wenatchee-wa-3-30-2-clone-wars-e1only
Title: wenatchee-wa-3-30-2-clone-wars-e1only
Author: Ryan "Shadow 13" French
Date: Apr 6, 2002
so i start putting together decks with my brother Mike during the week before the tourney, and i decide to pull out my old Driven: Senate Podracing Space Fury deck that took third last time, and jazz it up a bit with non-unique N-1 starfighters instead of the Bravos. Somebody suggested it in one of the reviews i got when i posted this deck after the last tournament, so i thought i’d run with it. well in playtesting that little variation didn’t do so hot...in fact i didn’t win any games against Mike at all. i decided to keep the nonuniques in and add a little meat to the Senate side, bad idea as it turns out.
for dark, i decided to take a break from Combat and go with Senate for a change. i threw in the political effects that mess with battle destiny and cancel force drains, figuring the one that adds to force drains is too easily ruined by control or Vergeance so it was unnecessary. i only have two Lott Dodds so i decided that with Clone Wars rules i could take a few strange risks, like start the Desert Landing Site and TPM, and pack 4 Mauls and 3 Scrabbling Delegates. that’s 9 chances to deploy Lott Dodd first turn. According to clone wars rules, i could afford to drop a cloned Maul at the DLS first turn, even though i didn’t use any other Tatooine sites, and i could just deploy a regular version of him anywhere else i needed him. then i decided since i’m starting TPM i might as well make use of Nemoidians if i can pull them, so i threw in all the original Coruscant Nemos, including Tey How and Sil Unch plus one droid control ship, and 2x original Nute Gunray. since i wasn’t using any battle droids, just the P-XXs, i didn’t have much use for the Theed versions. Then i hit on the idea of throwing a cloned Sidious into the Senate chamber to add battle destinies with those Nemoidians...and i had a winner on my hands. I’m going to post this deck in a few days, once i’ve altered it for regular Ep1 only play.
Friday afternoon, after my last class (English 410: Major British Writers), Mike and I hit the road and drive to Wenatchee. He lets me drive his car, which is cool since i love driving but don’t have a car. right away, on the onramp to I-90 i get hit by a tumbleweed. ok, it didn’t even do anything at all to the car, but it was kinda funny seeing this tumbleweed come rolling up onto the highway to broadside me. despite high winds, the hour-and-a-half trip went fine and we arrive at my grandparents’ house in wenatchee right on schedule to meet our parents, siblings, and very excited dog Buttercup. we don’t even touch our star wars decks, instead opting to play a LOTR 4player game with my younger brother and sister. it was a hilariously fun game, since i’m the first shadow player to go during Mike’s turn, i ask my little bro and sis how much twilight they wanna use, then i quite purposefully use it all, laughing at them all the while. it was just a great game, and my little sister Hannah eventually won despite my best attempts to choke her hand.
next morning, as is the custom we arrive at the card shop, with Hannah who wants to play LOTR with "the big guns" before the Star wars tournament. but at 10:30, we’re the only ones there. so we grab some Mines of Moria packs, i pull a twilight Witch King and Hannah gets a Mithril Coat in the pack we buy her. Now she’s got three of my most-wanted cards, including Last Alliance and Boromir’s Blade. So i grab two packs of Reflections 3, hoping to get Arica or that elusive battle plan shield, and i get absolutely jacksquat, not even anything good enough to save from the garbage...my foils were vigo and some other worthless card, and my premiums were either shields i already had or the effects that you only need one of. so i wasn’t too happy about that.
anyway, a few of the regulars including Dennis "PCGSAlucard" Jeffris showed up around 11:30 and we sat down to a 5 player LOTR game. Dennis forgot to bring his LOTR deck, so he grabbed my little brother’s deck, which Hannah had brought along. So he was playing Uruk Hai with maybe one rare in the whole Shadow side, plus a crazy Gandalf start. We didn’t have any pennies or anything to use for twilight, so Dennis grabbed a stack of Japanese star wars cards he had in his box and used those. He was overwhelmed quite early in the game, but we only got to about site 4 when Jason showed up and it was time for the real tournament to begin.
Thankfully Jason decided we didn’t need to fill out decklists like last time, so we just filled out our cards and handed them in with our fee, and waited for matchups...
