Jeremy Benedict (flrazor) Tournament Report - 2E Dangerous Missions Draft - Andoria Regional 2010-06-19 - 10:00 AM Occupied? Introduction Any tournament in DS9 can be a brutal battle, and Draft format is no exception. You need to build a tight deck with solid strategy and pack in some surprises to catch people off guard. You really don't know what you're going to be able to draw or see from other players, especially with packs from all across the board available. I grabbed some TBG packs to get some good Starfleet rares since I knew there would be a lot of good FLeet folks to draft later to go with the good stable of DS9 people from my starter. At first no one was snapping up the Cardies, so I started taking any purple people I could get my hands on for the DM-style second affiliation rule in effect. I grabbed a few capture/punishment cards that no one else wanted and debated for a bit about the possibility of a capture deck. I even caught a copy of Rescue Captives rolling around our pod so they would be able to get someone back. Odds are if you lose someone to the brig in draft, they're gone. I did end up with a good number of Starfleet personnel and a copy of Earth, Humanity's Home if I wanted to also include them, but the deck would have been all over the place and the skills from the Cardassians did a lot more for the missions I grabbed. I decided to go straight up solver with no tricks, but have two Timescape to block double attempts and two Stir Crazy to bump late attempts. Round 1 Matthew Hayes FW (+60) Matt's playing Dominion with missions I'm familiar with from a deck I play. (The starter missions are rediculous for those guys!) I know he'll be able to pass missions with 5 personnel, so I have my work cut out for me with mostly one-stop dilemmas to work with. I try to stick with weeding out the skills I know are light in Dominion decks and try to get the double-this-or-that dilemmas to work as walls. I didn't get many of them to work, but they filter out the Vorta and Founders really well and the Jemmies that are left don't have the mission skills to finish. I've got too many personnel for Matt to easily shut down and get double teams going by the end to win 100-40. Round 2 Ben Johnson FW (+35) Ben's starting with TNG which I know means he's got some big solvers before he even gets to drafting packs. I see he's running Integrity missions like The Last Outpost which Picard + 24 more Integrity have solved. He's got skills in spades to cover his missions, so all I can do is play smart and fast and hope I can stop the attempts he makes at least once each mission. As I guessed, he blows through his Integrity missions with little to slow him down, but Ben tosses me a couple double-this-or-that dilemmas that I can pass by with Odo and Riva so I pass two of my missions in one shot. Yelsar earns his stripes with me again for providing all but the Science to complete Runabout Search and get me a personnel back. I hold my lead on him and carry through to the end with a 100-65 win. Round 3 Michael Van Breemen FW (+30) MVB stomped on me at GenCon during the sealed tournament last year playing just about every double-skill personnel you could think of in a TNG deck. I see he's rolling TNG again and joked about it with him before we knew we were playing each other, and he shows me his posse of doubles he's got to blow up dilemmas. We get paired together and my heart drops because I know I'm going to have to get lucky to stop the right folks since the double dilemmas aren't going to save me. On my first attempt he misses the Law personnel I played earlier in the turn and tosses only a Drumhead at me since he was sure I hadn't played Law yet, I pass in one shot. I get Stir Crazy out but on MVB's second planet mission (he went P->P->S) I think I can get enough to stop him without using the Stir and missed, so now I can't use it for the late mission draws. I manage to squeak by and win by a turn, though playing it out it looks like I might have been able to stop him with a two dilemma draw on his next attempt of a Timescape and a 1-stopper. Game ends 100-70. Round 4 Kevin Jaeger FW (+30) The two 3-0 players finally meet and Kevin's going to be bringing a serious Borg hurt with the Interlinking Queen to gain anything to solve missions. On his first attempt I draw Stand-Off...I left it in since I didn't get enough capture/punishment love to make it part of the play of the deck, but figured I could maybe nab a Leader somewhere to at least make things interesting. I think over Kev's personnel and I know he's got no Diplomacy, Honor, or Law, so he can't pass the requirements...and his only Leader is the Queen. Queen is now locked down for the rest of the game. Two copies of Timescape keep his double attempts to a minimum and I manage to stop whole teams with some double-this-or-that dilemmas when he's short on some skills. Kevin also drafted a McCoy and for at least the second time lost him to the discard pile on an Interlink, then sent him to the bottom of his deck with a Salvaging the wreckage, but never got him into play to return dilemmas. On the other hand, I get Temporal Conduit running so I'm pulling dilemmas off his missions instead. A well played dliemma combo including a Preventative Repercussions actually destaffed me on my 2nd mission and bought him three turns while I got another ship and staffing out, but not enough to catch up and I squeak out the win 100-70. Round 5 Kevin Peterson FW (+70) Kevin won last year's Draft regional so I know it's not going to be an easy match, and with Klingons staring me down he's got no trouble with Strength missions to solve. I get Stir Crazy out but never get to use it, and let the Timescapes stop the double-teams. Temporal Conduit for the third time lets me pull dilemmas out from his missions to keep the overcome stacks low. Even with awesome personnel, sweet dilemmas, and the constant threat of The Promise smacking me around, I get ahead and stay ahead and end the day with a 100-30 victory to end 5-0 for the day. Kevin played a much closer match than the score might show and he easily would have finished mission 2 on the next turn with tons of people to go for #3.