Johannes Klarhauser (Kaiser) Tournament Report - 2E Standard - Vandros IV Regional 2011-04-16 - 11:00 AM For K and D Introduction After disappointing showings in the past two years, I put some more effort into this tournament. I was planning to attend three Regionals this year, and I wanted to win one again for a change. Before the tournament, my choices were Borg Assimilation, Cardassian Capture, TOS, and a Romulan deck, with the latter two being my favourites. Test games against myself the night before were not much help, as there were both blowouts and nailbiter wins for either deck. My TOS deck was based on Ben Hosp's "A Piece of Action" deck, which I liked a lot better than the recent Regional winning TOS decks by Mike Harrington and Kris Sonsteby, two builds that I found a bit too unreliable or vulnerable for what I was expecting to see in Dessau. In the end I ended up modifying the draw deck slightly, but kept most of Ben's original idea intact. Most importantly, I got rid of Favor The Bold and changed the personnel selection slightly to include another McCoy, Shran and Number One. I also went for Survey New World as my second planet. The dilemma pile was the latest version of my Kaiserpile that evolved out my pre-Erratum Worlds Legacy pile and that relied heavily on skill tracking. Round 1 Tobias Rausmann FW (+100) And it starts off with a bang. Playing against the reigning world champ is not the best way to start into a tournament, especially when your record against him in the CC era is 0-5. However, this time I got off to a great start. I drew into a nice spread of personnel early on and actually beat Tobias' post-errata Worlds deck to the first mission. He managed to stop me for two turns in space, and also managed to remove both of my copies of Secret Identity with Ohhh...Nothing happened! to protect Archer. Still, my dilemma pile worked like a charm, since all my skill-dilemmas made it impossible for Archer to work his magic. Pitching In + stopper + Gomtuu Shock Wave on Tobias' first attempt, followed by Temptation + stopper + Where No One Has Gone Before on his second bought me a lot of time. In fact, by the end of the game, there was only a single dilemma under Tobias' space mission, as I used Leonard H. McCoy (Chief Medical Officer) and Shran (In Archer's Debt) to pull dilemmas back, while my crew worked their way through my two planets. FW, 105-0. Round 2 Oliver Thust FW (+100) Last time Oliver and I played against each other, it ended in a very entertaining True Tie. This time, the game was much more lopsided. My deck again ran extremely well, while Oliver was slowly assembling a crew of powerful high-cost personnel. He used Tal almost every turn, but since I didn't have any interrupts in the deck, he never got to download any cards. Oliver did manage to remove a copy of James T. Kirk (Original Thinker) with T'Auethn (Obedient Centurion). I retaliated by removing Oliver's freshly-played Energize from the game with a timely use of Montgomery Scott (Experienced Engineer). In space, Oliver stopped me for several turns with things like In Development and a Gomtuu (I had 2 Diplomacy and exactly 32 Integrity remaining), but once I was done with that mission, the planets were less trouble thanks to Navaar (Experienced Gift) and Gav (Diplomat). Oliver didn't leave his headquarters this game, so I don't know whether my dilemmas would have been useful against his crew. FW, 105-0. Round 3 Sebastian Kirstein ML (-5) It's always back and forth against Sebastian. Last time I beat his triple HQ beast, this time it was his turn again. He was running a Klingon battle deck with a Delphic Expanse mission to use Trellium-D in addition to ETUs to control the table with Korath and Grav-Plating Traps. My deck didn't really rely events, so that was something I could live with. I knew that a lot of people were going to die, but with about 50 personnel in the deck, I was confident that running out of skills or attributes would not be a problem even though the killer pile and the Klingons' inherent bloodlust would get their share. Before I started attempting, I used Helen Noel to try and remove some dilemmas from Sebastian's pile, but the stars aligned for Sebastian and all four dilemmas he revealed had a cost of 0! I started attempting anyway, and went planet first at Assess Contamination. Sebastian played a lot of dilemmas and killed some guys, then I flew my ship back home to be safe from Kruge. Sebastian came over, killed three guys, and scored points from battling my crew, and I started rebuilding my personnel. Sebastian stopped me a second time thanks to things like Conflict and Hindrance, but a turn later I finally completed Assess Contamination. However, I made a critical mistake when Sebastian made his second attempt at Amnesty Talks. For some reason, my mind blanked for a moment on the Anthropology option on Infinite Diversity, so I named Science, confident that Sebastian couldn't show 2 Science. However, he did have 1 Science and 1 Anthropology, so