J (The Mad Vulcan) Tournament Report - 2E Virtual 2011-02-19 - 04:00 PM At Any Cost Introduction This tournament immediately followed our Standard tournament. As was my goal in that tournament to accomplish the European Style achievement, here I was trying for 'The Bare Minimum' achievement. I chose to play Equinox because I had never played a Voyager faction deck before and because they are good cheaters (much like my favorite 2E group; the Bajorans). To make up for the thin deck, I ran 2 copies of Rebuilding the Fleet to ensure that I would not ever be completely out of a deck. One of the major flaws of this deck was the dilemma pile. I built this deck wholly theoretically while sitting at my desk at work (no real cards). I had intended to then steal the dilemma pile from my TOS deck, however I had neglected to remember that much of that pile is non-virtual. Instead, I threw together a quick pile the night before and playtested this deck against my Bajoran one. The fact that it held up against a non-Virtual deck to me meant that it was solid. However, the dilemma pile had the flaw of not being able to use any dilemmas already in the other pile (I have 3X copies of all virtual serts printed and glued). I had then intended to steal some of the cards from the Bajoran deck for the Equinox one between the two tournaments, but I did not actually find the time for that. Round 1 Seraph117 FW (+50) Francis and I played a relatively fast final round for the previous tournament, after which the other players were still not very far into their game. So I suggested to Francis that we simply shift to the next tournament and play our Virtual decks. This was a mirror match-up, as we were both playing Equinox. I had just spanked his Voyager deck with my Bajorans, but this game was much closer. Francis stayed ahead of me for most the game. However, I had an advantage. Francis built his deck as a 4 mission win (with or without Caretaker's Array) but my deck utilized a three mission strategy. It could either go 20 + 40 + 40 or 20 + 50 + 30. Given that I had three 40 + point missions, I was running the high cost dilemmas and Unfair Comparison. On my last turn it was rather obvious that Francis could win the following turn (though I was holding 2X Conflict), so I decided to pull pout all of the stops and attempt to cheat every dilemma that he tossed me. As such, i completed my final mission on the first try. Round 2 Deathbymonkeys FL (-40)View opponent's ReportView original Report My game against Andrew went quite differently. He was running a 2 HQ deck with the TOS Earth and Ferenginar. This sounds more interesting than it was as he never played any TOS cards in the whole tournament (he had a Kirk in the deck for some unknown reason). Andrew was running Legacy and that dilemma kicked my ass. My pile was not built to withstand it at all, at a complete fault of mine. I had 7/25 skill dilemmas! Not once did Legacy fall in my favour. Still, the game was quite close with Andrew only winning by drawing deep into his deck for his copy of Ferengi Tradition, while I was on my final mission (I could have likely cheated through on the subsequent turn so he made a solid play in ending the game). What is interesting is how well I did do against Legacy even without any sort of tech at all. I continued to throw attempt after attempt (sometimes 2-3 in a turn) each to hit a Legacy. Andrew played few other dilemmas, so odds were on him not drawing a Legacy once in a while. In those cases, I walked through the mission as the dilemmas in his pile which were not Legacy were quite weak and easy to cheat. Another distinction between my game against Andrew and that against Francis was when I played Inequitable Exchange. In both cases, I took Lore. However, I did it to Francis on his first or second mission attempt. I didn't get Andrew's Lore until he was on his 3rd mission. By that time, Lore had helped him through many missions. This was a tense game but Legacy shut J down long enough for the Ferengi away team to get it done and set off the ferengi traditions for the win. Round 3 Bye BY (0) For this round I had the bye. Since we only had 3 players in this tournament, it was not sanctioned unfortunately. But we still scored some sweet foils. Francis was able to beat Andrew's Legacy even with a fairly minimal skill dilemma percentage. The game was close with 2/3 of Andrew's Legacys working against Francis. But it was those times that it failed which cost him the game. Ultimately, this tournament could be considered a rock/ paper/ scissors type as my deck ignored Legacy and Andrew's used it. But it doesn't fit that mold well as Francis' deck was hardly Legacy tech and no decks really schooled the others. In the end, we had all won and lost 1 game. So it came down to differential. I had the best differential as I had only lost to Andrew by 45. The other two guys had a differential of 50 and 55. So the tournament was really a 3 way tie and we sort of mutually agreed on who could get which foils rather than having a pick order.