Tournaments | trekcc

Daniel Matteson (OKCoyote)
Tournament Report - 2E - Cardassia Regional
2013-06-29 - 12:00 PM
TOS/ALC
Introduction
This was apparently not a good weekend to run a Regional. I had ten players pre-registered at one point. In the last week I lost Leslie McGinty (work emergency), Robert McGinty (church retreat ran late), and Ian Coleman (got sick), and with seven left, Alex Taylor (who is still learning) dropped so we wouldn't have a bye. Then I woke up two hours before the event to discover my air conditioner broke down! Couldn't get anyone out to fix it until Monday, so I hurriedly managed to get the tournament moved to another venue. Thanks to Get Your Fun On in West Melbourne for squeezing us in on short notice. As for my build for this event, I considered three decks: Starfleet (Delphic/Samuels), TOS (Aid Legendary), and Relativity. After playing Starfleet and Relativity in recent online events and not faring as well as I'd hoped, I decided to try TOS, using mostly Kris Sonsteby's build with the exception of a few cards I didn't own. I had built all three decks anyway (Ian was going to pilot Relativity if he had made it to the event).

Round 1	Tammy Vititoe	FW (+100)
Tammy borrowed the Terok Nor deck I used at Orlando Regionals as she had played it before to help me playtest. It's a Ruling Council 2-mission win deck that starts with Kressari and then hits a planet (Recover Prisoners or Survey New World). Pretty straightforward. However I've played it enough times to know all its weaknesses and what dilemmas to hit her with. I solved ALC second (after a quick Alien Probe) while she was trying to soften up Kressari and ended up destaffing her. She dropped another ship but it was too late as I polished off the third mission for a shutout victory.


Round 2	Thomas Kamiura	FL (-35)View opponent's Report View original Report
Well this was the big rematch as TK is known for showing up and beating all comers. The last time we faced off I beat him for the first time (with Delphic Starfleet), but we didn't face each other at all at Orlando Regionals. As soon as we sat down TK's first comment was "In Sonsteby We Trust?" When TK is in game mode he's all business, and I tried not to let him rattle me and focus on playing the best game I could. TK was running Klingons with a Tragic pile, which isn't good against my deck. I discovered that microteaming can help get through the Tragic pile but that's certainly not the way to go with Kruge lurking about. My first attempt at Alien Probe with six resulted in three kills (as I wasn't yet aware he was playing Tragic) and he used Kruge on my Enterprise. Fortunately I had another copy, which he couldn't take, and even used Number One at full cost to get my three captives back, and some medical dudes to get some of my personnel back into my deck. I backtracked, with five dilemmas under Alien Probe, and went to ALC due to the shorter range. In my first attempt here we both made mistakes. TK accidentally put his dilemma stack in the wrong order, putting an overcosted Necessary Execution above the Entanglement that would have allowed NE to be legal. Unfortunately, my mistake was allowing his next 0-cost dilemma to go through, not realizing that once a dilemma is overcosted, ALL remaining dilemmas are overcome. I think it took an extra attempt but I did manage to get through ALC. He attempted to use Uninvited to grab a 0 cost dilemma, but I nullified it with Sisko. I solved Alien Probe as well. He drew one dilemma but I Kirked it. At this point I was up 65-60 with minutes to go, but TK got one final turn in and solved a third mission for the full win. A hard fought game.
Dan played Kris Sonteby's semi-competative TMP ALC build. The main gimmick here was to drop alot of cost high but play for cheap TMP people and then solve ALC to make me bounce several of my low cost personnel. That didn't work out so well against this deck as several of my people have a printed cost of four, but play for two. Dan attempts his first mission where I destaff him (using the kill d-pile) and subsequently Kruge his Enterprise. At this point, Dukat is not out to start clearing his discard pile yet so on the next turn, he drops another Enterprise (downside of Kruge is that I cannot get his second Enterprise) and some weenies who through their abilities, reclaim the killed personnel from the previous turn. So I thought great, that sucks. Then, just to stick his thumb in my eye, he drops Number One and gets his Kruge'd people back. The whole point of my deck was to kill his people and to prevent him from getting them back. It's not working. So for some reason, instead of going back to space, he heads to ALC where he runs into my kill pile again. I make a pretty rookie player error here and overspend on dilemmas. He takes a while to solve but eventually does and bounces 12 points of cost back to the bottom of my deck. In retrospect, I think this was good for me as getting rid of people was what I was trying to do from the start. Anyways, so Dan solves ALC and flies back to IAP and solves that. I think at this point, I had two of my missions down too, but he was up by five. With two minutes left, he attempts his final mission, again, running into my dilemmas and I bleed Dan dry of Biology locking him from his third mission and allowing me to win on the last turn as time was called. Dan and Sonsteby got TK'd 100-65.

Round 3	Sean O'Reilly	FW (+70)
More Klingons? Yeah... more Klingons. This build wasn't as evil as the previous opponent (no Tragic pile). I did still lose a ship to Kruge but IIRC there wasn't anyone aboard. Mission solving was pretty straight forward here and I got everything done that I needed to do. Sean played a lot of Treachery Klingons and I got him frequently with combos like Issue of Trust/Infinite Diversity and general interference like returning personnel to hand or top of deck.


Round 4	Rick Kinney	FW (+50)View opponent's Report View original Report
Rick's first comment at seeing ALC: "Well that's the mission I hate to see." Rick was playing a Terok Nor/Dominion combo with lots of events to earn him bonus points for a likely two mission win. I had an early jump on this game by playing Surprise Party on turn one, though I struggled a little drawing into mission skills. I did manage to get both ALC and Alien Probe done but Rick had solved his first mission for 50 points. Well on my way to solving my third and final mission with 12 minutes left in the round, I cleared all dilemmas but the last one: Breaking the Ice. I had just one Geology (on Harriman) but I attempted to use his own ability on himself twice to give him two more Geology. It took four people conversing over this and checking the rules to finally decide it was a legal play. I got through and solved the mission for the win.
Dan was playing an OS deck and getting the extra card draw with his HQ. On top of that, he was able to play Surprise Party from his opening hand, so he basically had a two counter advantage over me every turn. Rats. Same gameplay as before, we left each other alone and did our mission attempts. I was able to get my events out, and they weren't destroyed. Cool. I don't remember any big events or happenings until the last play of the game. Dan was on his third mission and I was on my second. It was late in the game with only about 8 or 10 minutes left I think. Dan attempted space and I used a filter and wall combo. The filter took at a couple and the wall required three Geology. Dan only had one Geology and no cheater cards to share skills. Unfortunately for me, the one Geology was John Harriman. He used his ability on himself to give himself two more Geologies to overcome the dilemma and solve the mission for the win. We all checked and double checked the rules and wording of the cards and it appears this was a valid and legal thing to do. Congratulations to Dan on the win.

Closing Thoughts
I was hoping for a top two finish and I felt that I had played and fought hard and earned that spot. With TK having won a regional already I get a bye handed down which I will happily take with me to GenCon. I'm sorry that due to the morning's chaos I never really got a chance to talk to David Blauvelt (the only player I didn't face) who was visiting from Virginia, though it's cool that I can finally say I had my first out of state player at my event. As always, I'm ultimately just glad everyone had a good time.