zanders-excellent-adventure-meriden4-14

Title: zanders-excellent-adventure-meriden4-14
Author: mike "zander" van zander
Date: Apr 17, 2001

This is really long and convoluted, and most of you might be upset by a bit of lacking detail regarding details of games against sticks... but how much are those details going to help... further, this is being composed 3 days after the event and after a weekend in which the millennium falcon died twice over...

if you’ve never been to rochester, ny... stay away... it’s the most boring town that has more people than goats this side of tennessee... after months of beating on the same sticks because chris jankiac is afraid of the locals, i decided that it was time to take a weekend off from the good old swccg and the light brown rochester drinking water and return to connecticut to eat home cooking and get even fatter... talking to my compatriate reid smith on IM, the zander had a wonderful, awful idea... i could skip out of rochester, bring reid with me to alleviate car trip boredom, and we could play somewhere in CT on saturday to avoid having to actually spend time with the family when they weren’t feeding me...

so reid-o and i leave thursday at like 230 for home, figuring we’ll get in by like 8 and build me a light deck... we both have bhbm and since reid doesn’t know how to build light decks that are good he’s prolly gonna steal one of mine... we’re maybe 40 miles out of rochester, cruising along the thruway, and i hit the gas to go up a hill and the millennium falcon doesn’t accelerate, just revs up a lot... there’s no shoulder up ahead so i pull off and call AAA for assistance... my phone call gets rerouted 6 times before they send a tow out... in the mean time i call my dad who tells me i should just junk the car cuz it’ll cost too much to repair... i tell him to eat a c0ck and start the process of chainsmoking up on the hell flipping off all the inbreds and hippies to feel compelled to honk and tell me that my car’s broken down on the side of the road... jesus... if you ever go to upstate new york, don’t date the locals...

so rich the tow guy shows up and we get off the highway, of course the lovely inbreds of the new york state thruway authority see fit to have me still pay my tolls... and rich drives us to this backyard transmission shop in geneva, where it seems that the only thing there is to do is your sister... and only if you’re lucky... dave the jamaican and these two crazy white dudes declare that they won’t touch my car til the morning and they start putting away bottle after bottle of labatts while we wait for my friend zak to drive from rochester to pick us up... even the hardware store is closed at 5... there’s one diner and like 1470129487 car repair places in this town... tight as hell...

so i figure that it’ll take a damn long time to fix my car, so we’re stayin in rochester for the weekend... that means we get to surprise assault chris jank who announced he was going to play this weekend after reido and i told everyone we would be away... i decide to take zak out to dinner to compensate him for his time and gas and whatnot, and in a rare moment of idiocy decide to eat at fridays again... we are rewarded with one of the more competent waitresses of all time, perhaps i was being a big d1ck because of my car troubles, but she brings reid-o out his salad with ranch instead of italian and i ask her if she knows that they make italian dressing that looks and tastes just like ranch dressing and reid almost chokes on his food laughin... other than that and getting charged like 7 bucks for a lynchburg that was pretty lackin in jack, dinner was ok... drink jack, kids

so at like 8am the next mornin dave the jamaican calls to tell me that it’s gonna cost me 850 to fix my car... i fall asleep again and he calls again at like 11 to tell me the car is done...so i decide that i’ll go to CT anyways... IM reid-o, and of course homocles has no plans at all so he’s still game for going to CT... my goddess friend Fur drives us out to Geneva... fur is of course the exception to all my earlier complaints about the girls of upstate NY... and we take off for CT... again... oh yeah, i forgot to mention, i quit smoking thursday night, figuring nothing could get worse, and i’d be relaxed...

the drive back is proceeding uneventfully, and we stop at Guilderland in albany for gas and "food"... and my fuggin car stalls in the parking lot... to make another longass car repair story short, it’s my timing chain... car won’t start, it gets towed again, my parents drive a 300 mile round trip to albany to pick us up, and we spend 3 hours in a thruway rest stop with my dirty laundry, playtesting... after being intimidated by some dirty mcdonalds employee who looked like he was gonna kick my a$$ after i moved his coffee...

