to have called her an hour ago. Uh-oh... So by process of elimination, I assumed they were in I-ming’s and John Border’s room. So I go find I-ming and we check his room, but all we find there are sleeping people I wasn’t looking for. So we head back downstairs and by the lobby tables I find Andy, Todd, George, Craig, and Tom. They said they were at the *other* lobby tables the whole time... Anyway, Andy had already put his LotR game away, so he tells me we can play another time. Everybody gathers around a table and starts talking about what they’re going to do tomorrow. I figure I’m gonna sleep in tomorrow, so I suggest we play some Settlers of Catan now. Me, I-ming, and Andy want to play, but 4 people is much better than 3, so I go try to find a 4th. I find Omar and John off playing some other game called Nuclear War, they really want to play but won’t be done for another 15 minutes, so I go back. Turns out that George wants to learn how to play Settlers, so we teach him real quick and begin. I get to 9 points real fast (you need 10 to win), and I’m so close to winning, so nobody’s trading with me. Eventually, Andy, who had 6 points at the time, offers me a trade that’s in my favor, so I accept, and he pulls 4 points out of nowhere and wins. So he plays me for a sucker, I shoulda figured out he was plotting something when he’s trading in my favor when I’m pretty clearly going to win when it’s my turn because of it. So in the meantime, John and Omar have come over, and started a game with Ben Robinson (my other roommate) and Todd. Craig wants to go run to the 7-11 to get something to eat, and John and Todd want to go with him, so I take over for Todd and I-ming takes over for John. I’m positioned how I like, with like all the ore and wheat I could need, and the wheat port. So I turn all my settlements into cities, and get to 9 points; all I need is to build one more settlement to win. So again, everyone stops trading with me, but I have 9 points to like everyone else’s 7, so I can prolly win anyway. Well, the dice are my enemy. Against all odds, I don’t produce anything for like 10 rolls, and someone else wins. So after that, some people don’t want to play, so we coelesce into one game of 6 using the expansion. And as my luck would have it, I again get to 9 points and then lose. Blah.
So we all go our ways after this, I decide to go to sleep and wake up at about 5pm, enough time to get dinner and run my tournament at 9:30. George and I-ming decide to just stay up, and the rest of us head off to our rooms. It’s 7am by the time I get to sleep, suffice to say, my sleep schedule is all messed up. I end up getting up at around 3pm and can’t get back to sleep, so I head downstairs. I meet Andy downstairs and try out his Lord of the Rings game. It seemed like a really cool and balanced game, except he got like a god draw and everything in the game went in his favor (including the dice), so he whooped me. I had even gotten a big ol’ army of Uruk-Hai in his way, but he just flew over me with some eagles. Oh well. After that, we met up with Todd and ate some meal that was in-between lunch and dinner at the hotel restaurant. Feel kinda bad for Todd, he ended up paying $7 for what was little more than a piece of cheese, a slice a turkey, and 2 slices of bread. After that, Andy wanted to check out the "reverse Q+A" session for the new LotR card game that Decipher will make, so he goes there and I head to the Decipher store. I want to get 2 boxes of JPSD (one for me, and one for my brother, whose birthday was on the following Monday) and I saw people going around with Japanese Hoth 2-Player games, which were pretty cool, so I asked for one of them too. Unfortunately, they were all out of the Japanese Hoth 2PGs, so I just got the 2 JPSDs. She gave me too super-size Maras as well, which is cool, I suppose they were for getting signed (I don’t believe in getting stuff signed, seems silly to me), but to me they looked like great prize support for local tourneys.
So I head back to the room where they’re having the LotR discussion, I’m really looking forward to that game, cause LotR is like the best fictional world ever, it blows Star Wars out of the water. So Chuck, Sandy, and some other guys I don’t recognize are there, and they start asking us questions. I try to talk up having a factional multiplayer game, cause I think it’d be real cool like that, and everyone else has great ideas too. The only thing that kinda concerned me was that some people wanted it to be simple or short, and a strategically watered-down game was the last thing I wanted. The Decipher crew seemed fairly open to all our comments, which was really cool, and they talked a bit about having to base it on the movie and not straight from the books, and not having all 3 movies at their fingertips at once, and other such logistical problems. But I came out of that room convinced that LotR:CCG would be Decipher’s best game yet, I’m really excited. After we came out, Andy had told us that before the session started he was talking to Ross Campbell, the guy in charge of PD or something, and gave a brief demo of his LotR board game to him, and Ross seemed pretty interested and gave Andy his business card. Andy said he could have just been being nice, but it’d be really cool if he could get that game produced...
