Scott Baughman (Neelix) Tournament Report - 2E 2015-09-26 - 11:00 AM Mudd's women Introduction It's a warm up for our league getting ready to start in the 2015-2016 season. I wasn't expecting many folks to show up but I was able to bring both of my sons. To my great delight, Nathan was able to grab two more new players in Grace and Zach and then Dave showed up to give us an unprecedented 11 players! Round 1 Matthew Baughman FW (+35) Matthew's deck was focusing on his favorite TOS character, Mr. Spock and a lot of TOS science. I was able to adapt my dilemma play to his deck fairly quickly after taking out Ronald Tracey - the surprising source of TOS Acquisition that would make many of my dilemmas do nothing against Matthew. After Tracey was dealt with, I was able to stop him almost at will. And I got lucky and hit on Dabo a few times after explaining to my oldest son here how Dabo actually worked. Trading the Felicium over with the Rule of Acquisition was the move that sealed the deal as my folks then had plenty of strength for my strength-based missions. Round 2 Richard Crandall FL (-70) During this round Richard surprised me with a deck I think he downloaded from the CC site. He's more of a 1E player but has been gaining lots of ground in 2E recently and in this game he really showed that experience being put to good use. I had a decent chance of stopping his TNG crew with my Acquisition-based dilemma pile, but frequently none of those dilemmas showed up in my dilemma draws! Richard ALMOST locked himself out of the game, though, by playing an At What Cost? to lose 5 points and gain 7 counters while not being able to find his bonus point gaining Enterprise-D of choice. It turns out he inadvertently printed the wrong version of the ole "D" and had to wait until he could find Tallera to score his necessary game-winning points. This was a great game and I look forward to facing Richard in 2E again soon! Round 3 Will Hawkins FW (+35) Hawk brought some Borg creation as is his usual desire - but this time it was MEGA TEAM BORG! I was sweating it for a bit until I realized that I could easily stop him with my Acquisition-based dilemmas. That is, until Two of Two showed up on his side of the table! Yikes! He consistently named Unwanted Guests with that accursed drone after the first time I stopped him. I thought I had come up with a clever way to get out of it by comboing Secret Identity with Unwanted Guests and choosing for him to replace Two of Two with someone else, but I forgot about his Borg Queen, Guardian of the Hive and he simply swapped Two of Two in whilst facing Unwanted Guests and overcame it automatically! D'OH! Thankfully, an earlier random stop had robbed him of a critical mission skill and it was still a fail. Later, after I had hit Dabo a few times and was able to have traded some Felicium with the Collective (don't ask me how that worked - Harry Mudd was involved so that helped, I'm sure, LOL!) I used some canny discarding from my own hand due to overdrawing on my turn to make a Pawn Against Pawn require Acquisition. Will got close, but after one more Dabo hit I was able to cruise to victory at my final mission. Whew! Thanks for a great game, Hawk. Round 4 Nathan Miracle FW (+65)View opponent's ReportView original Report The battle of the commodities!! It's a Trade War! As I sat down I told Nathan, "You're going to steamroll me. My dilemmas are all based on the idea that you won't have Acquisition and you've got it in spades." He sighed heavily and said, "Yeah, about that dilemma plan..." Turns out, he was doing the exact same dilemma strategy! It was merely a race to see who could get dilemmas overcome and missions solved the fastest. But thankfully for me, I had Dabo and my Rule of Acquisition Number 194 to grease the skids for the Ferengi crew! Not only did Dabo help me get quite a few dilemmas overcome without facing them (once I figured out the good numbers to name against Nathan's dilemma deck) but Rule 194 meant I could easily hand back commodities to him (or give him my own) whenever I needed to on my turn. I played a second copy of Rule 194 just to start getting things back over to his core faster, especially after he started to cramp my style via his Fleece. Harry Mudd and my Dabo girls were the real stars here as Mudd helped send a Felicium over at just the right moment to allow for a mission solve due to boosted strength and the Dabo girls did their thing with Dabo. But the real "play of the game" was my using 2 Ferengi Computers to weasel out of a Chula: The Chandra with no stops and solve a mission. That gave me more points than Nathan on a crucial turn which allowed Taar to have an insanely high strength of 11 after a Felicium boost and his own boost thanks to higher score and more cards in hand than Nathan. Did I mention Taar was one of the folks who got past the Chandra with a Ferengi Computer? It's fitting that the Ferengi were better traders than the Dominion - and in keeping with our sci-fi theme they were able to out deal them thanks to better trading technology - in this case, a Ferengi Computer! Scott often runs cards like Pawn Against Pawn in his Commodity decks to stop players without Acquisition. At the outset of the game he said he'd probably lose for that reason. I motioned to my dilemma pile and said, "Well, you know...", hoping to bluff him into thinking I had the same strategy. Reading his tournament report, it looked like the bluff worked... and was about the only thing which worked for me this game. Ferengi are superior at giving away Commodities, so I ended up commanding his Felicium and my Tulaberry Wines. Karemman Fleece helped somewhat, but overall you just can't out-Ferengi the Ferengi. I failed Resolve Trade Dispute on Cunning, which rarely happens since usually my opponent can't give back Tulaberry Win. Meanwhile, several of Scott's personnel had low enough Integrity to get by Adopted Authority and not quite enough other attributes for Artificial Ability. Closing Thoughts Four rounds later and David Abelson wins his first tournament! Thanks to all who came and I hope this is the first of many tournament wins for Dave!