pontiac-michigan-1-27-01
Title: pontiac-michigan-1-27-01
Author: Andrew "Gwaihir" Ehret
Date: Jan 27, 2001
Comic City
Me: I’m Andrew Ehret. I’m a SW:CCG player with a 1686 ranking. It is usually always going up, the reason being I have played in only about 50 sanctioned games. Only 30 of them have even been updated, there has been some kind of ratings backlog lately.
I attended a tournament in Pontiac, Michigan at a store called Comic City, which I had never seen or heard of. It turned out to be a nice little store, which had a surprising large collection of anime rentals. It would be cool to have a place like that near me. My friend, James West, agreed to drive me from Michigan State to Pontiac on Friday night because my car was in the shop. This tournament would end up being shortened by time constraints from 6 rounds to 4 but it didn’t matter because I played alot of high quality competition.
Game 1 vs. James West (rating: 1582)
My Watch Your Step with lots of space tech and matching pilots vs. Jim’s CCT flipping
First turn Jim deploys Ephant Mon with Power of the Hutt and dark Lando with the prison gametext. This would seriously limit my character selection for the rest of the game since Lando and Han are two of the best smugglers. I deployed Luke with lightsaber and Wedge to the Tatooine:db94 in hopes of freeing my frozen Han when he walked by. Unfortunately IG-88 with blaster cleared both my characters from the sight and Jim successfully flipped CCT and began using immunity, scum, and retrieval. I used squad assignments to get a steady drain at Kessel and dogpiled my men into the cantina. My hope was to defeat him with drains thanks to my Menace Fades. Things went according to plan as I won a few battles and ended up winning a close game. Full Win by 7
2(+7)
Game 2 vs. Clint Prong (rating: 1914)
My Dark Deal with ground mains and space ties vs. Clint’s New Age Throne Room
Clint has a very high rating which used to be higher and has a reputation for being good. However he hasn’t played much in the last 6 months and was playing a modern adaptation of Throne Room Mains. This game was decided fast and furiously with a series of battles on cloud city that I won. Vader/Tarkin/Evazan teamed up as a threesome and killed Obi twice, Luke twice and about every other character in his deck. Evazan operated on more then 5 people over the course of the game. Clint was especially hurt by my choice of Crush the Rebellion as a starting effect. It hurt his multiple draws strategy, his clash of sabers strategy, and his revolution strategy. Evader/Monnok was also played as a Monnok killing both his Leia’s early in the game. Full Win by 19
4(+26)
Game 3 vs. Casey Galvan (rating: 2021)
My WYS deck vs. Casey’s powerful My Kind of Scum Abyssins
After we draw Casey looks at his hand. His eyes get big, his mouth waters, and he says he wishes he got draws like this at worlds. First turn I find out why as he deploys Scum, SE Jabba, and Chall to the audience chamber. Then he deploys another JP site and puts 3 free abyssins at it. That’s right he deployed 5 characters on his first turn, flipped his objective, and still had some force left to draw. Undaunted by this fact I deployed Dash and Mirax in the Outrider to Kessel and Captain Han in the Falcon with Leebo to Corellia and begin my Kessel runs. On his turns a flurry of more characters pile up on Tatooine sites and Mosep and Gallid deploy in the middle so now I have to face losing six of the top of my deck every turn. Things get even worse when he deploys bargaining table and that with Myo to the objective cancel two of my drains for several turns. The game was over when he used Zuckuss in ship with 4-Lom and two tracked 5’s (which become 7’s with MKOS flipped) to kill my Falcon. The differential gets horrible when he plays two retrieval interrupts and retrieves his whole lost pile. Full Loss by 23
4 (+3)
Game 4 (My third straight game versus a 1900+ player) vs. Jeremiah Himmelbrand (rating: 1908)
My Dark Deal mains and ties vs. Jeremiah’s Hidden Base with mains and retrieval
This game was incredibly frustrating. I depoloyed all my favorite power battle combo’s in the first few turns. I have Tarkin/Vader/Evazan on a site, Xixor/Guri on a dreadnaught at one system, and Zuckuss/4-LOM/IG-88 on a dreadnaught at another system. BUT I CAN NEVER MAKE HIM STAND STILL AND BATTLE ME. Instead he runs in circles from my forces for 10 turns while he retrieves from 4 different sources. Kessel Run, On the Edge, Figrin Dan, Our Most Desperate Hour. I have secret plans out but we are both activating more then 15 so it has almost no effect on him. I get totally wasted and draw up before it’s even over because there is no conceivable way I can win when he is retrieving 6 or more a turn and that happens to be more then I can drain for with my stuff. To make matters worse we had five people cracking jokes around us as we were trying to finish and after awhile it was getting on my nerves. Only one joke was very funny:
Jeremiah: I play with Corran Horn even though I never read any of those stupid books.
Jeremiah’s friend (whispering to me): That’s because he can’t read.
I had a hard time not cracking up because the joke was delivered with perfect timing.
Full Loss by a huge margin
4 (in the negative big time)
So I finished around third out of 9 people. I was surprised to play so many highly ranked players in a small store with the prize being nothing but Cloud City packs. Oh well I lost 2 but my ranking will still go up because I’m kind of a scrub, at least in the ratings system.
Props:
- Jim for being nice enough to drive me.
- Clint for being a cool guy to play against and a fair td.
- Casey for taking my appreciation of MKOS to new heights, I didn’t even respect that deck until now.
- Comic City for being a cool store to look at stuff in.
Slops:
- Me for getting completely wasted in two consecutive games.
- The gods of tournament fate for making me play 3 awesome people in a row.
- The people making lame jokes as they watched our final game.
- Retrieval decks for still beating me even though I start Secret Plans and Aim High in every game I play.
Andrew Ehret
ehreta@msu.edu