Anyway, I still have some time before I have to run my tournament, so I go check out the volunteer lounge, where Scott Valentine is hanging out cause he’s the Pit Boss there. I hang out there for a while, and a bunch of pizzas come for the volunteers working that night, so I grab a couple pieces. :-) Then I head off to go run my tournament, and I go up to the registration deck, and they tell me I’m way too early, and come back in a half-hour. So I just hang out for a bit, and then go I back, and they say there’s 4 command cards in so far. So I’m kinda disappointed, it’d be cool to run something sanctioned, but like all of a sudden a bunch of people come in wanting to play, some of them saying they already turned in their command cards. Apparently, a bunch of command cards for my tournament were lost or something. So that bumped our number up to 9 people. Greg Anderson had mentioned to me that he wanted to play earlier, so if I could find him, that would get rid of the bye. Turns out he’s still playing in the JPSD tournament, but he’s on the last game. So I ask Bruce and he says I can let him come in late and get a 0(0) for the first game, especially since it would get rid of the bye. So I round everyone up, and Jon Dunn and a girl named Jenn or something come wanting to play, saying their command cards were lost too. So now we have 11 people. The tournament is Young Jedi Player’s Choice Sealed, so I collect everyone’s choices and start passing out packs. A girl named Ellen had the bye, so I sat with her and switched off her cards. I was looking at the cards I got, and a Naboo Maul was among them; Greg would be happy. Anyway, before the deckbuilding time was up, Greg finished his JPSD game, so he actually did get to play the first game, so there were no byes at all. No major issues came up, and some guy named Jared won (or at least I think that was his name); he was the only undefeated. 2nd place went to Greg Anderson.
So it’s around midnight at this point, I decide since I had slept until 3pm, it wasn’t really worth it to go to sleep. So I head back to the hotel lobby, and we play some more Settlers of Catan, teaching Tom H-K how to play this time. I-ming also teaches us this game called "Family Business"; kind of a fast moving non-collectible card game that’s about gang wars and the such. It plays out that it was pretty much about how well you could stay on other people’s good sides, we’d all gang up on whoever was winning, and make truces, and stuff. It was pretty cool. We ended up playing more Settlers into the wee hours of the morning, unfortunately some people had to go because they were leaving that morning, but the games went on. Eventually we were just hanging out watching a game of Star Wars between Hayes Hunter and some guy I didn’t know. Hayes got his butt kicked, but then again, he was using someone else’s deck. After they were done, me, George, Hayes, Mike Josem, and another guy who said he was TerronK (I recognized the handle from the listserv, but I still can’t attach a name to it...) decided to go to IHOP for breakfast. So we’re walking along, and I have no clue where the IHOP is, and apparently neither does anyone else. So the four of us start going one way, and Josem starts going another way. So we’re like, "Where you going?", and he says he’s going to Australia or something. So we think he’s kidding, but he keeps going his way, and then says it’s the way to IHOP. So we all follow him, and get to the IHOP. So we sit down, and the waiter tries to joke around with us, but he’s obviously out of his element, he’s saying something about there being insects in the coffee pot or something. So the waiter asks Josem what he wants, and he has like no clue whatsoever, and just kind of stares and shrugs. So the waiter suggests some sampler dish, and he orders it. So we go around the table, and Hayes orders one pancake. The waiter’s kinda incredulous, but he takes down the order and heads off. So we all talk for a while, and none of us had any sleep, so I dunno how coherent we were, and I don’t really remember either. So the waiter comes back with our food, and Josem picks up a thing of syrup that says "strawberry", and he’s like, "Strawberry syrup, what’s that taste like?" We all break into laughter immediately, and finish our meal. So we finish up, and Josem doesn’t have any small bills or anything, so he leaves the waiter this huge Australian coin that’s worth like 3 cents. We go up to the register to pay for our meals, and Hayes starts putting video game tokens in the "save the children" donation box or something. Then he stops, and asks the cashier, "What percent of these donations is actually going to the kids?" He starts going off about how he wants the children to get the video game enjoyment he’s donating, not some charity executive or something. :-) The cashier is just kinda playing along, nodding her head, but she clearly wants to get rid of us. So we all pay up, and head outside. I look at the time, and it’s like almost 9am, so I want to get back to make sure I get into the Team tourney, and the rest of the guys are hanging around some vacation booth or something. So I tell George I’m leaving, and head off.
