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J (The Mad Vulcan)
Tournament Report - 1E Modern - Online Event
2012-02-19 - 12:00 AM
FederationThings Can Be Deceiving I
Introduction
This was one of those tournaments where you build a decent deck which has some flaws and you just have to stick out the tournament with those (for a month). I drafted Modern Feds which was an issue actually. I ended up going with EE Feds even though they are very lacking without a bit of help. But built a speed deck which dropped two Assign Mission Specialists after drawing up the whole deck such that a 2 mission win was possible. The inherent flaw is that the play Engine is discarded by bringing in the non-EE federation help. So all the opponent has to do is wipe everyone out once and I have no good way to rebuild. I did have an Isomagnetic Disintegrators to get the cards back, but it would take a long time to put those into play. What I should have done was use 62nd rule for the bonus points rather than the specialists and build a pure EE deck. I also could have killed for an STP and maybe Dr. Suna.
Round 1RomulanMarkFW (-44)View opponent's Report
I can’t say that I really understand this game or its outcome. It’s a pretty straight forward case, really. I was playing a tight little solver and Mark had a capture heavy interaction deck. As such, my deck was very fast and to the point and Mark’s was slow. I would have to win the game rather quickly or be completely locked out. So the game was really decided during the seed phase. The first mission that I pulled out on the table was Reported Activity, which is the planet that I want to solve. So I really wanted to get a space mission relatively close to that. Then I pulled the other two planets and stacked them to the left of RA in order to put a space mission as close to the other side as possible. Mark put two missions to the right of Reported Activity before I got a space mission (Repair Mission) so that put 10 range between my key missions. However, one of those was a 2E Romulus Region and when Mark pulled his Romulus out (last) it slid right into this region kicking the span up to 12! A perfect spaceline for Mark; he is doing interaction and has all the missions that he needs right between mine making me have to cross right over his Outpost and Facility. All of my space missions are on one side of his territory and all of my planets are to the left. The first part of the game went as expected. Mark’s deck drew and played well and he tossed out a lot of free Romulans to pilot his ships. Card draws and ships were the only card plays. Meanwhile, I quickly built up a solving force, cleared Repair Mission (without enough Engineer). Then on my following turn, I played an Assign Mission Specialists and a Holodeck Door to get three specialists and solve the mission for 50. All I have to do now is traverse the gap (at least two turns of range) and solve Reported Activity. I had seeded a Barclay’s there and with those 10 points, I would only need to get 5 Mission Specialist bonus points off the mission to win. One of those specialists was in play (Leah Brahms) and I would need to get the other into play with an AMS the next turn. What I should have done is to send Leah with the attempting away team and then restocked with the second specialist (Gibson) if she happened to die, but I was concerned with losing bonus points and being forced into a three mission win. As such, my plan was to send the A-team to clear the dilemmas and score 10 points off the Barclay’s then have my two ships meet in the middle of the spaceline to trade over the Mission Specialists for a solve. The first half of this plan worked okay, Mark didn’t attack my Enterprise-E which was loaded with EE personnel and had a decent Shields. Then my personnel cleared all dilemmas except the Barlcay’s (being stopped by Mark’s last dilemma.) But Mark finally mad e amove and he Outgunned my Enterprise thereby taking Geordi, Riker, and the hologram Leah as Captives and commandeering my ship (excellent play, I am always happy to see a pulled off outgunned.) Since I had never intended to solve RA without the mission specialists, I had left my navigation personnel on the ship. I could persona swap my Picard to get Navigation and solve the mission for 35 points, but that would only put me at 95 and leave no way to get the final 5. I doubted that my B team could solve another space mission and didn’t like the idea of risking everything on Mark using a 5 point bestowing dilemma. However, I had a lot of time to work with as Mark had not so much as scored a point or bust a single dilemma. After all, his deck is teched for one purpose only. So I drew into my deck to get both of the Akiras and the people to staff them so that I could traverse the spaceline with some defense. Meanwhile, Mark did solve 2 missions (though slowed down by my Mission Debriefing) and cleared a 3rd. Thanks to a the Higher the Fewer combo at his 40 point planet mission, he would need a 4th mission to win (burned) but had cleared a 3rd mission (but not solved it) prior to my personnel embarking from the outpost. I flew both ships to a planet mission and beamed everyone to the planet. In order to get to RA, I needed one ship to survive Mark’s inevitable battle and at least one of the two key mission specialists. Mark played the Scimitar which looked like absolute death to me. This put his armada up to Scimitar, Prometheus, Goraxus, Pi, and Raptor 1. The first 3 being big enough to mess things up just fine. He attacked one Akira with the Scimitar and Goraxus (I believe it was) but I was surpsied to find that his tactics were designed not to destroy the ship. The hull only went down 30%, the range only down by 1 (meaning that it could still fly to RA), but the shields dropped to 0. Mark used Goraxus’ DL to Romulan Ambush the ship into space debris. So it comes down to that one other ship and Mark still has some that have not fired. Yet, he ended his turn. I’m not sure why, dear readers, in all likelihood it could have been that he just wanted me to win the game. But I had the range and people to fly to and solve Reported Activity for the win. After the game, Mark showed that he had a second Outgunned in hand which he didn’t play. That means that he could have locked me out entirely. After all, once he had destroyed one Akira the other was alone against an Armada. He would have commandeered two of the three ships in my deck and I would have no way to get any people to the outpost if I did replay the one in my graveyard. My only option would have been to persona swap Picard and lose 100-95.
