Lucas Thompson (edgeofhearing) Tournament Report - 2E Sealed 2010-08-21 - 12:00 PM Introduction Tournament Report: Saturday, August 21, 2010, That's Entertainment in Worcester, MA. About a month and a half ago, Chris O'Connell had a dream, a dream about Star Trek cards. He hadn't played in about 4 years, since I had to stop running tournaments (and paying much attention to trek) due to school; he wanted to play again. He contacted me, and as luck would have it, I had recently rediscovered the CC and been printing out some of the cards too. It was time. Turns out there were a bunch of us itching to play again, so he started planning a tournament, back at That's Entertainment - a great store in Worcester, plenty of space to play, and lots of cool stuff to browse through when you have a bye. We cajoled friends into coming and trying out the game, found some old timers who wanted to give it a shot, and were lucky enough to have some guys from Albany make the trip all the way to Worcester. I'm really glad Chris took the initiative because we ended up with a bunch of fun people to spend 5 or so hours with playing trek, with only a couple having played a handful of games in the last 4 years. Since we were all rusty at best, with even a couple complete newbies, Chris opted for a sealed deck tournament to start us out. He picked up a combo box for premiere and CTA for the tournament on the cheap so the entry cost was low, and had an AA and some promos for prizes. Aaron brought a sealed SNW box he had laying around and graciously added that to the prize pool too. In random order, we picked out the starters we wanted. Dominion was pretty popular - Art, Aaron, and Nathan all went for them. Amanda and Chris Morse both went for Klingon, and the rest of us all had unique starters - Chris O and I picked last and cleaned up the last two unchosen affiliations, DS9 and Romulan. To try to make it more likely we'd get cards we could use from the boosters, we drafted them - but to keep things moving, and to make sure the person who opened the pack could still take the rare and the things they want for their deck, they could pick five cards before passing it on (then each person would take one until it was gone). It started a bit slowly at first, but eventually we were ready to play. I had been lucky enough to get a Berserk Changeling in my starter, and picked up a Dangerous Liaisons along the way too. To go easy on myself, I just tried to track the Exo, Sci, Security, and Treachery that those dilemmas require. Mopak x2, Scout Vessel x2, and Taris went in, along with Grathon Tolar and Nel Apgar, whose cunning helped make up for the Romulans' deficiency in that stat. Of course, Nel was most useful for his ability, since the starters include as little as 3 of some critical mission skills. I threw in a Protection of the Tal Shiar too, even though I only had 2 intelligence (the Mopaks) - I figured the attribute bonus was reason enough to use it, since people were sure to have picked up some Trabe Grenades (I never ended up getting a chance to use it though). The 2 Cry Havoc/Render Assistances went right out, along with 2 D'Deridexes to make room for the Scouts and leaving one for Cretak to download. Kerry, who had only played part of one game with Chris immediately before the tournament, opted for the bye so she could get more of a handle on how the game was played, and Aaron and I invited her to watch our game. Round 1 Aaron Northrup FW (+30) Aaron and I started out pretty slow, explaining what we were doing to Kerry, which is probably the reason why we went right up to time on this one. Well, that and our random selections always seemed to hit the right guy. It was incredibly hard for both of us to solve missions in this game. When time was called, we were both at 2 missions apiece (both at 1 planet 1 space iirc), and it was Aaron's turn, and he had gone first. He had a bunch of dilemmas under his last mission, but I'd randomly killed off his last Navigation Jem'Hadar, and he wouldn't be able to solve without flying home, which he couldn't do and still get back to the mission. I felt I really lucked out there; he had no choice but to try to solve his fourth mission in one turn. I threw everything I had at him, and managed to get the stop. On my turn, I too had a bunch of dilemmas under my last mission, but with enough people out for multiple attempts (since the starter Romulan personnel are so lousy, they're at least cheap to make up for it. But, as I was arranging my attempts, it turned out that I was in exactly the same position Aaron was - he had killed off my last Security. Thanks to Reman Mines (this was the only game it ever got into play, and even then probably because I'd had to Masaka twice trying to