The Grand Prix Convention 2007 - Part One

by Johannes Klarhauser, Staff Writer

17th March 2008

The traditional Grand Prix Convention was to be my last Star Trek Customizable Card Game event of the year, and I tried to use the seven tournaments there to make up for my poor performance at the Continental Championship in July. After losing my first game of the year to James Hoskin, I had stayed unbeaten from January to July, only to choke in Day One of the Europeans, going 3-4 with a Starfleet deck.

For Celle, I had brought three decks with me, and was hoping that one of them would be good enough to win one of the numerous events of the weekend. I had little hope of continuing my series of winning a trophy each time I go to Celle, though, because this year I was assigned judging duties for some of the tournaments, which would cost me precious points in the overall total standings.

However, the Grand Prix is a much more relaxed event than Continentals, and even if you keep losing all day long, you're still guaranteed to have a good time; for example, this year caricaturist extraordinaire Thomas Vorwerk drew a couple of very interesting dream cards of some of the players - who would have guessed my heavy Bavarian accent would qualify for a whopping 3 Anthropology? In your face, Antedean Assassins!

Friday

Tournament #1: Random Affiliation Constructed

When I heard that I had been assigned Caretaker's Array as my quasi-headquarters for the random affiliation tournament, I wasn't exactly happy... partly because I had played Voyager a lot during the past year and wanted to try something different, and partly because all those Voyager decks at the Europeans made the event a bit monotonous. I decided against playing the standard ultra-fast one space/three planets deck, and built a new version of my Voyager battle deck.

Round One
In the first round, I had a Bye, because the train I had booked arrived only after the convention had already started. Shockingly, I was willing to sacrifice one round of playing for three more hours of sleep. Must be getting old. (+3, 3 total)

Round Two
In round two I played against Stefan Perau, my teamplay partner from the previous year. Stefan arrived midway during the first round, and borrowed a Klingon battle deck from Thorsten Wanek. He was not familiar with the deck, and he also needed a couple of turns to set up his core and crew. That gave me enough time to complete Caretaker's Array and a planet mission. When I was stopped on my second planet, Stefan was finally set up to start the killing, and flew over to slaugther a few of my personnel and score some points. Unfortunately for him, his ships were now right were I wanted them, that is, away from his headquarters. I completed my third mission, then attacked his I.K.S. Vor'cha with the U.S.S. Voyager (Home Away From Home) and the Delta Flyer (Innovative Vessel) for 20 extra points and the win. (+3, 6 total)

Round Three
My next opponent was Sonny Jensen. I met Sonny for the first time at the European Championship in July, but I didn't get the chance to play him then. The lottery gave him Unicomplex (Root of the Hive Mind) as his headquarters - a brilliant outcome for Sonny, as he already had a juggernaut Borg solver that earned him third place at the Euros, so he didn't even have to build a new deck. Luckily, I was able to hit him with a Gomtuu Shock Wave at his space mission. Next turn, the Voyager brought down the shields of his Borg Cube some more, and the Delta Flyer blew the ship out of the stars. That gave me extra points and enough time to complete my missions. (+3, 9 total)

Round Four
In the last round, I played Will Hoskin for the tournament win - one of five matches we played over the course of the weekend. Will got Mouth of the Wormhole (Terok Nor) as his headquarters, which meant that he could use the latest version of his Androids build, the only deck that beat then World Champion Christian Pulsfort at the Europeans 2006. Will didn't give me much to spend on dilemmas, and easily walked through his missions. Also, I couldn't strand his ship, because he always had enough Range left to fly back to his one-span headquarters. In the end, his three- or four-personnel mission teams dodged my dilemmas well enough to win the game. (+1, 10 total).

Will won the tournament, I came in second. Not a bad start into the weekend, considering the fact that last year I started with a 0-3 record after the Random Affiliation Constructed.

Tournament #2: 2-on-2 Teamplay Tournament

My teamplay partner, Jens Petritzki, was late, so I partnered with Markus Eberlein for the first round instead. (Markus and I had already partnered for the GP Con 2005). I played a slim Borg assimilator, combined with a Tragic Turn pile. Markus complemented this build with a version of the Pseudopod loop, though his take maybe wasn't quite as refined as Derek Barry's infamous "machine gun" deck. Still, it was good enough for its fair share of killings.

Round One
Our opponents in round one were Team Bothered, Sonny Jensen (Borg) and Will Hoskin (Voyager). Sonny played his tried-and-trusted speedy Borg deck, and Will had borrowed my Voyager battle deck. The good thing was, I knew Will's deck, and I knew which dilemmas he would have in store for me. The bad thing was, it would still be hard dodging his attacks. The early game went well for Markus and myself. Markus killed about half the crew of Sonny's Borg ship, I assimilated a couple of personnel (including a Borg Queen (Guardian of the Hive) ), and we managed to keep Sonny from attempting and completing missions.