I don’t have a team yet, but Pat Ziagos told me he was looking for more people, so I find him and he says he’s still got two more spaces. So I tell him that I’m in, and that George might be in as well. Then I find out we need decklists for the Team tourney, so I fill one out real quick. George finally caught up with us, so he starts filling out one too. I look at the time, it’s almost 10am, and checkout’s at 11am. I figure that if we’re not out of the room by the checkout time, the hotel would be more than happy to charge us for another night. So I run off and find Josem and we go wake Todd up and hurry out of the room. Checkout goes without a problem, despite splitting the charge between my credit card, Mike’s credit card, and like $200 cash. So I run back, and fortunately they haven’t started the Team tourney yet, everyone’s just sitting around. I don’t feel like dragging along my luggage to every game, so I just put it along the wall, and have one eye glued to it the entire time. So they start the pairings, and first game I’m matched up against Steven Turner. Well, this ain’t gonna be easy. :-)
Game 1: My Light vs. Steven Turner’s (2102) Bring Him Before Me
Well, I actually get off to a real good start. I get out my systems and flip really easily, and I have a bunch of ships, including Wedge and his ship and the Liberty at Kessel draining. I play an Anger, Fear, Agression in his deck, and I refuse to spread out until it comes up, which is fine because I’m canceling his drain whilst draining for 3. He deploys the Emperor and Janus at some Docking Bay, I think it Yavin or something. Then he puts Vader down at the Docking Bay and the Avenger with some 2/2 pilot at my Kiffex. I’ve got a nice beatdown force in my hand to take care of the Avenger, but I can’t just go swallowing 3 Force from his objective, so I decide to just give him Luke instead. He had found my Hidden Base with the Avenger, so he now drains me for some at the Yavin Docking Bay. I play Always Thinking With Your Stomach to cancel his drain, and make Vader wander off, sending Luke free to the Used Pile (which is ok, cause I have another in my hand). Now here’s where I begin proving what a scrub I am. I’m looking at Janus and the Emperor, and Luke and some guys in my hand, and I’m thinking I can take them on. So I throw down Luke and Cracken, but Luke gets the Barrier. Now I realize Cracken is in a whole lot of trouble if he finds Vader, because then Luke will be gone too, so I deploy another 2/2 pilot to accompany him. Here’s the catch. Home One DB is on the table. While I couldn’t move Luke, he’d be captured anyway, so he wouldn’t get beat down. But I could’ve just moved Cracken over and been completely safe. Anyway, I’m an idiot so I have Cracken and Elyhek Rue at the site, he finds Vader with the Force Lightning he tracked around, battles, chokes Elyhek, hits Cracken with a Lightsaber, and I’m losing like 20 Force. He spreads out to his Spaceport Docking Bay as well, and plays Search And Destroy. I’ve got like nothing left (I was winning before that battle, too!), so I lose. FL-10ish
Highlights: Despite my obvious stupidity, Steve was a really cool guy and fun to play, and he even heard of me before. hehe :-)
Lowlights: Once again playing like an idiot.
Game 2: My Dark vs. Joe Olson’s (1860) Baragwin EBO
Okay. This game was RIDICULOUS, with a capital R, and a capital IDICULOUS as well. I draw, and my hand is like all red except for one character. So I draw up, and draw all red cards. He begins to set up with Ishi Tibs and Baragwins. I draw up again, and once against get all red cards. So I deploy my guy, and he deploys an EPP and kills it. So I draw up some more, and get like 1 character. I deploy a Reactor Terminal, and start to recycle all of those useless red cards. He’s got EBO set up with stuff at Hoth. I get some ships down at Bespin Cloud City to at least drain for one there, but he just loses weapons (like Ewok Catapults) and retrieves them. So I get pissed off with that and deploy Coward. He just deploys EPP Luke to his North Ridge and continues on like nothing happened. I deploy another character, Mara I think, and he deploys an EPP and kills it. I finally manage to draw a couple characters, so I deploy the Emperor at one site, Mara with her Saber at another site, and Obsidian 8 at the docking bay and play Dark Deal. Obsidian 8 obviously takes off. He deploys EPP Leia and shoots my Emperor with an Ewok Catapult for destiny. I’m still draining some, but his Baragwins are taking care of practically all of it. I need Coward to be in effect, so I finally draw a Lord Vader (I’ve had his Saber in my hand forever), and come down to battle Luke. Now I get to demonstrate why Lord Vader is cool. He draws a 1 and a 7 for destiny, and thinks he hits me, but he doesn’t. I draw like a 1 and a 4 for my weapon destiny, he thinks I miss, but I don’t. Then he draws some battle destiny that I’m immune to. Nice, eh? Well, he just goes ahead and deploys EPP Leia and Luke to one of my Cloud City sites to fulfill Coward. The game didn’t last too much longer. FL-30some?