Round 2KlingonSebastian KirsteinFL (-35)
It was rather obvious during the seed phase that Seppel was playing a variation on my Klingon deck. A wise choice since it was already almost entirely legal for this format while both playing and drawing fast. He managed to seed Khitomer and Kronos right next to each other, so the former was the obvious choice for the duck blind and I put my Horta combo there. In addition to Khitomer he had Reported Activity, both of which can easily be 50 point (or better) missions thereby allowing a 2 mission win, with Assign Mission Specialists bonuses. So I put my The Higher… The Fewer combo at that mission. This left the low point Kronos as having the weakest combo. Seppel had made a few wise (but rather risky) format specific improvements. He had exchanged all of the space missions for 40+ point examples which could only be attempted by Klingons. This allows him to go for a two mission win without The Genesis Device (which he eliminated from the build) but it as risk for Romulan and Cardassian Espionage decks. Each of those had a solid combo plus a Kobiyashi Maru Scenario seeded by me making them hard solves. The gameplay started out well for me. I was drawing and playing with speed and eventually had a crew worthy of attempting Repair Mission (which had my outpost). It had a Maglock as the lead in, so I played one more Officer to bust through it. The follow-up was a Cytherians hawking some bargain basement tour; the big problems with that being that my Klingon deck (that is; Seppel’s) had a nice set of Klingon ships with which to destroy random passers-by and I lacked an STP. But off they went on their merry voyage. This actually left me in a fine position but with a hard decision. I only needed to solve the space mission with Mission Specialists and those certainly hadn’t been red shirted. I could simply play a new ship and solve for the 50 points. What’s more, Seppel did not have his ships lined up yet and had to let my EE pass right by netting me the 15 bonus points from Cytherians. Also, there was still one more dilemma at Repair Mission and who knows if the Specialists could bust it (or might die checking it out.) The big decision was whether or not I wanted to try and protect the EE. I still had Fed Flagship: Relaunched in play and so could play people to it. Plus it’s the CoC version and gets shield bonuses from however many EE people are on board. Flying across, I had Data, Riker, Picard, and Worf but I could easily add the likes of Beverly, Geordi, and Deanna to make it a bit hard to nuke. Or alternatively, I could just accept it as lost and play my people to the outpost in order to have skills for busting the last planet. I chose poorly, and would have likely won with a better decision here. First, I played Geordi to the Outpost and tossed a ship so that I could have a peek at that first dilemma. It was a Hazardous Duty. That meant that in order to complete the mission I would need all 4 key mission specialists since Leah Brahms and Christopher Hobson had the skills for the mission while Hobson and Ben Maxwell have the 2X Officer. I chose to play Deanna, Beverly, and Paul Porter to the EE to help staff it and boost the shields in the hope of returning in one piece but hindsite says that I should have just flown it into the Klingon fleet guns blazing as I didn’t draw either Paul or Deanna before Seppel nuked it. I solved Repair Mission for 50 and with the Cytherians bonus was on 35. This meant that I simply needed to solve any of my planet missions to win and they were all within range of my outpost. Seppel chose to solve Khitomer without his Mission Specialists around now just because he feared in the Zone and felt that he was about to lose. I used Isomagnetic Disintegrator to put my very full discard pile into the deck and start over. He started trucking away at the nearest Space mission but my combos plus Kobiyashi was really kicking him in the balls and slowing him down hard. Meanwhile, I flew Geordi around the spaceline to get an idea of what dilemmas were available at each mission. The closest had a Hippocratic Oath which was great in terms of what the combo could be but awful in that I had played Crusher to the EE prior to its elimination and that vessel already had Alyssa Ogawa and my Medical Kit onboard. I needed to redraw one of those cards in order to attempt the mission but could likely just let everyone else die to the follow-up combo and solve with Mission Specialists. Insurrection had a Founder Secret (and likely a flapjacks) but would be quite hard to attempt since my gun was onboard the EE, I had no tricorder, and was rather short on personnel. That left the third planet mission where Seppel had an Arsenal: Separated + the computer skill lockout combo. I had to send Hobson and Geordi to wait out the timer on Ferengi Ingenuity because the format does not allow me to get a Suna for the DL Reflection Therapy and 3X Computer Skill. I had considered during the build to put Reflection Therapy in alone due to the rampant popularity of this annoying combo, but it didn’t make the cut. All fo thise wasting time inevitably allowed Seppel to draw into 2X Exobiology and 2X Diplomacy to bust the Space mission and Kronos was a walk for the Klingons. We will remember the sacrifice that Lt. Commanders La Forge and Hobson made to the honor of wayward Klingons and hope that someday solid draws can get us a damned Medic.
