austin-texas-6-23-01
Title: austin-texas-6-23-01
Author: Jacob "Armaedes" Taylor
Date: Jun 23, 2001
My second tournament ever, and I am totally not prepared for it. I haven’t played at all this week, so I use two old decks. For dark I’m running Bring Him Before Me with lots and lots of SAC and plenty of mains, and for light I do a force choke deck with about 10 twixes in it and every main I can pack in there. They sound crude, but are actually pretty decent decks. I stay up late the night before with my roommate, Zane, playtesting over and over. He decides to run a Watch Your Step Beatdown for light, and a Dark Deal trooper swarm for dark. My old pal from last time, Adam, is making an appearance again, playing the EXACT same decks that he used last time.
We get to the tourney and fill out the command cards, and then go to McDonalds. Word of advice: the barbecue chicken sandwiches rule. We come back just as they are calling out pairings, and wouldn’t you know it - Zane and I get matched up against each other.
Game 1
DS vs. Zane Thorp’s Watch Your Step Beatdown
Zane and I have played this matchup a hundred times, and it all boils down to who gets the better starting hand. This game I don’t think it was either of us. I get 3 Lord Vaders and a bunch of interrupts and effects, and he gets 2 patrol crafts and a bunch of interrupts and effects. I get Palpatine and a docking bay, and on his turn he doesn’t have the card to apply the first-turn flip, so I generate about 13 on my second turn. Down comes the Endor docking bay with Lord Vader, and Janus goes with Palpatine to the Death Star 2 Docking Bay. I move Vader onto Docking Bay 94 and Janus and Palpy down to the Endor docking bay, and that was pretty much where they would sit for the whole game. He puts down Karrde, a Raider in a Patrol Craft, and Artoo & Threepio up against Lord Vader, but doesn’t have the force to battle. My turn I drop down Maul to the Cantina, and Boba Fett with gun to Vader’s site and battle. He draws his three destiny (low ones) and I whack Karrde with Vader and Artoo & Threpio with Fett. One card stacked on Insignifcant Rebellion. I should point out that after this point, every time I won a battle, I forgot to ask for the card for Insignificant Rebellion. Zane takes a couple of turns to regroup, and I put some ships on Tatooine, both for the drain of 2 and so I don’t have to pay for Battle Order. From that point on, I was pretty much in control of the game. We battle a couple of times, but Zane can’t seem to get the cards for his beatdown, so I spread across Tatooine with Vader and Maul with their sabers draining for 4 at the Cantina and Janus and Palpatine draining for their 2. I eventually outdrain him. First time I ever won with Bring Him Before Me by draining. Win by 13.
FW 2 (+13)
Good Stuff: Getting those pre-tournament jitters out of my system by playing a familiar opponent.
Bad Stuff: Having to play my roommate. I drove 60 miles to play a guy I could have just stayed home and played.
Game 2
LS vs. Conor Brace’s Court of the Vile Bounty Hunters
This is the guy whose EBO deck beat me by 4 cards at the last tournament, so I’m out for revenge, and play more aggressively than I usually do. He puts Mara Jade with her stick at the Audience Chamber, then plays presence of the force to get a drain of 3. I quickly lose Your Insight Serves You Well to get Battle Plan, as I have a weak hand. I put Shmi and Naked Threepio at the Slave Quarters and start searching for my twixes. I get a Qui-Gon using Threepio, and then draw up 3 twixes, a Han with gun, Leia with gun, and Chewie, Protector. I cannot believe my good luck, I am actually thinking God himself gave me this hand of cards. His turn he pays for his drain of 3, and that is the last time he drains me for the rest of the game. One turn later, my handful of cards goes to Slave Quarters, and I Narbrun them over to match up against Jade, Chall Bekan and Boelo. I hit everyone but Jade (Qui-Gon’s an idiot and likes to draw 1destinies twice), draw three destiny, and clear the site. I am now glad that I didn’t alter Presence, so I am now draining for 4 at the Audience Chamber. I am also generating about 16 a turn, while he is still generating only 7. He puts the Sail Barge with Xizor aboard at the pit of carkoon, and the sarlacc soon follows, but then he pretty much draws for the rest of the game searching for characters. Bossk comes down on one site, and is quickly taken out thanks to Jedi Luke and Obi with Saber, and IG-88 comes down and captures Han (and is immediately taken out by an angry Leia with blaster and Chewie, Protector), but it turns into a drain war. His presence and my revolution help me end the game quickly with a decent differential, although I do have a lot of cards in hand. Win by 24.