Highlights: Lord Vader worked well.
Lowlights: Like 6 turns of drawing nothing but crud.
Game 3: My Light vs. Bob Caton’s (1758) BHBM
Well, it’s the way of things at convention tourneys, you go 0-2 with huge negative differential, and you don’t play against scrubs, you play against other good people who’ve had the same luck. Anyway, I know Bob cause he plays in a lot of the Philly tourneys, and he tells me he’s going to win because he’s all teched out against the JPSD objective decks that no one’s using. I get off to a pretty good start. Like 2nd turn, he throws down the Emperor and Janus down at some battleground docking bay. So I deploy EPP Obi there, Clash the Emperor, hit Janus, and Smoke for destiny, he loses Janus and a whole bunch, but he Young Fools Obi to place him out of play. He went and fetched the Executor with Mobilization Points, so I’m not too anxious to put ships down. Meanwhile, the Emperor’s still pinging me for one, so I deploy EPP Luke and Madine there and hit him with a Lightsaber, so he loses the Emperor plus a bunch, and I lose Madine. So now I’m pinging him for one, and all he does is save up more and more Force. He deploys the Executor plus Mara Jade or something at one of my systems. So I deploy Lando in the Falcon, Wedge in his ship, Tycho in his ship, and like the Liberty and beat it down. At this point, he knows he’s not going to win, so he draws up. FW+30some
Highlights: I won a game!
Lowlights: Well, it was rather one-sided...
Game 4: My Dark vs. Hugh Shelton’s () Rebel Strike Team
Now *this* was a deck I surely wasn’t expecting. He goes and gets General Madine with Strike Planning, and gets Geezum with Madine to get his sites out. My draw isn’t actually that bad this time, so I manage to get set up without a problem. So he’s like not hurting me at all while his objective is on the zero side, and my drains start to dig in to him. However, he soon flips his objective. He’s got Midge at a site with Madine and Geezum, I figure I gotta kill Midge or I get outdrained. So I deploy EJP Dengar and Blizzard 2 there, battle, miss Midge on the first shot, hit her on the 2nd shot, and kill Madine with attrition. Unforunately, I don’t have enough attrition to lose both of them, so I have to leave the Walker around to potential get beat down. He does battle the Walker next turn, but doesn’t do enough to get past its forfeit. But now I’ve got another problem, and its name is Menace Fades. He’s got the Falcon or something at Endor, so I gotta kill that to make Menace Fades go away. So I deploy Bossk in the Bus and Obsidian 8 there, and battle, but I don’t draw well enough to get past his immunity, and I lose the Obsidian to attrition. So now he does something silly like deploys the Home One to Endor, and smacks around Bossk for all it’s worth. The game went quickly downhill from there, as he was draining for more, and I was draining for less. And that Battle Plan didn’t help any either. FL-abunch
Highlights: Umm, well now I can brag that I got beat by RST. How many people can say that? :-)
Lowlights: Going 1-3. Sucky sucky.
So Team Albany has like 3 undefeateds on their team, so they take home the large clear pointy thingers. Chris Twigg said he found my EPP Obi, apparently I forgot to grab it from my game with Bob, maybe it was just too far out of play. :-) So I’m just hanging out now, saying bye to people who are leaving and stuff. Charles Hickey want to play a game with me using his infamous Profit deck, so I decide to give my Dark Deal deck (which has gone 2-5 over the weekend) one final whirl.
