Matthew Ting (Wedge772) Tournament Report - 1E - Online Event 2013-12-16 - 12:00 AM Block NA Battle with Borg Introduction In my continuing mission to get all the affiliation played achievements, this time it's Non-Aligned! Strategy: blow stuff up, get around to missions over victory cocktails. Round 1 Johannes Klarhauser FW (+60)View opponent's ReportView original Report Mirror match! The Kaiser is also running Ferengi and Non-Aligned, and with more play engines than my deck. His Ferengi make it a bit harder for me to blow stuff up, but his deck is tuned more for solving than battle. I quickly take the lead with guns, and first blood is a D'kora Transport which wanted to Let's See What's Out There at Foster New Collective. Drop Assimilator, move over another ship, and it blows up. Kaiser puts together his mission crew, and runs right through a planet mission on the first attempt. He then attempts a space mission and gets stopped, meaning another ship and crew bites the dust. He starts building up another crew at the Ferengi Trading Post, and I follow to kill some more people in personnel battle. At this point I need to start doing missions and manage to solve Foster New Collective (putting us even on points), but with time running out a Business Gambit puts him in the lead. I hit a Subspace Shockwave with my main solving crew, and Kaiser has 1 last turn to blow up my crew, but he couldn't get a NA leader to do it. We hit time, and on my last turn I manage to complete 2 more missions for a full win. A close game, where in the end every small decision made a huge impact. Matt had the same idea, though his setup was a lot better than mine, with more ways to get ships in early. He happened to have an Assimilator in hand on his second turn, as was able to blow up one my ships right away. From then on, I was just trying to stay away from him as much as possible, and even completed a mission, but he then attacked my outpost and left my guys either stranded. I had a 40-35 lead going into his last turn, but he managed to redship his own dilemma under Host Metaphasic, and then had all the pieces in play to bust through my selfseeds, too. Round 2 Justin Ford FL (-25) Bajorans make tasty targets! Problem is the spaceline setup is pretty harsh for me, and my card draws are absolutely abysmal. No free play personnel in opening hand, ouch! You know a battle deck isn't going well when your opponent asks several rounds in whether your deck is a battle deck :) This gives Justin time to build up his team, and start walking through my dilemmas. Chula: The Dice stalls him for a while as he looks for HQ: War Room to make the strength requirement, but after that he's able to easily solve 2 missions. I stall him at a 3rd mission for a while, and start battling people on a planet, but at this point I need to start actually solving. Justin needs to do 4 missions, and he hits Friendly Fire on his last mission giving me some time to try to solve. Unfortunately I get stopped by Founder Secret on my last mission, letting Justin fly in for the win. Amazed I managed to make the game that close with the draws I had! In hindsight: Justin forgot to download Bajoran Wormhole in doorway phase, which affected how the mission seeding went (with Bajor region in middle). Something to be mindful of, it resulted in my deck having a harder time getting to firing position than it should. Round 3 Ben Hosp FW (+100) I get another crack at facing DS9, and this time my deck seems to be trying to make up for the last game. Turn 2 I go to commandeer DS9, since I realise I have 4 Computer Skill out (assuming a Sisko 197, which was there). TNG decks downloading TNG Quark to the Bar is nasty. Ben fortunately manages to play the Defiant, so he isn't denied of free plays, but I do manage to damage it before he sends it to the Gamma Quadrant. I split up my fleet, destroying his Outpost and sending some ships to the Gamma Quadrant to chase the Defiant, but he manages to evade by repairing with Call For Reinforcements, cloaking, and moving through the Wormhole at the right time. Ben ends up Digging for his Outpost and playing it again to the far side of the AQ. He's having trouble with attempting missions with his relatively few personnel, and he's losing more to dilemmas. Bareil is killed by Letheans, which I think was giving him trouble to replace some mission skills. At this point I decide it's not worth hunting him down, and that I should instead start going for missions. My super crew steamrolls dilemmas for the win. Round 4 Stuart Marsh FW (+65)View opponent's ReportView original Report Dominion! This gives me some