Second Edition Koblenz Regional winner Benjamin Liebich |
Benjamin's Commentary: What sorts of decks were you hoping to face while playing your deck? What decks did you hope not to face? Prior to this tournament, did you have much experience playing this deck (or decks like it)? Did you learn anything new about it when you played it this time? Did you use any situational cards (cards that you wouldn't expect to be useful in every game)? Are there any whose usefulness exceeded your expectations? Were there any that you wouldn't include if you played the deck again? What would you nominate as the MVP card from your deck? |
My Commentary: This version is also much smaller than Benjamin's regional version, while still having room for all these verbs. That's only 19 personnel in a 38 card deck. That's a ratio that only Bajorans can pull off in the game today. It is not unreasonable for a kill pile, even one without draw deck support, to kill off 19 personnel before you solve three missions. In a deck like this one, not only do you have the not affiliation-specific Tacking Into the Wind, there are also more flexible cards like Souls of the Dead, which can have a huge impact against a non-kill deck by recurring verbs too. Or the Orb of Prophecy and Change, which doesn't increase your overall personnel volume, but will keep your heavy-hitters like Bareil and Sisko cycling back into play every turn. I wouldn't mind seeing a copy of the Xhosa too though, since it does a great job at putting the chump you swapped out for Opaka back in the mix. I do really like Bejamin's decision to switch to a strategy where bonus points are not essential for reaching 100. I've run into Dominion Gamma solvers and decks with the Phoenix too often recently, and seen too much personnel removal in piles to trust in Solbor to get me to 100. I'm glad to still see him here, he's a necessary tool for fighting against those cards, but I wouldn't want to count on him (and Kira) to get me there every single game. This appears to be a much more resilient deck. |
Second Edition San Diego Regional winner Thomas Vineberg |
Thomas' Commentary: What sorts of decks were you hoping to face while playing your deck? What decks did you hope not to face? Prior to this tournament, did you have much experience playing this deck (or decks like it)? Did you learn anything new about it when you played it this time? On the dilemma side, I enjoyed experimenting with Pattern Loss and Undue Influence. Couldn't always get them to line up with the dilemmas they matched with, but when they did it worked well. Did you use any situational cards (cards that you wouldn't expect to be useful in every game)? Are there any whose usefulness exceeded your expectations? Were there any that you wouldn't include if you played the deck again? What would you nominate as the MVP card from your deck? Do you have anything else you'd like to say about your deck? |
My Commentary: In any event, here we've got a regional-winning deck with not one but three copies of a card that no one else has used in the past 12 months. I can tell you why I personally don't use Symbol of Devotion: it is very slow, in an affiliation that is not know for its blazing speed. You have to draw and pay for a Bajoran religious leader first, then place that person you paid for on the bottom of your deck (where you may never see that particular copy again) in order to download a personnel that I've probably already drawn. Which leads us to the reason why Symbol is more valuable to Thomas than it is to me (and, from my experience in this series, most people who play Bajorans): I tend to build smaller decks. When your deck is a sprawling 95 cards, suddenly it becomes much more valuable to be able to slow down to get just the card you need than it would be if your deck were only 50 cards. And Thomas is right that some Bajoran religious leaders (I wish there were a shorter way to list all those keywords) have very powerful "when you play" effects (like Ranjen Koral), which can lessen the sting of needing to remove that personnel from play. A similar theme runs through some of the other underused cards in this deck. Invocation of the Kosst Amojan (used by only two others) doesn't really grant any card advantage, and doesn't tempo out any high value personnel like some other Bajoran retrieval cards do. Instead, like Symbol, it grants a slower flexibility, either downloading a specific, needed personnel, or retrieving essential personnel who you'd like to play again (rather than sneak into play), like the aforementioned Ranjen Koral. |
Online Regional Update: On the Second Edition side of things, we've got three players heading into round four undefeated: Tyler Fultz, Andrey Gusev, and Michael Van Breemen. Tyler will face Andrey this round, while MVB is paired down with Nickolay Korotya who is at 2-1. There will be a fifth round, so there is still a possibility that there will be no undefeated players, and all of the six players sitting at 9 victory points could still be in the mix to win it.
In the First Edition Regional, there are only two players heading into round four undefeated: Jon Carter and Matthew King, who will face off this week. This tournament will also go to five rounds, so there's also a chance for any of the 9 victory point players to win here as well.
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