Game 1
LS vs. Mike French’s DS Watto Racing
Of course i have to play my brother in the first game. and of course its the matchup that i’ve never won in playtesting. So we’re putting out our starting stuff, getting ready for the big game, and i hear a bit of commotion down the table. seems that Tom Potter has started a podrace with Ben Quadrinaros. That’s right, Ben Quadrinaros. i don’t know what the hell he’s thinking...apparently he put together a deck without any rares or something, and it shows in his final standings. by the end of this game, everybody was hoping they could take a loss so they’d get to play Tom and boost their differential. anyway, back to my game. we set up the race, he goes and drops Watto and some other loser to make me lose 2 right off. i decide this isn’t gonna go on all game. unfortunately, playing Senate, especially this Driven deck, is horrible on your concentration, and quite a few times i forgot to save 2. he puts together a lot of force drains and i have a horrible time putting ships out, which i notice is pretty common for this deck. nevertheless, i go on to win the podrace thanks to his horrible destiny drawing for four attempts at Hit Racer and Pit Crews. since he’s got Watto’s Box out i retrieve 11 while he doesn’t lose quite that much due to shields. thanks to that retrieval i was back in the game and able to get a few systems under my belt. he grabbed Might of the Republic so i was getting worried about being able to get my retrieval with it later. i went after him once at the junkyard, using Jar Jar to take out Watto and adding a battle destiny or two i don’t remember how, but i managed to cause a bit of overflow although i cleared the site. later on when he was spreading out i hit some guys he had where he didn’t have 4 ability and caused some damage there too. that combined with my drains and Yarua retrieval managed to pull out a win.
FW by 14: 2(+14)
at some point during this game i glance over at Jason’s game, sitting diagonally across the table from me, and he’s playing the Watto objective but all of a sudden he deploys Deep Hatred. me and his opponent are gaping, and he starts explaining how his deck is meant to take on Lightsaber Combat head-on. which may have been a bad meta choice since i didnt see much LSC this tournament. i don’t know what he’s thinking, but i wanna see the decklist because any non-LSC or non-Hunt Down deck that uses Deep Hatred has got to be cool, you know it.
also during that first game, these two teenage chicks walk in and head straight for the LOTR display. So as my brother’s taking his turn i’m quite surreptitiously watching them...after all, chicks in Wenatchee Sports Cards, that doesn’t happen every day! i get Dennis’s attention, since he’s the LOTR tourney director, and i point out the two girls and say he should offer to teach them how to play, "take them under his wing" so to speak...even the cardshop owner’s wife understands the importance of two chicks buying LOTR cards, she tries to advertise our tournament next week but they don’t seem that interested. too bad...they end up walking out of the store without any of the guys having worked up the nerve to say a word to them. typical of wenatchee guys, really...now if they had been closer to my age...
Game 2
DS vs. Ian Hunter’s LS Senate Space
This game looks like its going to get interesting. however, i know that dark side has better senators than light straight up, so i should have the upper hand. Ian starts the JC Chamber, so i’m hard up for activation and decide to wait till second turn to drop my senators. he does nothing his turn, so i drop three or four guys in the senate and flip. i start getting my political effects out, but i consistently forget to drop cards out of his hands. i use lott dodd and squabblers to get Passel Argente and Toonbuck Toora to the Senate, because those two are simply amazing. he drops the Throne Room, Naboo and Naked Threepio, and sure enough he comes after me pretty quick, deploying a bunch of guys all at once, then realizes he only has one force left and i still hold the majority. so for some reason known only to him he uses the last force to target Tikkes with Yarua and mess with the politics so that we are evenly tied for politics. i don’t know why he bothered with that...next turn i believe i drop Sidious, init battle and use Sid and play Only Politics to get three battle destinies, use the polly effects to get the 6 swing, and use Toonbuck to up the attrition. he loses i think two guys, i cover with one high forfeit senator. this kind of battling goes on in the senate until i kick him out for good since Toonbuck gets me such high attrition. he’s got some n-1s draining at Naboo by now, so i slap After Her on the drain, then drop a clone Maul in his Infiltrator to control the site and retrieve 4. i recirculate, drop Fanfare and pull After Her again. he mentions that he hadn’t thought of trying that...which is a pretty good compliment since Ian and Dennis are usually masters of combos. i drop After her on another space drain, but he deploys the Radiant VII with Chancellor Valorum as a passenger to make sure i don’t pull the same stunt twice...so i drop Maul and two Nemos in the Throne Room, and he never bothers to come after me there, as i recall. with Aks Mo in the senate i’m draining for 5 total with the site and the system, plus one in the Senate, plus using my polly effect to cancel his only drain at Tatooine, which is for like 5 every turn b/c of my After Her and his polly effect. i knew that drain-adding polly effect would be no good. he mounts one more offensive in the senate, which i destroy, and i pull out a nice win after retrieving with squabbling.
