Benjamin Liebich (monty42) Tournament Report - 2E 2013-03-16 - 10:30 AM A Blast from the Past v1.1 Introduction Week 3 in our March Marathon of 4 consecutive Tournaments saw us drive to Hannover. Surprisingly there was a record number of 20 players which nobody had really expected. Although I originally wanted to break in my new "secret weapon" I intend to use in the German Nationals, I decided on-Site to switch to the Enterprise-C/TNG Battleship Deck just because it has lots of new cards in it and there were a lot of players who hadn't played in a while. Round 1 Sandra Wanek MW (+25) And although there were so many unfamiliar players, the luck of the draw saw me facing Sandra in Round 1 who brought a Relativity Deck. Luckily I had the chance to familiarize myself with the quirks of the Relativity, playing in last weeks Matter of Time Release. I was off to a slow start drawing lots of high cost personnel and no Guinan so I had to Lineage twice before I could get the ball rolling. Luck had me draw Dukat early, who successfully deconstructed the Relativity routine leaving it a very slow game as we were both just crawling through our missions. Thus when time was called we both had completed just one space mission but I was able to narrowly solve a second mission on my final turn, winning the game modified 60 - 35. Round 2 Andreas Rheinländer FW (+100) My second opponent Andreas brought a Maquis deck which had me worried for a while. But an extremely good starting hand sporting Guinan and a couple of Common Grounds allowed me to quickly throw lots of personnel at him. Due to my good start combined with him having a slow one I was able to complete two missions before he could make his first attempt. Successfully weathering through losing about 25 counters on cards going back to the top of my deck combined with the Maquis' average solver abilities saw me win this game 100 - 0. Round 3 Holger Janusch FL (-65) Winning my first two games, I went into Round 3 maybe a little overconfident as Holger's Starfleet deck seemed to have the upper hand for most of the game. I managed to keep his pace through the first few attempts but as usual I ran into trouble choosing the right dilemmas to get a handle on Starfleet. Giving him his second mission on the first attempt struck me a blow from which I just couldn't recover. In the end even desperate moves couldn't keep me from losing the game 35 - 100. Round 4 Thomas Vorwerk ML (-15)View opponent's ReportView original Report Thomas played the classic Weenie/Loaded for Bear TNG deck, solving Caretaker's and Survey New World and then overflooding you with low cost TNG personnel to excessively score points with the Enterprise-D. As I feared Insurrection eluded me for the whole game so he was able to flat outpace me as I fell victim to some of the Federation's weak spots like Issues and Moral Choices. As time was ticking and him having to make only a few more bonus points he decided to choose no dilemmas for my second mission leaving me to solve it. As my Range was used he assumed that I was out of options. But then I pulled a little rabbit name Geordi LaForge out of my hat who enabled me to attempt my third mission. But it was a long shot as at that point time was called so he threw everything he had at me which was quite enough to stop me and left me lose this game modified 70 - 85. My fourth opponent was another guy I knew only by name. Or better: vaguely remembered to have read somewhere on this site. The tourney not only had a spectacular attendance, but an interesting mix of new players (for at least one guy it was his first tournament ever) and old friends I hadn't seen in a while and will hopefully see again at the Weltbiermeisterschaft in Möhrfelden-Walldorf later this year ... (Hau wech die Scheiße, Daniel and Tobias!) Benjamin also played TNG-Earth (he even had the same Enterprise twice in his deck), but was all about the Battleship-crew and Rachel Garrett and her new playmates. High-cost personnel with many skills - almost the exact opposite of my deck. Benjamin played the only copy of "Timescape" in this tourney (at least that I got to see), but nevertheless I later had three mission attempts in one turn. At that time I commanded about 22 people, had my space and planet mission solved and was just waiting for my mercy kill with twice 15 points while Benjamin was still scrambling with his first mission. Since we had to cut the fourth round a bit short (we knew the game shop wanted to close at four p.m.) and I was quite well informed about the time left, I did a - to my mind - outrageous thing. I had started this game (I just realized: I started every game I won, only against Sascha I was second player) and I knew: If I would have another turn it would be a Full Win, since there's only so much you can do against that 15 bonus points. Benjamin finally had managed to solve his first mission, flew to the other one and I knew two things: a) Benjamin had no range left in his ship(s). b) The time-out would come in the next one to two minutes. And so, after Benjamin had assembled a team of seven people and attempted, I just said: Okay, solve it, no dilemmas. He solved and then surprised me with Geordi La Forge, Battleship Engineer. Damn it, you really have to know about some of these newer cards! When he was at the other planet, the time-out came, and even though he had not the ghost of a chance to solve that mission (I think I played six dilemmas, I had three copies of "Shared Problems" on the table since mission solving isn't everything in life) and I won modified 85-70, it was a sobering experience to do a really clever thing in one minute and then witness that some blind miracle worker can blow all your innovative tactics to smithereens. Closing Thoughts Well P11. And once more I managed to score every possible result except from a true tie. (There should be points for that) I had a lot of fun in this one as it's always exciting to play against opponents you are not familiar with.