FW 4 (+37)
Good stuff: Beating the guy that beat me last time.
Bad stuff: None, my light deck worked like a charm.
Game 3
LS vs. Mark Leahy’s Walker Garrison
I just got to know Mark at the last tournament I went to, and he’s a great guy. I don’t like playing people I know, but now I will get to at least see what kind of player he is. He starts the standard stuff, 3rd marker and walker garrison, and I get Shmi and Threepio to the Slave Quarters. I have a lot of characters in my hand, so I put Qui-Gon at the slave quarters in case I need to use my SAC, and then activate a lot, waiting for a beatodwn. He just draws for a couple of turns, and I start paying for my drain of 1 with Qui-Gon’s stick just to do some early damage. He quickly realizes I’m not giving him any force, so he gets out the holotable and another marker site for some generation. Then he drops an Imperial Walker. I use my piles of force to deploy my usual beat squad (Han, Chewie, Leia, Lando) and Nabrun Qui-Gon over. Down goes the Walker, and he loses about 10 or so more. I drop a couple more characters next turn to spread out and drain on Hoth, and he drops Visage of the Emperor at the holotable to drain. I’ve never heard of that, but it was a good idea, because that drain of one is all the damage he does to me for the rest of the game. He drops a couple more walker with Igar, but they quickly go down, and Bacta Tank makes sure I’m not losing anything. No offense to Mark, but it was actually a pretty easy game, even though I only won by 15 (again, too many cards in hand).
FW 6 (+52)
Good stuff: Winning against a deck that I thought about playing myself.
Bad stuff: Playing against a new friend.
So I’m feeling pretty good about life, I’m already doing as good as I did last time, and there’s still three game to go. Unfortunately, things were about to get ugly.
Game 4
DS vs. Jacob Mayers’ Local Uprising with Anoat Operatives
First of all, I have to say that this was the weirdest deck I’ve ever seen. He used nothing but Y-wings and Anoat operatives. He was running Never Tell Me The Odds, and a lot of battle cancellers. Operatives? Easy game, or so I thought. He gets his sites out fast, and starts throwing operatives and y-wings at his sites. His drains are getting pretty crazy, but he’s still having to pay for them due to battle order, so I think I’m okay. I put some stuff at his system, thinking Y-wings will be no problem, but 2 organized attacks and 2 "forfeit-fodder" operatives later, I have one dreadnaught floating in space and everything else is in my lost pile. Thanks to a couple of one-character beats by IG-88, Maul and even Mighty Jabba, I have 3 cards on Insignificant Rebellion. He had given me Luke with saber, so I use Janus to put back a 4 that i start tracking, and I head back to the Throne Room. We are both getting low on cards, and then he retreives 5 with Nar Shadda Wind Chimes (not the first, or last time today that I wished I had played Secret Plans). I get Emperor, Vader and Luke to the Death Star 2 docking bay, and I am running painfully low on cards. His turn, he inserts Odds. I have one card in my force pile, a 4 on the bottom of my deck, and I activate just 1 to move the guys over. Odds pops. I only take 3 points from it, but it leaves me with only two cards in my reserve deck - not enough to do the duel AND draw my 4 to turn Luke. It sucks a lot. I kept thinking, if I had just not deployed ONE FREAKIN’ CARD, I could do it. So he drains me out, I lose by 9, and I feel like a farkin quahog.
FL 6 (+43)
Good stuff: Playing the guy that won the tournament last time.
Bad stuff: Getting beat by operatives and y-wings, and not having that ONE FREAKIN’ CARD I needed to turn Luke.