FW by 28: 4(+42)
Ah, lunchtime. one of the best aspects of the Wenatchee tournaments is that our $10 entry fee covers a whole load of pizza. while the entry fee sounds high, all of it goes back to the players in prizes and pizza, so its not a bad deal. I notice Tom Potter is teaching Earl how to play LOTR with a starter deck, so hopefully we’ll be pulling even more people into our LOTR tournaments now, since they teeter on the edge of 8 players every time. Casey Merry is standing over by the windows of the shop watching people walk by, because this cardshop is directly between a tanning salon and some kind of manicure place, so there are chicks walking by all day. We start making jokes about him fogging up the windows staring at 15 yr old girls until he finally leaves the windows. Table talk goes around for quite a while, until somebody pulls out Blood of Numenor and starts talking about the picture. Now i’m not the one that came up with this, and its really pretty horrible, but doesn’t that picture look a little kinky? For those of you who don’t play LOTR, its Boromir’s death scene, with a wide angle shot of Aragorn kneeling over him, and it just doesn’t look right. of course somebody, and i don’t remember who (cough*Casey Merry*cough) makes the inevitable necrophilia joke, and soon we’re going on and on about it...then Dennis brings up the time he visited Central’s campus for an anatomy class and he was able to actually mess around with dead bodies. you’ll have to ask him for the details...anyway eventually we realize we’re gonna have to drop this subject and get back to the game, and i don’t think anybody’s sad to see it go.
Game 3
DS vs. Casey Merry’s LS Combat
As soon as I see him playing combat i know i’m in for a rough ride because i’ve never tested this deck against it. plus, Casey earned first place in the last episode 1 tournament, so he knows what he’s doing. and of course, to make matters worse i get an awful draw with Lott Dodd my only senator and no scrabbling delegates. So for two turns i have to draw up, but luckily he does nothing but deploy the battle plains. i drop a few locations too, and suddenly he puts two gungans at the battle plains and i’m thinking what? this is supposed to be combat. well i’ve finally got Dodd in the senator and my polly effects are starting to come out, so i drop maul and a nemoidian and i think a senator on him, hit some people and clear the site, causing a bit of damage as i recall. after that the battle stays in the Palace for the most part. he dropped queen amidala and a jedi, i dropped maul and a nemo, played maul strikes for the battle destinies and used sidious to add a destiny with the nemo, used the polly effects and would end up overpowering him and having attrition of like 15 every time. he managed to kill Maul a few times but i was usually able to get TPM back into my hand and redeploy it to keep the nemoidians coming. this happened a few times, i’d kill his jedi and he’d just redeploy them. usually he didn’t hit me, although we had a few combats and i lost a sidious that way (i had a clone in the senate). i got after her in my hand, so i figured i’d use that, i dropped it on the core, then dropped maul and a senator and a couple nemoidians, it was a big crew, but it couldn’t knock him clear off the site. he managed to hit one of the nemos, but i had another. i used both of my no civility only politics to add to battle destiny, and i was starting to have a tough time keeping my polly effects empty for use, and finally i got that big break at the core. i had enough attrition and power to make him lose his last jedi, and he couldn’t quite make me lose everything. well i did the stupid thing, and left a lone sil unch there, thinking he couldn’t possibly have more guys in his hand. i retrieved the 4, and suddenly found myself facing quigon and mace, and i lost 9 overflow on that one. suddenly i’m down to not very much force at all, when i play squabblers to retrieve 7 and i’m back in the game. i drop my beatcrew again, and kill both quigon and mace due to attrition/power. i’m not sure what was going on, i must have had craploads of power more than casey, because most of the game he was forfeiting Jedi even if they were immune to attrition, which i thought was kinda weird. i figured his R3 quigon would stick around all game, but he always opted to forfeit him instead...maybe me saying "I’ve got 17 attrition" confused him or something, i don’t know, or maybe i really was overwhelming him with raw power. well after this beatdown, he finally seemed out of characters. i had complete control of the board, his objective was flipped so he couldn’t drain, i was consistently draining in space, i had utter control of the senate and he couldn’t mount a comeback. and they called time during my turn. i had completely knocked him off the board! so its his turn, and he can’t even make an action because he has absolutely nothing to do. but he has 4 more cards in his life force than i do, cards i would have made him lose in drains the very next turn. i hate timed games!! so yeah, if i hadn’t left Sil Unch alone, i probably would have retrieved the 4 on my very next turn, without losing that 9 in overflow, and i most likely would have won. AUGGGHHH!
