Benjamin Liebich (monty42) Tournament Report - 2E - German National 2014-06-22 - 11:00 AM Protector of the Realm v1.1 Introduction Going into the German national I had the option of using my standard TOS deck or a pretty feisty version of the new Bajorans that I had floating around. I opted for TOS since it's very well tested and got me a lot of good results in the last 1 1/2 years. Plus I think TOS is one of the more versatile affilations you can play in a big Tournament as it allows you to cover most of your bases. Round 1 Earned Bye EB (0) Earning the bye in yesterday's Regional (I finished 2nd but Sascha already had a bye so it went to me)enabled me to get just a little bit more of that precious thing called sleep. So I went into the 2nd round relatively relaxed. Round 2 Thomas Schneider FW (+70) And hello Mr. President! An oldie but goodie (the deck, not Thomas). My starting Hand included a Surprise Party among some low costers which kick-started my game pretty good. Thomas managed to stop my first attempt at Mediate Peace Treaty pretty effectively with a lone Outclassed. Even though he managed to Promenade School and Jaresh Inyo relatively quickly (I didn't get to Worf in time) I managed to just flat out-pace him. Partly because it took him a while to get to a ship combined with me throwing peeps at him left, right and center (aren't those Tossers great...) Round 3 sascha kiefer FW (+65) Well, it had to happen sooner or later. Another face off with my dear arch enemy. I went into this one very pessimisticly because I know the deck as well as mine and for some reason I never managed to get a handle on those damn Relativitists. Very much to my surprise it didn't go as I expected. Between him having a slow start and some very poor dilemma draws I just rocketed through my missions without even having to go further into the insufficiencies of my dilemma pile. Still don't like those Relativitists even one bit though. Furthermore another manifestation of the curse of the day 1 winner ;) Round 4 Tobias Rausmann FL (-65) Ahh, Romulans! After beating Tobias yesterday as he was going for Achievements, I kind of knew he was bringing something extraordinarily pesky. I was right. I had a poor start, drawing none of my Law personnel which forced me to dump my standard strategy and start with a Planet. With FSE and his kill pile he disected my deck pretty effectively until there was no more Leadership left (there are 11 in there!) I somehow still managed to complete the Planet though. I even managed to remove A Few Minor Difficulties with Scotty so my Enterprise-B could negate the Phoenix. But at that point he tore my deck apart beyond repair. Round 5 Jakob Herath FW (+65) Jakob played a quite interesting Klingon-Cunning-Solver! Who would have thought it. It puzzled me for a while so I simply just gave him the space mission because I didn't realize No Peace In Our Time was boosting the Cunning of the Treachery Personnel. That was quite a wake-up call as I realized that I wasn't paying attention anymore. Luckily he wasn't paying attention either because nearing time-out he forgot about the Insurrection on his Arcanis Dispute and split his peeps into 2 six-strong teams which I managed to stop relatively easy. Closing Thoughts All of that led into the final confrontation against Tobias. I wasn't too thrilled about it since I lost the first match. I decided to change strategy though by skipping any attempt to use any gimmicks and just throwing people at him as fast as I could. That was definetly the right call as I suffered through the casualties and managed to complete 2 missions before his killing machine caught up with me. All in all I'm very happy to end up 2nd. Looking at todays stout field I surely didn't expect to end up where I did. Congrats to Tobias for the Championship!