Thomas V (Exon) Tournament Report - 1E - Risa Regional 2014-06-07 - 03:00 PM OTF TNG Illegitimate Klingons Introduction I had wanted to try a new deck for this tournament, and I had never played Illegitimate Klingons before. I'd had good results with my last 1E deck which was built around high-span missions, so I kept that theme but switched out the selection to go with the new affiliation. I liked the ability of the faction to dial a Duras card (the extra ship downloads really came in handy), and I added K'ChiQs and Holograms and some skill-gaining interrupts for even more flexibility. Round 1 Rogue Shindler MW (+19) Right out of the gate, in this game I made perhaps my dumbest move of the tournament. I had decided to use the mission Investigate Legend as one of my planets - it has high points and span, was unlikely to be stolen, and I had ended up with multiple Youth in the deck due to stocking multiple Divoks to deal with the inevitable Medical Crises. Of course this mission has a peculiar trait: it "cloaks or decloaks when any player scores points." Rogue was playing a DS9 deck, and if there's one thing I know about Rogue it's that he loves his Dabo. But I figured it was no problem - I could report someone to the Klingon Restaurant and play Dabo myself to decloak the planet if he cloaked it. So I blithely beamed down a large away team to Aldea, got stopped, and then sure enough watched Rogue on his turn download Dabo, and score 2 points to cloak the planet, trapping the away team. Only then did I realize that my timing was off - Dabo probes at end of turn, so even if I played to decloak the planet, I wouldn't have a chance to beam up before he spun again and recloaked it on his turn. D'oh! Of course he couldn't score himself if he wanted to keep me trapped. For a while it looked like the game might end at 2-0. Rogue eventually went and attempted a mission in the Gamma Quadrant, but lost most of his people. Meanwhile I got together a few Klingons to fly over and attack the Defiant which was stuck at the Wormhole. He counterattacked and drove off my ships, but I had managed to get a couple of Klingons aboard to the Dabo wheel. From that point it was nothing but bar fights and spins of the Dabo wheel. At one point he had no one left to play Dabo and my trapped away team escaped, but by then it was too late to accomplish much. 5 points from a dilemma and a couple extra Dabo wagers eked out the timed win. Round 2 Charlie Plaine MW (+45) I was able to set up the spaceline for maximum inconvenience in this game. Charlie's Sherman's Peak and Earth were stuck at one end of a long spaceline with my Klingons between him and his space missions. He surprised me by placing an outpost on the opposite side where I had gone light on dilemmas, but then wavered and ended up not really using it. He told me afterwards that he was thinking of just stealing one of my >40 planet missions along with doing the rest of his planets rather than face the prospect of a long Cytherians trip at a space mission. He managed to solve Agricultural Assessment, but between a Volcanic Eruption, Remat Detonator and the Klingons coming to fight he lost the skills he needed for the mission steal along the way. Meanwhile I worked on solving Hunt for DNA and a space mission. When time was called, I had solved a mission for 45 points, bring me to 95 points - I knew I could steal Charlie's Signal for Rescue that, but unfortunately due to the weirdness of In The Zone it wouldn't help me. I knew I had a point loss dilemma at that mission, and hitting it would count in the negative against my 50 points, while any excess I scored from mission points would be ignored. Oh, well. Round 3 Johnny Holeva FW (+32) This was set to be a tough game from the moment the spacelines hit the table. Johnny was playing all-DQ, which meant that my long spaceline was only a problem for me, and I also couldn't battle him. Plus, I had no You Are A Monument, so he only needed 100 points, which he could easily get from two high-point DQ missions. I decided to self-seed one of my Cytherians rather than hand him easy points (he still got easy points from the other one when he used Kes and The Gift to jump from one side of his spaceline to the other). I started attempting early, going back and forth between Hunt for DNA and Survey Mission. Somewhat fortunately for me as it turned out, my main crew got stopped by Johnny's last dilemma, The Cloud, at Survey Mission, allowing me to trip the self-seed Cytherians with a sacrificial crew, which I hoped would get me round the corner points. Meanwhile Johnny got unlucky in his first couple mission attempts, first failing a Lack of Prep and then hitting a big Higher the Fewer and Dead End. But he made a comeback, easily overcoming most of my dilemmas at his planet mission. I got another lucky break when Seven's Music stopped him from passing I Hate You, then a random end of turn Horta selection got his only Youth. He started digging for Youth though, and found it pretty quickly, solving his planet and then going to space. Meanwhile I had managed to solve Survey Mission, and then used all the tricks I had (K'ChiQ and Kamala) to push through a Medical Crisis and solve Hunt for DNA Program. Unfortunately, Johnny had used multiples of his signature Loss of Orbital Stability to hold up my Cytherianed ship at a planet for so long that my round-the-corner points had failed to materialize. My 60 points from Hunt for DNA were cut to 50 by Johnny's In The Zone, leaving me at 90. The card proved to be a double-edged sword, however - on his next turn Johnny blew through his space mission and headed for the Dead Ended mission, which was cleared of dilemmas. It would have easily given him enough for the win - but his In The Zone was still out, and having burned his Q the Ref to grab it on my turn, he no longer had a way to cycle it away. So he had to wait a turn to solve. On my turn I was able to use Nu'Daq to Dig an Arbiter of Succession from my discard pile for the last 10 points I needed. Round 4 Dan Hamman FW (+71) The spaceline looked more favorable to me in this game, with Dan's Romulan Outpost II separated from his other missions by some of mine. I also quickly drew into some of my "pollution" cards that I hadn't seen much of this tournament, such as Gaps in Normal Space, which made his side of the spaceline even longer. But, I was also a bit concerned as he dropped tons of TNG Romulan scrubs with multiples of the odd skills (Arch, Geo, Youth) he would need to walk right through many of my dilemmas. I was able to solve Hunt for DNA pretty quickly (amusingly, I actually got to use Ja'Rod + Toral's 1 combined Leadership to help pass Dignitaries and Witnesses there). Meanwhile he was working on Romulus - he didn't have much trouble mustering the skills to get through my dilemmas. But, he was delayed by two ridiculously lucky (1 in 13 odds both times) random Horta kills, both times killing Alidar Jarok, his only Navigation for the mission. Meanwhile I was about to solve one of my Study Badlands, but I had only brought enough mission specialists to get me to 95 points. I debated whether to wait to draw another misson specialist or solve and press on to a third mission. I decided I had enough of a lead to chance it, so I solved and went to the next mission, which went rather more poorly - sending my main crew on the Fek'lhr on a long Cytherians trip and leaving my second ship crippled by The Cloud. In the most hilarious play of the day, Dan then flew his D'Deridex over and dropped a totally unexpected Romulan Ambush to destroy the damaged Vor'Cha. Didn't even have to "stop" for a battle. Awesome. I had almost managed to scrape together a third ship and crew to evade the Romulans and finish the cleared Study Badlands when I drew into my Arbiter of Succession to score the winning points. Closing Thoughts I had a lot of fun at this tournament and really enjoyed the versatility of the Illegitimate deck. Thanks to everyone for the great games!