TL by 14: 4(+28)
Game 4
LS vs. Dennis Jeffris’s DS Invasion Racing
I don’t know what in the world i was doing during this game. looking back, i played so badly its a wonder i managed to keep the damage down to 21. for one thing, he was podracing same as i was, and doing a bit better at it than me. i couldn’t get my steps for anything, and he ended up winning by enough to make me lose 4 even with the shield. then i did absolutely nothing while i watched him set up on Naboo, getting everything just the way he wanted it. at one point i had epp quigon and panaka in my hand, and his blaster in my deck, and just enough force to deploy and battle, but for some reason i didnt, and too late i realized that when i activated next i wouldn’t get the blaster, so i didn’t deploy them at all...then later i drew the blaster and ended up losing it from hand because i thought it wouldn’t do any good. when he deployed the docking bay effect to add to his already big force drains, i knew that was it. i was basically off my rocker during this game, and i totally deserved to lose. if i’d won, i would have taken second, maybe even first, but my deck and i just weren’t up to it. Dennis finished undefeated, with 1 timed win.
FL by 21: 4(+7)
Final standings:
Dennis Jeffris 7(+82)
Jason Herrin 6(+16)
Casey Merry 5(+54)
Earl Sessions 4(+29)
Ryan French (ME!) 4(+7)
Ian Hunter 4(+4)
Stephen Pool 4(-43)
Mike French 2(-5)
Casey Honeysett 1(-12)
Tom Potter 0(-132)
of course the event isn’t quite over...we still have to stagger around buying lotr packs and trading crazy cards and opening our premiere limited starters that we got for coming. my brother pulled On The Edge from his starter, but most everybody else, including me, got crap. pretty special because its his first OTE ever, now he can finally take one of the proxies out of his MWYHL deck. then my bro grabs some LOTR packs and pulls the rare Balrog. what is up with that? could i catch a break, please? i’m actually starting to get pissed, because i can see myself losing every game i play with him forever now. i mean, his moria deck was virtually unbeatable by me before today...anyway, i grab some packs and get nothing, of course...but then Ian runs around asking if anybody has a rare Boromir for trade, and it so happens that i don’t care what happens to my only one, so i grab his nazgul cards and pull out a bunch of them and we start haggling. then my brother, curse his filthly little soul, wanders over and offers Ian a rare Boromir for the Balrog’s Sword, and Ian practically jumps at the trade...leaving me staring at Ian’s nazgul cards realizing i’m not going to get any of them now. so i wasn’t the best company for mike on the drive back to my grandparent’s house...
well that’s about it...the tournament was a roaring success, even though i only placed 5th...now i start to understand the power of my Driven deck a little better, and i think i know what cards to use next time i play it. so watch out...and here’s some props and slops...
Props:
-Casey, for a great 3rd game...that was one of the best i’ve played in a while, even though i shoulda won.
-Tom Potter, for having the cahunas to bring the two most loserly decks i’ve ever seen to a tournament and then almost beating somebody with them (he lost one game by 5)
-my grandparents, for always being glad to let me stay at their place when i hit the wenatchee tournaments
Slops:
-my brother Mike, for ruining my Nazgul trade with Ian because he was so all-fired set on getting the Balrog’s Sword whatever the price
-George Lucas, for the whole licensing thing
-the universe, for setting it up so i can’t make the next LOTR tournament in wenatchee
-Decipher for printing Blood of Numenor
-the universe again, for rigging the packs so my brother got all the crap he needed for a rip-snorting moria deck and i got jacksquat.
-Sil Unch for not being a powerhouse when he’s alone and faced with two Jedi...