Michael Van Breemen (The Ninja Scot) Tournament Report - 2E - Worlds Day Two 2013-10-20 - 09:30 AM Romulan Denial Introduction I was strongly debating whether to play the same deck that I did the day before - it was strong, could solve missions easily enough and still have some harassment available in the form of Kruge. Instead I went Romulans but not the typical version - Gal'gathong, At An Impasse and Dreamer and the Dream to keep them down. Unfortunately, I never got Dreamer and the Dream to work in any game that I played that day. Still, I can't complain with the results... Round 1 William Hoskin FW (0) I was 80-20 thinking that Will was going to play Romulans and, if not him, someone else which is why I didn't bring a gimmick deck this year. I guessed wrong and he was playing Klingons which would've been my second guess. In the first game and the second game, it went pretty much the same - I prevented him from solving his first mission on his first attempt, I played At An Impasse so that he couldn't get more people out and, due to his Transport Crash Survivors, he couldn't get an attempt in without giving me even more dilemmas. Meanwhile, my people are just putting more and more dilemmas under until I get the win in each game. Round 2 Sebastian Kirstein FW (0) When I saw that it was Sebastian that I was playing, I was assuming that he was going to play the same thing. At this time I assumed that I wasn't going to get a full win of any kind because of his space mission - Commandeer Prototype to get the Phoenix into play (my missions added to 100 exactly.) Game one he was getting points from GUYS which I couldn't blow up soon enough to prevent him from getting points to use Power Shift. His Energize hit his Phoenix and I was feeling infinitely better as a result. He managed to get through two missions but used up all of the bonus points in the process and was one person away from solving his third mission but couldn't draw into Lursa. I couldn't get the third mission either resulting in a true tie. Second game he went firs, getting me a Tal download to hand. This helped immensely as he had an interrupt in hand to download people to hand along with the Bird of Prey. I got hit by Outclassed in space but with three Past Romulans on the ship, I managed to get past Outclassed. This was the real turning point in the second game as I had two strong teams to get my mission attempts in, keeping the pressure on. He also intentionally discarded the Phoenix although I'm still not sure why. I got rid all of his Programming and Archaeology at Iconia but still had enough in play to theoretically solve Assess Contamination. Thankfully, I kept him at bay before getting the third mission and the win. Round 3 Oleg Ryzhikov FW (0) I had played him two days ago in the Random Affiliation tournament in which he had gotten Ferengi. It helped a little in knowing what he was playing to do in this tournament but I only remembered seeing stop prevention, not kill prevention and people who can still solve missions with four or five people without assistance. Unfortunately, I was drawing really bad in his mission attempts, getting hardly anyone in any of his mission attempts. Surely not enough to de-staff their ships which is what I wanted. However, without TCS and with great people in play, I could micro-team solve to get ahead of him by a turn for the win despite Reyga's influence. Second game Reyga never saw play and the dilemma pile worked its magic - getting Bold Plan to consume two ACE's is a good top deck. This time the deck worked together and made the game seem a lot easier than it probably was. I didn't expect to be at the table... but I hoped that I wasn't going to play against Slaby. Round 4 Stefan Slaby FL (0) Except Slaby managed to win and play against me in the final. He was playing what I called a controlled Romulan deck - Guys, P&P, FSE, Power Shift and all the bonus points to pay off anything that he wanted to do. What I didn't know was what dilemma pile he was running with it. Nine people attempting in space became nine corpses after the mission attempt despite having a copious amount of Exobiology. Needless to say I managed to get the space mission done but couldn't get another mission done. He had enough bonus points that he didn't even have to solve another mission. Second round I got some things right and screwed up other things. Attempting with six in space to minimize death - good idea. Attempting the second time without mission skills to put dilemmas under - very good idea. Attempting the third time without putting the mission skills there on accident - bad idea. Giving him a very good dilemma combo in space... but not putting it into the right order - the worst possible thing ever. At the planet mission I attempted with two teams and accidentally screwed up not giving mission skills with the first team. When he only gave Tragic Turn, I could've gotten away with using Donatra... but I had forgotten to bring Security because I was an idiot. Second team had Security and they had died. I managed to get through the second mission but so did he, burning enough points to get through. It was 75-65 him when I got my last chance. They weren't capable of living through the blood bath and he won Worlds. Closing Thoughts I think that, had I played the space combo correctly, I might have managed to pull off the win in the second round. The third round he probably still would've won but still, who knows what might have happened. However, other than the errors I made, I couldn't say that I made the bad choice in what I played at Worlds.