Tournaments | trekcc

James Heaney (BCSWowbagger)
Tournament Report - 1E
2014-02-22 - 12:00 PM
Echoes From The Past (or: Day of the Draw Engine)
Introduction
The most exciting part of this tournament was, in some ways, the planning. EE + TOS Kli + TMP Kli + Phoenix means relying on four different reporting locations. The logistics of reporting to and then actually accessing all four locations are complex, and demand lots and lots of draws. Actually GETTING those draws requires lots of draw engine cards... which have to be delicately balanced against the personnel in the deck, or you'll end up with a ton of draws but no personnel to play. I ended up creating one of the more bizarre spreadsheets of my life (see here for a sample: http://imgur.com/ovAAJ2q) to find the ideal balance. Personnel had to be balanced, too: the play engines would break down if I relied too heavily on any one of them. But once I figured out how to get them rolling, I had extremely fast card plays, extremely strong personnel, a couple of cloaking devices, temporal fortifications, a means for traveling around the spaceline indirectly, and, if it came to it, a good amount of firepower. That was key, because it took a LOT of seeds to make it go, and I was forced to go into battle with just 14 dilemmas -- fewer than I'd ever played before.

Round 1	Jeremy Benedict	FW (+65)
Ever since we bumped into each other at his arcade, Fallout Shelter (you should all go there), I've been hoping for the chance to play Jeremy. And here it was, and in 1E at that! Jeremy was playing some solid Feds, which would go on to win a couple of games that day, but was unable to keep up. Hit by Linguistic Legerdemain at his outpost mission, Host Metaphasic Shield Test, he realized that he was one turn from losing the game, but Linguistic was not going to count out until the next turn. He needed to score 100 points in one turn and hope I didn't have In The Zone in the deck (I didn't). So he gathered his forces and raced over to the neighboring mission. He faced Access Denied / Ferengi Ingenuity / Dejaren, I believe, but was able to clear it with about a million Comp Skill in his megateam and got on the board, but was then stopped by Personal Duty / Friendly Fire at a nearby space mission. And that was that! Geordi's Ocular Implants help us to nope away from a Ferengi Bug that could have cost us a turn (and the game?), and we busted through Historical Research for the win. An early draw into Lily Sloane and Zefram Cochrane was key to this win.


Round 2	Ben Johnson	FW (+50)
Always a pleasure to see Ben, who really seems to be enjoying Romulans these days. I mis-seeded my Personal Duty / Friendly Fire combo at his outpost mission -- a planet! -- by mistake, and this gave Ben an early 50 points. Several of my other combos were, I knew, weak to Romulan dissidents (e.g. I Hate You), so I just had to race. And race I did! Ben wasn't able to pass Access Denied / Ferengi Ingenuity at Pegasus Search (huge sigh of relief! No Comp Skill! What were the odds?), fell to Friendly Fire at another mission, and was poised to attempt a fourth as I won the game -- just in time, since it turned out Ben could have passed Linguistic and had a bodyguard to sacrifice to beat the filter, A Fast Ship Would Be Nice! Our closest game yet.


Round 3	Matthew Hayes	FW (+10)
We were both playing Feds, and our spacelines were isolated, so this turned into something of a dilemma duel. (Which is funny, since we both worked together on dilemmas all week for Make it So.) I did a ton of redshirting in this game, but not when it counted: I redshirted into Lack of Preparation, then later overcame a Hanonian Land Eel with 16 personnel... only to hit The Higher... The Fewer. A 26 point hole wiped out all my gains from the Phoenix and the Whales, and I had to go for a three-mission win (fun fact: this is designed as a two-mission win deck, but every single game took me to three). Meanwhile, I found Frame of Mind / I Hate You... and it turned out I didn't have any Youth in the deck, except for Vina, who had to be drawn out. I had to grind like crazy to get what I needed to get the points to win. Matt was faring little better on his side of the spaceline. Linguistic Legerdemain locked him out for four turns (and A Fast Ship killed Guinan), while the auto-hit Personal Duty / Friendly Fire hit him at another mission. Able to overcome them while I dithered, it still cost him a lot of turns. At Install Emotion Chip, he tried two-teaming, but I had cannily placed Lack of Prep at that nigh-unsolvable mission, which stopped him short. Crisis on my end of the spaceline as I lunged to complete Test Mission II for a space mission and the win (I was already at 119 points because I'd cleared out more planets than I'd actually needed). My Ent-E with practically everyone aboard hit Cytherians! It seemed clear I wouldn't be able to get back in time to win. Fortunately, there were no dilemmas left there, but suddenly I had a huge, huge problem. Matt reattempted Chip with a more equipped team, beat Lack of Prep, then fell to Denevan Neural Parasites, which killed all his Cybernetics and his Anthropology, which he needed to pass I Hate You. He still had a zillion people out, but we were about to hit time, so it was starting to look like a Mod Win for me, 119 to 90. A Horta at Historical Research had made it difficult for Dr. Royce to continue generating Guardian of Forever draws for me, but now it proved clutch. Royse time-travelled to 2063 Earth, halfway down the spaceline. Zefram and Lily Sloan landed the Phoenix (-10 points for me), then we boarded a Vulcan Lander with T'Shonra staffing. We lifted off, Q the Ref'd to get a Temporal Vortex out, time-traveled to modern Earth, and had JUST enough range to get to Test Mission II. Lily had the Physics, and we had 32 Integrity in the entire group -- just just barely enough to secure the FW.


Round 4	Justin Kaufman	FW (+55)
This was the only game where my engine broke down: no draw engine cards at all in my opening hand (two Ref cards, though), and no Guardians drawn until about Card 18. This was almost certainly because I didn't shuffle well enough (doh!), so clumped stuff from Round 3 stayed clumped. (I was in a rush to get home and would have to forfeit if we ran close to time.) My loss. But my dilemmas did an okay job holding Justin off while I recovered: Linguistic hit for the third time that day, as did Personal Duty / Friendly Fire, and Justin was the first player all day to find my favorite combo: Males Love Interest / Plague Ship / The Vengeance Factor / Microvirus / The Gatherers / Executive Authorization. Of course, being a dope, I seeded The Gatherers first by mistake, but it still got the stop, and it turned out he didn't have anything to pass Exec Authorization anyway -- his Romulan leaders were all down the spaceline at Romulus. Meanwhile, I was solving missions and repeatedly failing to coordinate my draw and point engines correctly -- I had everything I needed to launch the Phoenix for about three turns, but never got it off the ground. Highlight of the game -- and probably the day -- and possibly my life: near the end, realizing that I'm about to reach 100 points (again, with Test Mission II), Justin hops from Romulus to Earth (they were right next to each other), opens a Temporal Vortex, sends a warbird through, beams down, and, in an attempt to rob me of 15 points, he attacks Sevek, Zefram Cochrane, and George & Gracie! WHALE PUNCHING ENSUED! He won the battle, but selected Cochrane as a casualty instead of George & Gracie. We then hid the survivors in the Vulcan Lander, which was still landed. By some miracle, I actually passed More Of Your Kind at Test Mission II -- thanks Bareil! -- but still died of V'Ger, who blew up everything. Once again (after offloading the whales to the planet), it fell to Lily, a handful of Klingons, one Feddy personnel (Data?), and the Vulcan Lander to do the temporal tango and cheat over to Test Mission II, where we solved for the win.


Closing Thoughts
A very fine day with some very fine gentlemen. My only regret is that I didn't have the opportunity to play in the other events this weekend, or against all the players who came out for a big weekend of 1E. Also, DVK still owes me a game. :)