Pick-up Game: My Dark vs. Charles Hickey’s (1959) Profit
I manage to deploy Come Here You Big Coward first turn, so when he frees Han on like the 2nd turn, he didn’t retrieve the 1 Force that was there. He’s got Ben with his Saber and Premiere Han off at some Tatooine site, so I’m taking 3 a turn for it. I drop Mara with a Saber at the Port Town District (where she’s free and powerful), but he deploys Master Luke with Anakin’s Saber there, and we both hit each other and everything dies. So I manage to set up Dark Deal, with Sim, Janus, and the Emperor at one site, and Lord Vader with his Saber at the other. He tries attacking the Emperor’s site with another Master Luke, this time with Luke’s Saber. He does hit the Emperor, but other than that it goes badly for him. He tries to Clash, but I lose 1 to Crush to cancel it (and he was such a dear to remind me to do that, too). :-) He tries to play The Force Is Strong, but I Sense it. I go through my deck and pull a I Have You Now with Crush, and play it. So I draw 4 battle destinies, and they’re all good, plus I add 6 to my power from Dark Deal and the Cloud City text. So he loses Luke plus a lot. So Vader’s over at the Port Town District draining for 5, so he puts Boussh there. I Sniper Boussh and keep right on draining. So next he puts Luke down in front of Vader (he said he had a Narrow Escape or 2 in his hand), so I Sniper him too. After that, it was pretty much over, as I was draining for 9 a turn, or something crazy like that. FW+lots
So Doug Taylor comes over and starts talking about how good I am, where was he the rest of the weekend when I sucked? :-P Anyway, we’re pretty much just wrapping up all th events here, and I hadn’t played YJ all weekend for some reason (I didn’t want to dedicate my entire weekend to it, but a few games would’ve been nice), so I challenge Greg Anderson to a quick match. He agrees, and I use my SUPREME CHANCELLOR deck, which just happens to be an awesome deck with no rares. He starts with the Galactic Senate, which is cool because the SUPREME CHANCELLOR is super-cool there. We really duke it out on that planet, he’s got a bunch of scrub senators and Sidious running around with a Sithy Saber. I can never seem to get my SUPREME CHANCELLOR with his Rifle and his battle card matched up with Sidious, which is bad for me, cause at a 9+destiny, he’s a winner. Never got out any Planetary Shuttles, either. Oh, well. He throws down Maul with his Double Saber, and like kills everyone, so I surrender. I did manage to blow up his Transport though. I go to the Naboo Swamp because I’ve got some Tarpals, but weapons seem to be in short supply, and I never did see Tarpals’ Pole, and he gets big Sithy guys out after me, so I lose. I don’t feel too bad, cause Greg said that deck had gone undefeated on the weekend, and I was the smallest win. *shrug*
They finally hand out prize support for the Team tourney, and our team gets 2nd to last (woohoo!), so I get a pack of Reflections. It was, however, the best pack of Reflections that I’ve ever opened. The foil was Tantive IV, and I got 9 (!) rares besides that, including CC Lando, WB Han, BB EBO, Smoke Screen, Punch It!, Luke’s Blaster, and a bunch of other stuff. I was impressed. Anyway, everyone begins to clear out of the tourney area, I decide to head back to the airport with Charlie Herren, but he ends up on a Mears shutttle cause he can’t wait for the courtesy one, so I stick around. My plane doesn’t get in until 9:30pm anyway, so there was no rush. So I just sit and talk with Greg for a while, and head out on the 6pm shuttle with Nhat and Omar. I get to the airport, check in, and the guy at the desk says he got me a better seat, which is cool. So I eat at the Burger King and go get changed into warmer clothes in some bathroom, then head to my terminal, set my watch, and fall asleep. About an hour later, someone starts talking to me, it’s Sean Wiedemann, a friend of mine from college who qualified for Trek Day 2. So we talk a little bit about dominant and goofy strategies in our respective games, and he tells me how Kyle Craft went and played in the Trek Team tournament and apparently did really well, which was cool. I go give my friend Joe who’s picking me up at the Philly airport a call from the pay phone, I’m dead tired at this point, so I forget my friend’s phone number, but after a few tries I remember it. So I head back to the seats, and sitting there is our regional champion, John Lolli. So I chat with him a bit, mostly about how he was doing in Day 2, and he was saying he really liked my Light deck (he borrowed it for a while Saturday night, I think). So the plane actually boards on time (gasp), leaves on time (gasp), and arrives in Philadelphia early (double gasp). And the guy at the check in desk wasn’t lying when he told me he got me a better seat, I was in the 2nd row from the front, and had the whole half-row to myself! Surely a change from when my plane screwed me over on the way here. So I meet Joe at the airport, he drives me home, and I fall asleep. And then somebody lives happily ever after, but I really doubt it’s me.