during this playtesting, it becomes apparent that it doesn’t matter what cards we put in BHBM... it’s dark, so we’ll both go 3-0 unless we play each other... reid can’t win a single game in playtesting... he tries profit, wys, hidden mains, pretty much everything he can come up with.. and bring him beats him.... then i decide to build hidden mains and give him my lewis wys while we wait even longer for my parents to show...

as an aside, people who play 2 fall of the legend and only 1 throw me another charge are idiots... end aside

finally my parents show and we get home after some rather obnoxious automotive conversations... we spend time on dennys.com and decide that the brownie ain’t worth the effort... and we go to bed...

get up in the AM, forget to eat, reid puts the last like 2 cards in my light while i relieve tension by showering ;-)... then it’s off to meriden with a little help from mapquest... find the place pretty easily, looks to be your normal local sticks with steve brentson and potentially 1 or 2 ok players...we get ghetto t-shirts for playing star wars, and it’s on... in a friggin church...

BEGIN ACTUAL REPORT HERE:

yeah, there’s 14 people, my decks are hidden mains and bhbm, and i didn’t write names down because it’s fairly irrelevant and it’s been a long weekend...

Game 1, my hidden mains vs. sum yung gi’s hunt down flagship ops (no kidding)

here’s why details aren’t important... he pulls milwaukee and it’s apparent he’s running some sort of tie machine, but he never plays seinar during this game... and i pretty quickly fortify two dbays with ben and luke, some friends, and sticks... every time i drain him he pitches vaders, maras, xizors... it’s like he was completely unwilling to even try anything on the ground... he put a bunch of intercepters dreadnaughts and a chimera i think in space at like 3 systems... i tried to clear a rather weak system off with dash and melas, he drew a 6 :-( and kept a tie there to keep draining... i retrieved a little bit, drained for a while at corulag with captain han, then moved him in front of some ties with his homegirl leia... he tried to spread and drain, but i cleared another system with dash and melas again and simply drained on the ground while retrieving what i could with edges... fw by 22 because i was nice
2(+22)

good: i won, my car survived the trip, etc...
bad: scrubs make me feel like i’m working
ugly: flagship ops

Game 2... BHBM vs. some dude playing wack hidden mains with lots of bad cards...

details are fuzzy, i killed some dudes with mara and friends while draining with palp and jan-o at ccdbay... dropped vader down for a drain somewhere to force him to play his hand since it was all dbays all the time... i think i won a few battles, stacked like 4 cards on insig rebellion, then finished it by lat damaging his homo1 and dropping the executor on his head while thrawn chased the rest of his fleet around with cheerio... fw by 21
4(+43)

good: i’m 2-0
bad: i’m 2-0 against sticks
ugly: i’m bored as hell

Game 3... my hidden mains vs. some kid’s MKOS abyssins... this is interesting, i keep with my tradition of counting decks and this dood has 63 cards... tournament director first declares this a game loss and then a dq... and i’m like, that’s retarded, let’s just play after you take 3 cards out of your deck and we’ll forget the whole thing happens... well, abyssins are utter crap in case you didn’t know... luke and corran drain on CC, ben and leia drain at dbay 94, and the falcon and outrider sit uncontested in space... i have bplan and fades, so he drains for nada worthwhile in the palace... i finally put lando wax and twass and melas at the desert heart for a 2 drain to finish him off while i’m busy retrieving, and he starts fighting me with like myo and like 2 random abyssins and i keep kicking his @#$% even tho he has scum retrieval... i pitch my hand to his slow, bad drains with his slow, bad abyssins, watch him cancel a few of my drains, but eventually grind out a very easy win of 29
6(+72)

good: i’m so moral and just and nice and stuff... and i won
bad: i haven’t gotten action in... err, he didn’t play mkos that well
ugly: every girl i saw this weekend

Game 4, my BHBM vs. Steve Brentson’s Hidden mains with tat-cel...