However, Will's Voyager crew made short work of Markus' dilemmas, completed three missions, then went hiding at the Unicomplex for a while. With the help of assimilated personnel and Knowledge and Experience, I completed two missions. Unfortunately, Will repeatedly used Dukat (Pah-Wraith Puppet) to remove my used copies of One With the Borg, Knowledge and Experience, and any assimilation cards in the discard pile from the game. Doing a third mission with the limited resources I had left in play turned out to be impossible. Markus went on killing personnel with his infiltrators, but he didn't manage to complete a mission before the 90 minutes were up, so we had to give Team Bothered a Modified Win. (+1, 1 total)

By the way, Modified Wins are the usual result of these team games. With all the options a four player game offers, and endless discussions among teammates about which dilemmas to play in what order, what event to play next, etc., it's hardly ever possible to meet the requirements for a Full Win: one completed planet mission and one completed space mission for each player, as well as 200 team points total.

By the beginning of round two, my teammate Jens Petritzki had finally arrived and joined my team now instead of Markus, who went on to partner with another player for the rest of the tournament. Jens was playing a Borg speed solver (with a few Borg Cutting Beams in it for good measure), and combined it with my Tragic Turn killer pile, since he had asked me before to bring a dilemma pile for him. Myself, I now switched to a generic stopper pile for the rest of the tournament. Also, I realized during my first game that I had three empty sleeves in my deck - apparently I forgot to add the Annexation Drones that were still in my mission solver deck...

Round Two
So, with a new teammate, a new dilemma pile, and three Annexation Drones in my deck, we faced Tobias Gmeiner and Alex Mosbacher in round two. Alex and Tobias are relatively new players, but they are learning very fast and have improved a lot since I had met them last year. (They were joint winners of the "Newcomer of the Year" award later that weekend.) Their decks were The Original Series and Voyager, and this combination had some wicked tricks up its sleeve. One of them was using Energize to play Josephs at a discount. Remember Josephs? A one-cost weenie who can be played at cost +5 to make each player discard five cards from their deck for each headquarters they command. With Energize, an upgraded Josephs could suddenly be played for zero counters! And of course, the Voyager player was not affected by the discards, while Jens and I were losing lots of cards.

Still, Jens hit the Voyager player hard with the killer dilemmas, and I assimilated most of the survivors. Whenever he played new personnel, I dropped by and persuaded some of his guys to join the collective, and kept him down to only a couple of personnel in play. With one player pretty much locked out, I then joined Jens in attempting missions. It all went well, until our opponents dropped a Phoenix (Risen From the Ashes) and moved it to a non-headquarters mission - which meant we now had to score 220 points in total! When time was called, Jens had one more turn. It took us a while to agree on how he could best use his resources for the final turn. After a couple of minutes, we had figured out a way of playing and moving personnel and ships around that would allow us one final mission attempt with the right number of personnel aboard to get past the dilemmas we expected. The plan worked; Jens completed the mission, brought our team total to 200 points, and had just enough Range left to fly over to the Phoenix and hit it with a Borg Cutting Beam, which gave us a Full Win! (+3, 4 total)

Round Three
In round three we were paired against Carsten George and Stefan Perau. They were using Bajor (Gift of the Prophets), and (another) Bajor and Mouth of the Wormhole (Deep Space Nine) respectively. As soon as we saw Stefan's two headquarters, Jens and I made sure to download or play our Party Atmospheres as soon as possible. With Unimatix Zero, Borg Cutting Beam, Abduction, One With The Borg, Changed History all playing for a cost of zero or one, we quickly set up our strategies. Thanks to At What Cost? and Unimatrix Zero, Jens spent lots and lots of counters per turn; myself, I assimilated four personnel once I had stopped Carsten at his first mission, then used The Perfect Tool to get the rest of my deck into play quickly.

However, the biggest problem of these team games is that you don't get very many turns, so we couldn't afford to waste more than two turns per mission. Like in the first game, our Borg decks dominated the table, but scoring 200 points was still a pain. Just like before, it came down to Jens' last turn in overtime to complete our final mission. Carsten had managed to stop two of his mission skills. Jens didn't have a drone who had both skills in his discard pile to swap it in, and he didn't have any unstopped Interlink drones to put one from his deck into the discard pile. After several minutes of brainache (and me actually coming over to his side of the table and having a good look at the cards in his hand), we realized that while he didn't have any of the appropriate drones in his discard pile, he had one of those crucial cards in his hand, ...and a Stricken Dumb as well! So in the end it was as easy as discarding that drone to Stricken Dumb during the last dilemma, then swapping it in with the Queen, and we had another Full Win! (+3, 7 total)

As we were the only team to score Full Wins during the tournament, Jens and myself won the teamplay event with seven points; Will and Sonny came in second with three modified wins.

It was close to midnight now, but there was another event scheduled for this day:

Tournament #3: Mercenary Sealed

What a strange and disturbing format. Have a look at the rules, and you'll get an idea of how unpredictable this tournament was. I managed to stay unbeaten for three rounds, and won the tournament, thanks to an incredible streak of luck with my dilemma choices in the last round against Will Hoskin. I killed three personnel with Training Accident (a key dilemma I got after Sonny Jensen played it on me in the first round), captured three with Captured by the Breen, and hit his big mission team with a lucky wall play that resulted in him having no personnel in play, while I had about 20 for my final mission. When the tournament was finally over, it was already past four in the morning. And, in time-honoured tradition, my deck list for the main event had yet to be written...

Check back for Part Two of this article!