Nathan Miracle (GooeyChewie) |
Tournament Report - 2E |
2014-09-27 - 12:30 PM |
The Sound of Silence |
Introduction |
Team 42 made the trip down to Atlanta to play in the Balance of Terror release event! We provided five of the 11 players. I brought a Paranoia DS9-Earth deck, focusing on Intelligence and Security. |
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Round 1 | | Alex Pauley | FW (+100) |
I knew Alex was expecting Terok Nor when I saw her giant-sized deck and dilemma pile. Fortunately for me, the sheer number of cards in her deck made her draws unreliable, and she ended up being unable to complete missions. My super-thin deck, on the other hand, got everything it needed. In one mission attempt, I managed to have nobody stopped to An Issue of Trust, despite having one Honor and three Treachery personnel. Sirna Kolrami made on personnel lose skills and Oq'nab excluded two personnel from the selection. Another key moment came when I used two copies of Confessions in the Pale Moonlight to get by Flare of Rage and complete a mission with Dreamer and the Dream on it. I won 100-0 without drawing a dilemma. |
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Round 2 | | Greg Hodgin | FW (+100) |
Greg also teched out against Terok Nor with a giant-sized dilemma pile. As soon as I saw Terrasphere 8 I knew to expect Species 8472 dilemmas. Over the course of the game, Greg got three dilemmas in my core, but two of them came from Combined Attack. An early good Hard Time selection prevented Greg from completing the Terrasphere 8, and he struggled with the mission for the rest of the game. My best play came against Unusual Consideration. Agonizing Encounter had stopped all my Intelligence personnel and Lwaxana Troi, leaving only Oq'nab with Law. Since I was going to fail the mission attempt anyway, and there was another dilemma, instead of stopping Oq'nab I made him lose his skills with Sirna Kolrami and stopped everybody - leading to an overcome Species 8472 dilemma. Full win 100-0. |
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Round 3 | | Scott Baughman | FL (-65)View opponent's ReportView original Report |
Scott has decided to "go red" in several of the games we play, so he brought Klingons. Nobody had Transport Crash Survivors, but it did not matter because my dilemma pile can routinely stop attempts with fewer than five personnel without putting any under, and after Sisko got hit with Secret Identity and Garak by Frozen by Fear I needed six personnel for my attempts anyway. After failing his first mission a couple of times, Scott picked up on the fact that you could beat my dilemma pile by sheer force of numbers. He started attempting with twelve or more personnel, and my pile just could not handle such attempts. I was closing in on my second mission, but Scott got a full win, 100-35. |
Nathan and I play against each other A LOT. He encouraged me to play Klingons today (as, amazingly, I have not done so during a tournament in the CC era before this event!!) and I encouraged him to play an ES9 deck focusing on the Paranoia events. We both knew what to expect from each other's decks, but under a gentleman's agreement played as though we did not. Also key to this game was the fact that neither of us was running Transport Crash Survivors! Micro-teams away! I got five really strong Klingons into play quickly and played one of my ridiculously cheap PA Klingon ships to go attempt a mission on my turn 2! It's been many years since I was able to do that at a tournament, but Nathan was playing a dilemma pile that focused on not getting dilemmas overcome beneath a mission. Hard Time, The Weak Will Perish, Healing Hand, Polywater Intoxication, etc. etc. all came barreling at me during my many mission attempts in this game. At the end of the game I had four dilemmas in my core! We were neck and neck on attempts and speed for a while, until I was able to get a good Secret Identity pull to remove the new Benjamin Sisko from his attempt and then a lucky random selection with Flare of Rage to remove Lwaxanna Troi and Elim Garak from the game. Later, I also got extremely lucky with a random selection for Racial Tension. I had included 2 copies of this old dilemma because I was expecting several Terok Nor decks at our release event and they have quite a number of different species in their personnel pool AND ALSO because I knew my mostly persistent dilemma pile needed some cheap, dual-dilemma support. Nathan use the new Starfleet Academy Bolian Admiral to exclude himself and another non-human from his mission attempt. But Sirna Kolrami was still there amongst 5 humans and I pulled him and a human to get two people stopped. Nathan failed the mission and I solved my final one on my next turn to win. For a few moments, on my last turn, I briefly considered dropping Point-Blank Strike and sending Kruge and company over to blast and commandeer his U.S.S. Excelsior. But he already had an empty ship waiting at Earth and I expected it would be easy to staff for a rescue mission. I opted instead to send all 14 of my Klingons to attempt Brute Force for the win - and large teams actually worked better against Nathan's deck despite the lack of TCS. A real chess match of a game and I have a huge respect for the ES9 Paranoia strategy now. |
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Round 4 | | David Camp | FW (+30) |
David provided my second Klingon match-up of the day. He churned out lots and lots of personnel early, but it took him several turns to draw a ship. By the time he started attempting missions, I was working on my second mission. That head start kept me in the game, because when David started attempting I could not stop him. In two attempts he completed two mission. After the first one, I knew I had to kick it into high gear. I ended up attempting my last mission with ten personnel. While I did fall victim to Pursuit Just Behind, and one personnel did fall to The Weak Will Perish, my Intelligence personnel were able to outwit a Rogue Borg Ambush to pull off the win, 100-70. |
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Closing Thoughts |
I finished second, with my only loss coming to tournament winner Scott Baughman. I believe I would be well served by adding back-up copies of key personnel into the deck, but overall I am happy with the performance. |
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