Game 5
LS vs. Mark Million’s Dark Deal Troopers
This guy annoyed me a lot. I guess that’s not a nice thing to say, but he was acting very superior to me, and I didn’t appreciate it. I wanted this win in a bad kind of way. My first turn I pull out Shocking Information & Grimtaash, and says "Hold on a sec, let me check my hand and make sure I have the cards to counter that." So he looks through his 8 cards in his hand, and the people on either side of us look at him kind of funny, and then he nods at me, so I guess he’s satisfied that he can handle my Grimtaash, and we keep going. Every time he verifies my deck, he makes some comment about it, like "Oh, I see, heavy SAC and a couple of Jedi Lukes" or "It’s always good to be able to look in and see your opponent’s destinies." I don’t know if he was trying to psyche me out or what, but it worked, because I kept on making all these stupid mistakes. He had all the cards to kill my deck - the anti-SAC card, the anti-Nabrun card . . . I couldn’t do much of anything. I go for a beat, but he plays Stunning Leader to cancel the battle, and then on his turn throws down about 19 troopers and plays the assault. I sense it, and he tells me twice (once as I’m doing it) that i have to take 2 point of damage and lose the interrupt. Then he grabs my sense. ???? Whatever. I spend the rest of the game running from his swarm of power 1 troopers, desperately wishing I had a surprise assault (I could draw about 10 cards for it, because he literally had about that many at one site), but then dark deal rears its ugly head and I run out of places to run to. Loss by 17.
FL 6 (+26)
Good stuff: Being rude to him when he tried to tell me how awesome his deck was after the game.
Bad stuff: Losing to this guy.
Game 6
DS vs. Michael Tilley’s LAMEST DECK ON EARTH (Training)
First of all, training decks should be banned from tournament play. I felt like I was sitting in that chair for about 3 hours by the time the game was over. It took FOREVER!!! I was playing BHBM, but he goes ahead and trains Son of Skywalker. That’s not something you see every day. I draw until I get Search and Destroy, and then occupy my 3 battlegrounds to take care of Honor. He drops Wedge in his ship at Rendili, I battle him, and he hyper escapes away. I try to deploy some ships to Dagobah, but he tells me I can’t deploy anything to Dagobah unless it specifically says it can. I think he’s full of crap, but don’t say anything, because at this point he’s taking 5 direct damage a turn, plus my drains. A couple of turns later, he deploys two undercover spies to my docking bays, and an entire fleet of ships, including the outrider with a couple of pilots, to rendili. Needless to say, he beats me off Rendili, and that is the only other battleground on the table I can occupy for Honor, so I spend the rest of the (very long) game trying to get it back. I am desperately putting up Maul and Jabba on my ships so I can have something to forfeit. I hold onto it for a few turns, but then he completes test 5 and starts coming after me. I track a Palpy with Janus to force lightning TK-422, and then I track a Circle is Now Complete to sniper boushh, but I guess I tracked wrong, because instead of drawing my 6, I drew two ones instead. That could be the first time I have ever incorrectly tracked in a tournament, and I felt like a scrub. All of a sudden, all this weird stuff starts happening from his Jedi Tests (I say weird because I have never played Jedi Testing, so I have no idea what they all do). He does a pretty good job of hammering me down, but I hold on to it until time is called. He’s got quite a few more cards than me (when he flipped and retrieved 10, I was REALLY wishing for Secret Plans), and I suppose I should have done the honorable thing and let him get the full win, but I was pissed that I had to go against such a crappy, non-interactive deck, so I just let him taked the timed win by 16.
TL 6 (+10)
Good stuff: Getting search and destroy early in the game, and tracking palpatine for my force lightning.
Bad stuff: Playing against a lame training deck, and not being able to hold that 3rd battleground.
So I finish with exactly the same win/loss ratio as last time, and I actually have a lower differential, so I’m feeling like a loser for going 3/3, and Zane went 2/4 and Adam went 1/5, so we’re all ganks. Just like last time, Adam wins the random foil drawing and gets the Obi case topper, and I get a single pack of Tatooine that has I Will Find Them Quickly Master as my rare. It was still a fun tourney, even if I didn’t do as well as I wanted, and I got to meet Justin Warren, the Texas State Champion, so all in all it was a good day.
Live long and prosper,
JT