Johannes Klarhauser (Kaiser) Tournament Report - 2E Standard - European Continentals Day One 2011-07-23 - 10:00 AM Alex Downloads Manhattan Introduction Klingon Council was my choice for Day 1. It's one of the most versatile control decks out there, and I liked my chances with it against Borg and speed solvers. The dilemma pile was a stop/kill hybrid that ideally held off multiple attempts at the first mission with anywhere between one and three kills. I was expecting to play from behind in many games, but there's no reason to panic, unless your opponent plays extremely slow. At the urging of Peter Moller, this report will include not Austrian, but Danish Fun Facts again, although I'm puzzled as to how the hell I'm supposed to work connections to Denmark into this report. We'll see... Round 1 Earned Bye EB (+100) Somehow I had managed to accumulate a total of three first-round Byes into Continentals, and decided to use it, because that gave me more time to recover from the Biermeister the night before. I played Tribbles instead with some other Bye players. Danish Fun Fact #1,771,561: Peter Moller also had an Earned Bye, but unfortunately he couldn't make it to Vienna. Round 2 Tobias Rausmann FW (+40) Tobias decided to use one of the decks I brought to the Manhattan Project test session this year, a two-mission solver based around the new Enterprise-D. It's similar to a recent build by Ben Hosp in that it mixes both Cadets and TNG big guns like Picard, Kirk, and Lwaxana + TATV and Trellium/Fajo's as draw engine. Tobias had a decent start and was out attempting early. I stopped him twice at Practice Orbital Maneuvers, using In Development and Coolant Leak to stop the cheap Cadets. He played it safe and used the Qel'poh as backup ship to fly his Enterprise-D home and dodge my attacks. When he went for his planet, however, I was all Set Up. I finally got some kill dilemmas to hit, then used All-Out War/Ferocity/Noble Cause to kill a total of 8 personnel on consecutive turns, and used my second ship and crew to work my way through Amnesty Talks. Tobias was about to rebuild, but I had eliminated most of his Engineers so he couldn't get enough personnel in play before I completed my planet mission for the win. Play to remember: Tobias was about one good personnel short of putting together a new crew that could complete Restore Errant Moon. He played Persis, only to see her killed instantly by Flaw in the Plan. Danish Fun Fact #66: When photographed from strange angles, Scott Denmark looks a little bit like Montgomery Scott, who is a beast in our current meta. He eats ALL the 8-costers alive, as well as Pitching In. Round 3 Markus Eberlein FW (+95) Markus was playing his latest version of the Cardassians. Although I had a nice winning streak against him, I was warned, not just because he had me on the brink of losing in recent local tournaments, but also because he beat Tyler (who also played Klingon Council) in round 2. However, the game went smoothly for me. I drew into my engine early on and had access to all the cards I needed. Markus' Evek captured my Martok (Soldier of the Empire), and later on a William T. Riker (Exchange Officer) with Ensnared, but those were losses I could live with. I destroyed the Labor Camp Markus had built, and completed some of my own missions. No Transport Crash Survivors meant I was able to micro-team after one or two attempts. After Markus had lost some more people during mission attempts, I decided to complete a third mission instead of waiting for him to come out again, since I had lost some battle cards to Energize. Play to remember: During the mission attempt after Markus had captured Martok with Evek, I used an Inequitable Exchange to capture Evek before the Tsiolkovsky Infection that followed could kill him and allow Markus to use him again. Danish Fun Fact #189a: So far, Markus has yet to lose to a Danish player. Danish Fun Fact #189b: So far, Markus has yet to play against a Danish player. Round 4 Sebastian Kirstein MW (+75) Borg assimilation. Fortunately, this was matchup I was prepared for. I even added a Dukat (Pah-Wraith Puppet) specifically for this matchup, the only hand-written addition to the deck list which I had already printed after our playtesting the weekend before. Sebastian downloaded two Quintessence early on got some event destruction going with Two of Nine (Tactician Drone), nuking Energize, one of my standard opening downloads. Using Korath (Duplicitous Tinkerer), Trellium-D and Grav-Plating Trap, I destroyed both copies of Quintessence, and Sebastian didn't bother with trying to win the event destruction race after that early blow. As expected, the first 30 minutes consisted of two players sitting at their respective headquarters, playing personnel and ships and waiting for the other player to make a move (I had neutered a possible Borg Queen's Cube threat by downloading A Few Minor Difficulties). Sebastian had scored some points with Annexation Drone, so I was forced to come out and try my luck. The cards that won me the game were Dukat, who got rid of anything Sebastian was forced to discard (including stuff like Knowledge and Experience, Reborn, One With the Borg, etc.), and K'mpec (Protector of the Empire). K'mpec and Surprise Party gave me a whopping 13 counters to spend for about 8 turns in a row, so by the time I finally went out and attempted Amnesty Talks, I had three ships and just about every personnel in my deck in play. I lost some personnel to dilemmas, saved some with Emergeny Transport Unit, but completed the mission. Sebastian then flew over, beamed some personnel to one of my ships, played a Reborn and assimilated two more personnel with Harvest Drones, but he didn't have the Range to fly his ship to another mission (one of the reasons why I went space first) and use the assimilated personnel right away. In the end, my sheer counter advantage (I was basically taking double turns for half of