Lucas Thompson (edgeofhearing) Tournament Report - 2E - Trek Masters 2016-02-20 - 12:00 PM A little bit faster and a little bit worse Introduction When I first saw New Life and Garvey, I knew I wanted to do make a TNG weenie speed deck using Rigel X. It's fast. You throw people at Rigel, refill your hand, play more people next turn. By then, New Life should be online, and you're golden. The reason for 6 ships in a deck that you draw through in 8 turns is that you've got to be able to move around freely to avoid Timescapes. Round 1 Will Raiman FW (+100) Will is an old World of Warcraft buddy of mine; we'd raided together for years, but I'd never met him in real life. I knew he lived in Georgia, so when I knew I was going to this Masters, I asked him if he wanted to come too. Not only was he interested, he also offered me a place to stay! It was great to meet him in person, but when we were paired in the first round, I was worried. We'd done some playtesting the night before, and once my speed advantage evaporates, he can pretty much keep me locked down indefinitely. I was really worried when he dropped Gelnon and Crom on turn 1, but I think it ended up helping me. He spent a lot of resources getting set up, and I got my usual fast start. A lucky selection of Bashir with The Weak Will Perish before Will had Set Up out meant that I was able to put him on the back foot. I had enough ships to make him choose between spending resources on Pseudopod (to get Kira back), another Bashir, or dig for a ship, and was able to press that advantage to a victory. Round 2 Nathan Miracle FW (+100)View opponent's ReportView original Report Nathan's deck is intended to be fast and play on the opponent's expectations of a Romulan crew to steal missions by not getting stopped by popular meta dilemmas like An Issue of Trust and Personal Duty. Fortunately, I was tracking his skills well enough to not throw either one when I drew them, even if that meant putting more dilemmas under a mission than I normally would. I also enjoyed a speed advantage here, putting him on the defensive (where he would not normally expect to be with a fast deck. Fortunately, though I blanked him score-wise, he had a good time and was happy to see the new TNG cards at work. A funny thing happened in this game. Nathan used Stripped Down on my first mission, and shuffled the dilemmas off to TCS, figuring I'd wouldn't go there. I'd actually solved it last game, to get away from the Tenak'Talar and the infiltrators aboard it. I then realized that I had plenty of skills in play now too, and most of my personnel I happened to have in play were the lower integrity/higher cunning ones, so I happily went to TCS instead of Alien Probe. In fact, the only time I solved IAP this tournament was in my game against MVB, when I had no concern for Insurrection. Sometimes I run dilemma piles which are great against weenies, and sometimes I run dilemma piles which falter against weenies. Today my dilemma pile let me down. Lucas ran a very fast TNG solver, attempting Rigel X multiple times for multiple card draws. My Notulans can attempt missions pretty fast, but not THAT fast. Lucas flat outran me for the full win. Round 3 Nic Brautigam FL (-30) My deck is built to not generally care if personnel are killed, but I met my match with Nic. He was running multiple copies of Unfair Terms, which, when followed up with Whisper managed to decimate my crews while only putting a few dilemmas under. I managed to overwhelm the pile enough to solve two planet missions (I wasn't worried about doing Planet and Space first against a two mission win deck), while I waited for enough Bio/Exo/Med to show up to guarantee passing Tsiolkovsky. The catch is that, by the time I started on space, he'd finally broken through his first mission, which meant I had multiple Endangereds to worry about, and I was down to the last 15 personnel in my deck. I'd lost more resources to the kills and Dreamer than I'd realized, so I was in a position where I'd need to stop him often at his planet mission too - this would be the only time all tournament where I was facing an opponent with more personnel in play. I gambled on a AIOT/Hard Time on his first attempt at Sha Ka Ree, and came up short of stopping him. I'd made it a close game, but couldn't close it out. Round 4 Michael Van Breemen FW (+30)View opponent's ReportView original Report Fortunately, MVB's kill pile did bury the missions when he killed my people, so I had an opportunity to treat my personnel as expendably as I'd intended. Unfortunately, I'd made a tactical error early on, and failed to move my staffed Excelsior home after my mission attempt, and MVB was able to capitalize on the situation by Ensnaring Beverly. I lost a whole turn or two rebuilding, but fortunately I think the speed of my deck had him rattled too. He lost significant resources to Central Commanding a wall when he couldn't solve, and it burned a second one. He had to dig hard for his third one, and the only time I was concerned about the parallel draws of New Life was when it helped him dig deeper into his deck. I'd managed to fail with two crews and a 5-dilemma third mission due to him topdecking a 1 cost dilemma and then Uninviteding the the second crew, so I had to block him for one more turn from solving his second and third missions. Mission two was buried, so that wasn't much of a problem; and for mission three I drew a timescape. The bad news is that I failed at dilemma placement, and put it after the Excalbian - the good news is that he'd forgotten about TCS and was left with 5 people for team two. He tried anyways because I had a guaranteed solve on my turn, but couldn't pull it off. Really close game. This was a nailbiter and it came down to me screwing up my final two turns - the previous turn using Central Command to get through the final dilemma only to realize that I miscounted my Cunning and couldn't solve. That was my first Central Command which burned a second one, one that I didn't need to burn at all. Final attempt, I forget about Transport Crash Survivors and attempt with five - getting three dilemmas. I used Telle to get around the first dilemma, used the final Central Command to get around another but couldn't prevent the final one from hitting, stopping one person, giving Lucas the solve on the next turn. Round 5 Kevin Reitzel FW (+65) I got one of those opening hands that put out a whole attempting crew, with an Excelsior for the next turn, but Kevin responded by dropping a full five personnel of his own. I was worried, but then New Life/Rigel did their jobs and helped me continue to accelerate. I almost blew it though; when Kevin attempted his first space mission with 7, I gave him just Shocking Betrayal - when I realized that the Federation card in my hand was a ship. Fortunately, Kevin had stopped someone essential to protect them from the kill, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Kevin was very concerned about New Life, and ended up blowing it up twice with Tacking Into the Wind. However, by the time he could afford to do so, the damage was done - I had multiple teams out, and Kevin's attrition pile was putting too many dilemmas under to hold me off for long. Closing Thoughts I'm prepared to call Atlanta Masters an absolute success. Win or lose, my opponents were fun and gracious, and M. Shea kept everything running smoothly. I had a great time - next time there's a major event down here, I'll be checking my calendar.