Round 3CardassianJon CarterFL (+50)View opponent's Report
This round came down to the same issue as the previous one; I should have included a Space-time Portal to avoid the Cytherians issue. Or I could have just as easily gone space 2nd, but some lessons are hard to learn it would seem. My deck went very quickly and had Riker benefiting card draws by turn 1 and Geordi eyeballing dilemmas by turn 2. He found an Ankari Spirits under Repair Mission so I played Worf to gain the honor and cleared that. Then I ended up just 1 cunning short of clearing Ferengi Infestation. So on the 4th turn I played Data, moved Geordi and Paul Porter to the Outpost so I wouldn’t accidently solve the mission. Then I cleared the Ferengi Infestation and found the Cytherians. Jon had built his deck well for Cytherians as he had a lot of high range missions to make me take all day crossing the spaceline. This gave Jon a lot of time to set up his side of the game, time that I could have spent replaying the personnel had I returned them to hand with the STP. What Jon did that was really smart was to put a dilemma in front of the Cytherians that required me to bring a lot of people. Losing a ship full of people is painful, losing a ship full of everyone in your deck is more so. Once the EE was almost at the end of the spaceline, Jon played a second Keldon Enhanced and damaged the EE such that it wouldfly even slower. This is where I made a large mistake as I jumped the gun on playing my Assign Mission Specialists and solving Repair Mission. It revealed my playing strategy to Jon and it made it so that he had no reason to destroy the EE. I couldn’t fly it and all those people were simple stranded out in Cardassian territory. Jon wisely chose not to shoot down the EE and as a result I had to fly an Akira over to it to get it restaffed and make it start toward the end of the spaceline again before he would actually blow it up. All of this gave Jon a decent amount of time to win the game. But he was having his own issues, mainly with Kobiyashi Maru Scenarios and a few mistakes of his own. Because Jon was running 4 planet missions and 2 space, my dilemma placement was rather odd. I put only two dilemmas under two of his planet missions and 3 under the others but had 5 each, plus a Kobiyashi Maru Scenario on each of his space missions. One of the 2 dilemma planet missions also had the 3rd Kobiyashi. The planet which I chose to low bid, though, was his best one; Cardassia Prime. He ended up solving this for 50 points with Lagate Damar and his For Cardassia download. He did struggle there due to red shirting, though and struggled even harder at the Kobiyashi + Armus; Sticky Situation + Hanonian Land Eel mission. Because: he red shirted with one and lost him to KMS, then red shirted with two and lost one to Kobiyashi and the other to Armus, but didn’t learn his lesson and sent two more! Finally, he got wise and sent everyone. This got Jon through the Armus with the normal 2 casualties but he still failed HLE due to a lack of Science. The real saving grace of his deck was his 2E BC cheese, namely Oran and his Legate gaining skills and being eaten by Crell so that they could dial another skill on the next turn. That trick inevitably got him through a space mission. I was hoping that he would waste time trying to get to 140 off space since I was fairly certain that my The Higher… The Fewer would burn him by 2-3 points on that. Fortunately for him, he balls up enough to face the 5 dilemmas a Kobiyashi Maru in space and although they took a while to get through he was certainly able to do so.