interesting choices to make, since I can't blow up his Harvester planet free play engine, and the Great Link is a bit of a walk. Another terrible opening hand (no universal personnel again...), but I still get out a few ships to start harassing. Once again the Wormhole requires me to split up my ships to harass, and I manage to kill some people and blow up some ships. Nothing devastating though. This means I had to accelerate my mission attempting, and at my first mission I lose a big crew to Devastating Communique (stopping Ferengi Picard) + Spaceborne Entity + Subspace Shockwave. Woops. Stu is also stalled for a while by Chula: The Dice and his own mission requirements, and 2 turns later I go back to solve the mission and start attempting Raid Ancient Burial Site (which gets solved the next turn). I then manage to run through 5 dilemmas at my next mission over 2 attempts, and solve for the win. This game is a classic example of how a TNG deck can just keep throwing out personnel to recover from losses. Another very disappointing game due to the imbalance between DS9 and TNG. Matt got out 4 ships by turn 2 (2 seeded, Attention All Hands and Call for Reinforcements) and kept my forces on the defensive. Luckily I was playing with the T’Lani homeworld so no facility needed and The Great Link, which is very tough. I didn’t draw well on ships so I had to Call for Reinforcements to get a T’Lani Cruiser. Then started a game of cat and mouse around the wormhole. Matt moved two ships into the Gamma Quadrant, and although I lost a couple of ships I managed to keep my crew safe beamed onto planets. Although I lost a few people here and there (e.g. Data and Lore beamed into the Great link to kill Odo). In the mean time Matt attempted his Attend Mysterious Rendezvous his ship and crew were killed by my super combo of Chula: The Lights > Devastating Communiqué > Spaceborne entity > Subspace Shockwave which destroyed his ship. I managed to keep out of the way enough attempted Host Tournament, clearing all the dilemmas except Chula the Dice (no INTEGRITY>6) but I had Tosk in my hand. Matt moved his other ships and crew back from the Gamma quadrant and continued through missions. He cleared all the dilemmas from Raid Burial Site but hit his own “God”. Curses I didn’t have the Archeology in my crew otherwise I could have managed to get to this and steal it! I cleared all by New Essentialists from the Founder homeword, but had to wait to use my Diplomatic Contact to get back Leadership x 2 to be able to solve. After a couple of attempts Matt scored his last mission. Overall a disappointing game and again completely outmatched in terms of card plays. Final Result 100-35 http://flic.kr/p/jijyUj Round 5 Michael Van Breemen FW (+65)View opponent's ReportView original Report Evil Klingons! Michael is running 24 dilemmas and a very thin deck, which screams speed solver. The spaceline was a bit interesting with 2 duplicated missions. I took an early chance to move my Mercenary Ship to a planet (beaming down crew) to Let's See What's Out There, sure enough the Bortas shows up to blow that ship up. We each start building up personnel, until I gather 4 ships with enough weapons to shoot the docked Bortas. His outpost was safe with Strategic Base, so my only option was to shoot every ship that shows up. 2 turns takes out the Bortas, 2 more takes out his Mercenary Ship. During this time Michael solves his outpost planet, and I start redshirting some planets too, clearing a fair few dilemmas. At this point all of Michael's personnel are hiding on a cloaked K'vort, and he decks himself and plays all his evil Klingons there. There's a Dead End on the next planet over, and his third planet mission is the duplicated Raid Ancient Burial Site with 7 dilemmas (including his own Dead End). This means he has to go to space, and there's only 1 space mission within range of an outpost to let him return to safety if he clears it. Unfortunately, that mission has Spaceborne Entity + Virus which destroys the ship. With no Regenerate / Isomag in his deck, I manage to solve my missions at leisure. I got my ships blown up since apparently Outpost shields don't get the increase to protect docked ships with Strategic Base (which is really counter-intuitive in my opinion.) I still almost had the win if I had just had Tallera from my outpost on my ship (for the last Computer Skill to get around Virus.) Closing Thoughts Non-aligned battle is still TEH NUTS. Call For Reinforcements + Attention All Hands to download 2 ships is crazy good. Probably need to refrain from battle decks for a little while, lest I develop a reputation.