PROPS:
- Decipher, for running a great convention. Seriously, it was the best time I had in my life, ever (of course, that may just reflect how pathetic I am).
- Joe Helfrich, for being a Rules God, and bailing me out a number of times giving ruling on Day 1.
- I-ming Chen and Todd Theiner, for waiting for my plane to get in for like 3 hours in the middle of the night.
- Scott Valentine and Greg Anderson, for being two very cool people to hang out with.
- Heidi Farinholt, for getting out of her medical thinger and showing up.
- Juz, for writing cool software. If we would have used the regular software, we’d still be playing Day 1. :-)
- All the Coruscant guys who made it to Day 2, you guys deserved it.
- Bruce Umene, for letting us run an 8-man before 8pm.
- Greg Anderson, for taking time out to run our 8-man.
- The talking trash can at McDonalds, for being "tech".
- Kyle Heuer, for giving us free Reflections packs to play "secret squirrel".
- Bubo, for being the bomb in Sealed.
- MaryGail, for just being all-around awesome.
- Alex Tennet, for knowing who I am. :-)
- Heidi Farinholt, for not trying to get me drunk (of course, it’s hard to get someone drunk when you’re drunk yourself). :-)
- Tom Hermley-Keen and George Gundry, for learning how to play Settlers.
- Andy Parks, for teaching me his super-cool LotR game.
- Everyone who acknowledges that Settlers is the best board game ever, cause it is.
- Chuck Kallenbach and crew, for being so open at the LotR Q+A. That was awesome!
- All the people who played in my YJ tourney, cause it ran without a hitch.
- Hayes Hunter, for being hilarious.
- Mike Josem, for not knowing what "Strawberry Syrup" tasted like.
- Matty Sokol, for being a CHAMP!
- George Gundry, for sleeping all of two hours all weekend.
- George Gundry, for almost decking Tom when he was asleep (apparently, Tom tried to get George’s wallet with the keycard in it, and all of a sudden, George wakes up, jumps halfway across the room, counts the money in his wallet, then goes back to sleep...)
- George Gundry, for initiating a Force drain, then falling asleep, and then waking up not knowing whose turn it was.
- Charles Hickey, for boosting my ego. :-)
- Steven Turner, for knowing who I was, and being a really cool guy besides.
- Mark Tuttle, for being a "celebrity". (Funny, I thought it was "Mark McKay" that was the celebrity...) :-)
- Pat Ziagos, for having a team for me.
- Team Albany, for being the best!
- Chris Terwilliger, for knowing that the EPP Obi was mine and returning it.
- John Lolli, for liking my Light deck.
- Charlie Herren, for not quitting.
- Everyone I didn’t mention. Seriously, I didn’t meet one person this weekend that I didn’t like. You guys rock!
- The plane back, for being on time, and getting 3 seats to myself.
- Me, for writing a 13,000+ word report. :-P
SLOPS:
- My plane to Orlando, for being 3 hours late, and getting there at like 4 in the morning.
- The taxi driver, for taking me to the wrong hotel.
- Mike Dalton and Adam Kronfeld, for not coming.
- Someone at Decipher, for not letting Rich Haman help out at Day 1, he’s like an awesome TD.
- Juz’s computer, for not working.
- The Decipher computer people, for insisting on using a network printer.
- Decklists, cause they suck.
- Chris Janiak, for coming up with the idea of an IRC 8-man, then not playing.
- Orlando, for being overpriced.
- Todd Theiner’s sandwich, for being a slice of cheese, a slice of turkey, and two slices of bread for $7. (What’s that come to, about $1.60 per slice?)
- Dice, for screwing me all weekend, in Settlers and Andy’s LotR game.
- The Falcon, for tempting me to go battle it.
- The waiter at IHOP, for making bad jokes.
- My Dark Deal deck, for losing way too often.
- Thieves, cause they suck.
- The SUPREME CHANCELLOR, for failing me.
- Sleep, for being necessary.
- My memory, for forgetting names and diffs.
- Me, for being a scrub. An abnormally happy scrub, but a scrub nonetheless. :-P
Until next time...