i was hoping i’d get to play brentson since he’s apparently good and whatnot... unfortunately this matchup was pretty one-sided and his deck didn’t seem to have it... i imp commanded for thrawn right away, deployed the palp to ccdbay fetched monnok and force lightning and rendili and all that crap right off the bat... he plays a dbay and draws, i command for cheerio, so already he knows that his squassin is gonna have to be prepared for beats... i monnok away 4 cards turn 2, bith shuffles and i believe some edges tho it may have been tunnels... i put janus with his boss and draw for the chimera... he gets wedge and ship and blunt and ship to the rendezvous point and finally moves them to tat...i drain him, he loses tat cel off the top... i put zucko and bossk at rendili to drain and fill any sort of bplan nonsense that might come out and drop mara to endor with her vibrator for some action... he puts luke in front of mara, i barrier... he drops ben and someone to a dbay on tat, and i crush them with snoovy and daddy vader... mara dies to luke, and i pick up sonnyboy with vader and start losing force to dominate the ground... i move back to tatooine dbay eventually and he’s at the spaceport dbay with harc cancelling my drain... i drop cheerio and thrawn in the chimaera to tatooine, he alters my lat damage on red squad 1 but it’s still a beating... he eventually has to run and i just drain him out without much difficulty... full win by 22
8(+94)

good: beating a world-class player soundly
bad: i played well, but not flawlessly... if i’m going to come back to CT states in two weeks and play this man in the final confrontation, i’m gonna have to be better than that... and his deck probably wasn’t built expecting much competition
ugly: monnok when he only had like 4 doubles in his whole deck and i got half of them... and red 6.

So of course now the inevitable happens and reid and i have driven like 400 miles to play each other twice in a row... for details of these games, see reid’s tournament report (wrong fluid)... i crushed bhbm with hidden mains through my superior tracking skillz... fallen portaled vader and absolutely destroyed him as a result, and he walked right into it... my bhbm lost to wys pretty soundly, but i caused enough choice overflow at a few battles to keep the diff down... not enough to cross luke though, but i slowed his retrieval enough to only lose by 11 and barely edge brentson out after his opponent refused to draw up a lost cause and allowed him to keep losing cards from hand so he could max his differential with tatcel and attempt to catch me... fortunately, he didn’t...

so i win the tournament at 10(+114) to brentson’s 10(+110) and get a masterful foil, a dope oldskool yoda tshirt that i can’t ever wear in public, and a pack... reid peels an epp leia foil in a drawing, and we go home...

my cousin shows up with this skank girl saturday night and reid and i are so bored that we fight over who gets action first... her name was trina something, so i just started callin her Latrina... stay away from chicks named latrina, this girl prolly had more diseases than chris jank does...

so at easter dinner i tell my cousin i’m leavin at 3 for rochester, or 330 if she gets Latrina to come back... my family’s collective jaws drop, and my oblivious aunt tells me her name’s Katrina, not Latrina... i apologize for confusing her with a receptacle for urine... my aunt’s like, that’s ok, and i’m like... wrong fluid ;-) reid almost chokes on his meat (a common occurence) and even my mom can’t stop laughin... a final warning to you boys... don’t date girls in CT named Latrina...

so that’s the end, with many details expurgated to keep this from novella status...

praps:
to reid, for comin with...
to the cool-ass td and some relatively decent people to swccg with in CT... hopefully i’ll make it back for states but it’s doubtful
to Latrina for the opportunities for disease-free entertainment (or not)
brentso for providing a challenge and for the entertainment trashing reid ;-)

slaps:
to swccg for bein like work... it sucks to know exactly how a game’s gonna transpire after turn 1
to timed wins, to people who eek them out in questionable manners, and to those who take the game too seriously... including those on the wrong end of timed wins who whine and moan constantly... it’s just a game, kids
to the village bicycle
to the falcon for dying twice
to the new york state thruway authority for makin me pay my tolls
to collusion for differential maximization
to me for forgetting the vader restriction on guri twice this weekend
to guys who devote their whole prop/slop section to thanking their cards and calling their moms and stuff

ok that’s it
z... email’s zander611@yahoo.com if anyone wants the decks, etc

hopefully see you kids at CT states... but dunno yet