get some mission skill), I was able to grab some people and a ship from home to double team my last mission, very narrowly grabbing the win. Result: FW 100-70 Round 2 Steve C FW (+65) The last time I'd played trek against Steve must've been over a decade ago, back in high school (thus, it was 1e). He's pretty new to 2e but he certainly played well against me. Like the Romulans, the TNG guys are cheap so we were able to spam guys out pretty fast, but this time my personnel whose skills I actually need for missions showed up early. Fortunately, the TNG characters weren't pouring out Security, Treachery, or Exobiology fast enough, so I was able to buy a few turns on Steve's second mission with some single dilemma stops. By this time were were both double teaming missions, and I grabbed my last two pretty quickly. Result: FW 100-35 Unfortunately, Kerry had to go after round 2, but at least there were no more byes as a result. The good news is, I think she had a fun time, and will probably be back next time. We all agreed at this point that more trek was better than less trek, so we settled down for 2 more rounds. Round 3 Chris O'Connell FW (+65) Chris and I were the only undefeated players so we got ready for a tough game. The DS9 starter, perhaps to make up for its sweet 1 range HQ has pretty lousy skill redundancy for its missions, but I saw right away that Chris had managed to draft 2 missions with better skills to make up for it. I got started pretty early since the DS9 people are cheap too and I didn't want to get behind, but Chris's people were piling up at his HQ. Turns out, despite the better missions, the Chris's important skills were stubbornly stuck to the bottom of the deck. As a result, when he got moving, he had a formidable crew going. I bought myself a full turn with a Berserk Changeling (must resist the urge to put this dilemma in a real deck!) and solved Supervise Dilithium Mine, leaving the first, stopped crew behind due to the low span and moving right on to Investigate Coup. Here, Chris knew he was behind and needed to buy himself some time, and since IC has such a ridiculous attribute requirement (Str>36), hoped to stop me with one pinned down against 7 Romulans, thinking that the Romulan attributes are so lousy that there was no way I could do it with 6. A fair assumption, considering the high Str Romulans are pretty weak otherwise - and the Romulans have very few Str Space missions to chose from, so you don't see them very often in constructed play. But, in this case, I had all my 7s and 8s in one crew, and was able to pick up my second mission in one turn. At this point, thanks to the Changeling and a risky move, I was pretty far ahead, and could safely coast to the win by injudiciously throwing every dilemma I had a Chris's last attempts. Result: FW 100-35 Round 4 Arthur FW (+65) Dominion seems to be an Albany thing, since both the Albany guys, Aaron and Art, picked it. I hadn't seen either of them for a long time - the last time I'd seen them must've been 5-6 years ago when I was living out in western Mass. It was good to see them again and catch up, and sounds like they had fun too and plan to come next time. At this point, my strategy had gelled in my first three games: do my cunning space missions until my high strength guys show up, then go double team my strength planet missions. A surprise full stop with Authenticate Artifacts buried my Dangerous Liasons under Art's first mission, but it was probably just as well, his treachery personnel were out in force and would walk all over it anyways. I never got to use Berserk Changeling this game, but I had such good luck against Art's dilemmas that it didn't matter much anyways - pinned down never hit anyone important, and Onaran Threat never hit my diplomacy, medical, or security. I walked out of this game relatively unscathed, but that just means I don't really have any exciting stories to show for it. Result: FW 100-35 At the end we distributed prizes quickly since people had some long drives home - I got the Adversaries Anthology, but was only interested in the foils and gave the rest to Steve who had a lot of collection ground to cover. Everyone got at least one of the promos Chris brought and we opened the SNW/remaining CTA boosters, put the rare on top, and picked one by one. No one seemed to want Ferengi, so I got some to go with the Reyga deck that I keep planning to build. I also handed out the virtual cards I'd printed out and pasted on the million WB premiere commons that I can't bear to throw away. Things like Picard and Agonizing Encounter. I know for sure my wife and I had a great time, and can't wait for the next one, especially if we get the same, good natured bunch of people back together again.