Round 4BajoranStuart MarshFL (+10)
This was rather closer than my other games, though I still didn’t win it. It was obvious early on that Stuart was running Bajoran or Cardassian (based on his mission selection) and I could eliminate Cardies due to my R3 game. I opted to split my missions between either side of the Bajor Region as I don’t need them all (only 2) and hoped to lure the better dilemmas toward the Insurrection side. This strategy did not help me. There was no Riker in the opening hand, but I still had him by turn 2 thanks to great draw engines. I was going pretty well and used Geordi to look at the first dilemma at Repair Mission, the reveal of The Arsenal: Divided and Stu’s so far slow play made me think that it would be a slow-down type combo. That is one that only has the purpose of holding the opponent out until the other player is set up for some interaction. So I went at it early (space first, again) and this time it paid off. It turned out that Stu had rather weak combos in Space but beauties at planets. With the mission cleared, I left it unsolved and flew my main attempting crew out to Reported Activity to clear the Planet. Stu had yet to do anything but set up, so I made no move toward solving a mission as I didn’t want him to think that I was close to winning. I played a second ship, then my first AMS , then my 2nd before solving. Meanwhile, my Geordi found a Chula: The Dice at Reported Activity so I sent the necessary personnel to clear it but hopefully get stopped before my self-seeded Barclay’s as I didn’t yet have the skills to bust it. This worked well as they found their way through all dilemmas to the final dilemma and were stopped as it was a Founder Secret. Then Stu showed his true strategy, he played a Resistance personnel to the planet for free with Bajoran Resistance Cell, used a Hidden Fighter to get him a ship, tossed a Q’s Tent to get Mirror Bariel in hand and then played him to the ship with TMW. He then used Furel’s special download to get a copy of Sniper (which he revealed to be the 6th thanks to 5 seeded as hidden agendas) and used Mirror Bariel to get Transport Inhibitors. Finally, The Art of Diplomacy got him a gun and he was able to snipe off all of my remaining away team members and set up the Transport Inhibitors to prevent the attempting of the mission. At this point, Stu decided to go check out his missions but after losing one personnel to the Kobiyashi Maru Scenario on Characterize Neutrino Emissions and seeing the first dilemma, Armus: Energy Field he decided that he did not have enough copies of the mission skills in play to risk the actual solvers to the KMS and moved onto other missions. My Akira was destaffed as only Geordi and Ogawa were still on it and Stu destroyed it using a few Bajoran Interceptors before I could bring over reinforcements. I then played Isomagnetic Disintegrators to put my discard pile into my draw deck and played another Akira so that I could have some defense against his Aramda of Interceptors as I moved on to other missions. I was pretty well boned at this point as the deck does not have the skills for Transport Crash Survivors and the only other planet mission (Insurrection) was on the far end of the space line. However, I decided to truck the people I had in play over to it and see if it couldn’t be solved. Meanwhile, Stu chugged through each of his planet missions, and ended up solving 3 due to point loss from The Higher…The Fewer. He never did go after my ships but I lost time trying to keep them together as a defense rather than making a commuter chain. Insurrection had a The Arsenal: Separated and I did not have enough universal guys to red shirt it as I was afraid to sacrifice the mission specialists need to bust it. Instead, I drew into my rebuilt deck and built a new crew for the 1st Akira (replayed) and met the ships together to go after a space mission which was on the way. As with before, the space mission dilemmas were fairly easy and could be cleared without using the solvers. It was here that I realized that I should have gone all space all along with mission specialists to get to 140. Stu had no way to nick points (though even a loss of 1 would have made that method impossible. With two space missions solved, I went back to insurrection as I knew the 1st dilemma there and cleared the whole mission but had left the solvers elsewhere (for safety) and couldn’t solve that turn. This was a big mistake as Stu Q’s Tented for a Quantum Slipstream Drive, beamed down one lone Bajoran and sniped off all of my personnel except Data, finally setting up the Transport Inhibitors to lock out the mission. Here, I really should have bailed and went after space or the abandoned Reported Activity, but I decided to stick to Insurrection and started flying my solvers all the way from my outpost, while Data killed the Bajoran and turned off the inhibitor. Stu went after a space mission and ran through all dilemmas except The Cloud which stopped his crew for a full turn. This gave me an opportunity to complete Insurrection except that he replayed a Resistance Personnel (the same guy who died actually) and sniped off Data. That left me with too low of strength to solve it and not enough time to return home and pick up more dudes. So I finally went after that space mission but was held out for the extra turn that Stu needed to win.