he walked right through. At Survey New World, I played the same game as before: fly in a crew of expendables, take some casualties, fly the ship back home. Of course, this was not what I had really wanted to do, because ideally I would have played a second ship and use that to make attempts at my 2-span space mission, then fly both ships home after every attempt, but while I drew into all three copies of the Enterprise, I couldn't find a different ship. I completed Survey New World eventually, but even though my guys resisted admirably (Scotty destroying a Hindrance, a second copy of Helen Noel finally removing both a Tragic Turn and a Guillotine), all the killing and replaying personnel had given Sebastian enough time to complete Deliver Ancient Artifact in the meantime. When time was called, Sebastian decided against securing the Modified Win he had at this point by flying over and killing enough of my guys to make sure I couldn't complete a mission on my last turn, and attempted his last mission instead, trying to get the full win. I managed to stop his fist team with Secret Identity (removing Koloth, Sebastian's only Officer in the attempt) followed by Formal Hearing; then got lucky with a Sylvia against his second team, capturing Alexander Rozhenko and Gowron. That gave me one last turn to pick up my remaining people at Survey New World, then fly on to Deliver Evidence, which had no dilemmas under. Sebastian worked his dilemma drawing magic and ended up with 12 to draw and spend, then decided to throw what seemed like his entire remaining pile at me, including all the planet dilemmas, and shuffled them all up. Naturally, that left Kirk standing there like an idiot, wondering which of the 12 dilemmas he should prevent (all copies of Secret Identity were already under my missions). Unfortunately, Misguided Activist, A Royal Hunt and Unbelievable Emergency all made it through, so I couldn't complete the mission. ML, 70-75 Round 4 Stefan Perau FW (+100) Stefan Perau was playing Romulans (one of three green decks on the day, I think). He played a Prejudice and Politics and Sabrun early on, but never scored points from it, as my personnel-heavy deck never had a non-personnel card on top. I was out and attempting early and breezed through Deliver Evidence on my first attempt thanks to Kirk, then went on to Survey New World where I got stopped. Stefan attempted at Investigate Sighting; I overplayed on dilemmas, giving him a Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? in addition to Coolant Leak, which had stopped 3 out of 7 people anyway. I worked on my planet missions again and made a blunder. I had left only 5 people at Survey New World the turn before, knowing that they would be able to complete with the five dilemmas under, and had moved my ship home to pick up other guys and go to Assess Contamination. Only then did I realize that Stefan had Transport Crash Surviors on the table, so I needed an extra turn to fly in a sixth personnel (and another crew of 8, for that matter). Shran and McCoy had made sure that Investigate Sighting never had more than two or three dilemmas under, though, so for once my mistakes didn't come back to haunt me this time. FW, 105-0 Round 5 Christopher Coyle FW (+70) Chris has only recently started with 2E, but he's quickly getting better. This time, he was playing an Equinox deck. While he couldn't do much against Klingon battling, he managed to win one of the other games and complete two missions against veteran player Oliver, so I was warned. I was out and attempting fast, but Chris had some nice dilemma plays to stop me for several turns (Hard Time + Breaking the Ice; Hard Time + Gomtuu Shock Wave). I was able to stop Chris with An Issue of Trust before Marla Gilmore showed up, then recycle the dilemma with Shran. Later, I was unlucky first when I randomly picked Lore to be stopped on a one in six chance, but then breathed a sigh of relief when Chris didn't have a Navigation to pass Where No One Has Gone Before. I completed my space mission and went to work on my planets, but since I used Benjamin Sisko several times to prevent Nucleogenic interrupts, I didn't get as many personnel out as in other games. Chris stopped me on the planets with things like We'll Never Know and hit me with a Whisper in the Dark. While I was struggling on the ground, Chris finally made his breakthrough in space, laughing at a Legacy as he revealed three skill dilemmas, then named An Issue of Trust after completing Inversion Mystery. Also, by now all the heavy hitters like Marla Gilmore, Rudolph Ransom, Equinox Doctor and Maxwell Burke were all on the table, and forced me to put three under on his first attempt on the planet (Swashbuckler at Heart to remove Nucleogenic cards + Secret Identity to get rid of Noah Lessing + Rogue Borg Ambush). After that, I managed to complete my last mission, narrowly dodging a loss. We played out the next turn, and Chris would have completed both of his planet missions next turn. FW, 105-30.