the game) gave enough resources to make it through a planet mission before time was called. After the timeout, I sent 12 guys on a suicide mission to try and see if I could get a Full Win, but only 2 survived to make it to the mission requirements. Play to remember: The turn after Sebastian assimilated three of my personnel, I used the second function on Flaw in the Plan to mercy-kill the freshly harvested guys and make sure their Knowledge and Experience would not be used against the Empire. Danish Fun Fact #359: Borg are definitely not Swedish. Scholars are currently doing research on a possible Danish heritage, since a recently discovered photo of a certain Danish Trek player clearly shows that part of Denmark's population has the genes for developing the ever-popular red ocular implants. Round 5 Thomas Schneider FL (-95) Ah, Jaresh. I used the deck at the Koblenz Regional this year and beat fellos MP players Thomas and Tyler with it; it's what we called the swiss-army knife of trek decks, since it can give both stopper and killer dilemma piles a headache, has sufficient tricks to catch up with super speed and outrun them in the end, and has even some decent control elements in Holding Cell and Luther Sloan. I'm writing all this because the game itself isn't worth much of a story. Thomas played at the top of his game, while I blundered twice with dilemma decisions, and forgot to keep a Diplomacy in hand to download the pieces I needed to get the kill event loop ready. In the end, I think it was a good thing that it was in this game that random selections conspired against me (Primmin against dilemmas, Energize discarded two battle events and Nu'daq (Tenacious Rival), ...), since I had no business winning this game in the first place. Even with the Qam-chee out and reducing Thomas' personnel's attributes, he managed to complete four missions for the win (I had grav-trapped a Promenade School when he was on 95 points). Play to remember: None, really. The closest thing to a memorable move was killing my own Korath, who was iced on Holding Cell, with Hindrance to give me extra dilemmas and be able to play my other copy. Danish Fun Fact #58: Although displaying sufficiently strange and alien behaviour to many, Danes do, in fact, not count as another species to stop for Promenade School. Round 6 Peter van der Helm FW (+50) The only Klingon vs Klingon matchup I played on Day 1. I expected to see far more of these, and was positively surprised to face six different headquarters in my six games. Peter went with the speed solver version, a deck I know pretty well, so I had a good idea as to what dilemmas will work. I stopped him several times in space, and a couple of personnel here and there while I was building up my core. Peter then switched to planet; he completed Rescue Prisoners in one go, if I remember correctly, but had take more casualties there. When he went back to space, I stopped him with a filter/kill/kill combo that, even with an ETU aboard, left only four people aboard the ship. One turn later, Peter had no personnel left in play and had to start from scratch. To make matters worse, he didn't draw into a ship he could play for several turns, so I was able to complete two missions for the win. Play to remember: With a lucky dilemma draw & random selections in space, I was able to kill enough to set Point Blank Strike and Kruge (Instinctive Commander) up for some capture goodness. I ended the game with five personnel in my brig; it was the only time I actually used Kruge that day. Danish Fun Fact #103: Hamlet, the Shakespeare play referenced by Klingon General Chang, is set in Denmark. In this game, it was a case of "...not to be" for the eye-patch-wearing cold warrior. Round 7 Jeronimo Mitaroff-Szecsenyi MW (+10) Jemo played an interesting, combolicious Future/Damaged Starfleet hybrid. He used things like Shuttlepods and Noble Intentions to grab needed cards, and also got Nathan Samuels in play early on. His biggest advantage, though, was dropping Standard Orbit on his opening turn, which denied me easy access to my complete download chain, so I had to watch Jemo burning multiple At What Cost and dropping good personnel by the dozen. I caught a break when I found Korath and a Trellium-D as back-to-back cards in my deck, so I got rid of Standard Orbit and finally started to get my combo going. Still, I was only able to use the K'mpec 13-counters-turn a single time this game, as there a LOT less turns than in other games and I didn't have enough Leadership personnel to stop for a long time. I was forced to attempt missions earlier than I normally do, as due to both my own and Jemo's numerous download and order actions, time was quickly running down. Jemo was up 50-0 after he had finally completed Eliminate Sphere Network. Thankfully both my stoppers (Unfair Comparison, Agonizing Encounter, etc) and kill dilemmas (Tsiolkovsky Infection was huge this game!) worked as intended all game - see play to remember. With Starfleet crippled for a while, I completed Amnesty Talks and battled several times for bonus points, and in the end I was lucky to be in the lead (60-50) when time was called and got the modfied win. Fun game against a class opponent (who went on to become Tribbles Champion the next day)! Play to remember: On Jeronimo's first attempt, I worked my usual Hindrance magic of killing Alexander Rozhenko (K'mtar) to draw 12 and found the one dilemma I was looking for: Inequitable Exchange captured Jonathan Archer (Damaged Captain), which was crucial to making non-skill filters work. On my turn, I re-played K'mtar to download Heart of Glory and Ferocity and got the jackpot kill of Phlox (Damaged Doctor). Danish Fun Fact #8472: With a disappointing record of two losses and only a meagre True Tie against Jeronimo between the two of them, Danish players Soren and Peter will have no choice but to come to Austria soon and erase this mark of shame from their books.