Lucas Thompson (edgeofhearing) Tournament Report - 1E 2013-07-25 - 05:00 PM Tacking Into the Fail OR Failing Into the Wind Introduction Well, my only WC card was a second copy of AAH, so universal personnel were to be kings. I only got 1 Fer, 1 Fed, 2 Kli, and 3 NA non-uniques (and only 1 NA ship, the Batris), but then I noticed that I got 5 Kli ships and decided that, if I couldn't beat other players' personnel spam, I'd just have to kill the personnel that hit the table. The starters came with a paltry 3 ships, and my best bet was to hope that my opponents would pick whichever affiliation gave them the best personnel plays and skip the ships. Round 1 epinnick FL (-70)View opponent's ReportView original Report Things started going wrong when Eric seeded a d'kora. I'd kept my stupid stealable missions on the theory that I (A) wanted the spacelines to be shorter and (B) would have some theft protection in the form of a massive armada; but when that seeded d'kora was followed by a luxuriant second copy being downloaded by AAH, I knew I was in trouble. I had an edge in the arms race, but never enough to seal the deal and actually kill a sizable number of personnel. And that's about as well as I could do in the one game where my deck flowed the way I expected it to. I eventually punted on battle when I no longer had enough weapons in play to finish off the outpost, and at least got on the board before the end. I poked at missions from the start and got a quick solve while Lucas built up a fleet. Then Lucas came out swinging. The result was a pair of large discard piles and a damaged outpost (mine). Lucas wasn't running Get it Done, however, and he found himself without enough ships to finish the job. I hide out at my outpost next door to his Host Metaphasic Shields Test until I could solve it, lucked out and did despite a self-seed from him, then wandered off down the spaceline to finish the job. Lucas tried to race on points, but my head start was enough. Round 2 Steve C FL (-30) So, the problem with a Klingon armada in block sealed is you don't just need the ships, you need the universals for staffing and lots of Losta in particular as the only non-unique Kli leader. My opening hand in this game was all unique, and stayed that way for a while. Worse, Steve had pulled Evade Borg Vessel, making his outpost immune to me, but at least that gave me one small advantage: I knew where his outpost would be, and I could position mine such that I could box him in and better protect the stealable missions. If I could have positioned my OP right next to his, that might have made all the difference (striking distance would have been shorter), but I had Romulus (homeworld) and Amnesty (no aff icons, double seeded) in between. But despite piling almost all of my dilemmas on the 3 missions at his end of the spaceline, he was able to knock out two easily, and sent a suicide run in to steal Amnesty after I helpfully cleared half the dilemmas. Well, despite my deck running more poorly, I got 2 missions this time; cold war worked better for the deck than actual fighting. Round 3 April Pinnick FW (+60) From the looks of things, April's deck seemed to be in the same predicament as mine: not enough universals to get anything done. Despite 8 ships in the deck + an AAH download, I didn't see more than 2 for over half the deck but sometimes timing/luck is more important that armada size. We'd both placed our outposts at my stealable Host mission, the upshot of which was that, the first person that went out on a trip uncloaked, got asploded. April went out first, and cloaked, but got her Bortas and a good chunk of crew nuked on the return trip, which got me some breathing room for the first time all tournament. The game remained quite close though, since our personnel were singularly terrible at solving missions. Q's Animals kept bouncing from planet to planet (I think she must've pulled an extra, since I think there must've been 3 out there) - no mission went down in less than two attempts, many took many more than that. I finally pulled off my last mission after daisy chaining two treachery down to the end of the spaceline, only to almost fail the mission by putting them under my deck (fortunately, Q'elyn's Acquisition came to the rescue). Closing Thoughts Well, I'd been hoping that I'd at least pick up some achievements with my terrible deck, but it turns out that a bunch of achievements that I'd been hoping for were not available in a limited format (or in 1e at all, curse you Tacking Into the Wind!). Hopefully we'll do a complete card pool format next time so that I can get more achievements!