J (The Mad Vulcan) Tournament Report - 1E - Online Event (Mission to Talos IV) 2013-07-01 - 12:00 AM The Second Hirogen Foray onto Talos IV Introduction This event was an affiliation draft which, like Christian's, allowed players to use 3 wrong affiliated cards. The difference being, the draft order was by Talos IV points. Ken had the most points so far this season and picked first, I went second. Interestingly, I did not get my first pick, which surprised me and told me that Ken was playing Non-aligned. I then regretted picking Hirogen second, as I kind of hate them and just played them in Talos IV.2.9 for the play achievement. But they were the second best option, of anything I didn't have Victor for yet. Round 1 Rem Boon FW (+70) I was paired with Rem in R1, which is great as he is a cool guy that is fun to play against. Rem tends to do well in the early Talos IV events but has only recently returned to the game and only knows later cards to some extent. Still, he had a rather high draft pick (3rd or 4th) and managed to get the best non-DQ affiliation - Bajorans. So we seeded in different quadrants and could essentially chose our spaceline layouts. Rem had all 3 Bajor Region missions plus the often overlooked 6th bajor region mission - Mirror Bajor. Clearly he was running all the Bajoran play engines (4-5) plus the Intendant to play mirror Bajoran for free) - pretty solid plan. unfortunately his deck was trying to do to much and did only one thing well - draw. he could draw 7-9 cards a turn without even spending his card play. But that was wasted on sifting through a chubby deck build. he never did get the Intendant into play and First Minister Shakaar showed up quite late in the game. The other play engines (Resistance Cell, Chamber of Ministers, Quark's Bar, and Docking Ports) say lots of use. Kassidy Yates worked hard to pull off a 1st cargo run for 2 draws and 3 GPLs and then those were spent on Plasmadyne Relays to make a whole lot of easy future cargo runs. My draws were horrible, like my previous nights game against Andreas, apparently lackey's definition of shuffled is distinct from my own. I got all the draw cards and none of the Alphas. Eventually i dug down far enough to get Holodeck Doors so I used those and Dominion War Effort + ASP to get a lot of Holos. the only nouns I say in the first 30 cards of my deck (half of it) were the two Ocampas and then the first two Hirogen I saw were non-Alphas. Still, holos know how to red shirt. I sent them to Reinitialize Warp Rxn to find a Hazardous Duty, which they failed to meet the requirements for as only the Alphas have Officer. Still, i liked what I saw as Holos don't die and Officers don't lose points. Next i went to Answer Distress Signal only to find a Dead End. This mission only had 2 dilemmas under it, so I decided that I should solve those two and a planet. But which planet? I opted for Establish Home Planet, which proved to be the wrong choice. Kejal turned on the lights and the holos found a Founder Secret after not dying from a flapjack infestation. At this point, Rem has just been drawing like Mad and playing people. On my next turn, I finally had some hirogen and I sued them and a Hiro Knife to stab my way through that wall. The last dilemma was Executive Authorization, which is impassible for me. Finally, on the 57th turn, I got a second Officer in play and we went back out to jump start a ship. After passing the Hazardouis Duty, Hull Breach cleaned out both Officers (but lost no points) and everyone else went on a Cytherians Cruise. I had sent too many people to STP the ship to hand and it would take 2 turns to reach the end of the spaceline. The people who did not attempt could not solve the cleared out Reinitialize Warp Reaction, but I came up with a cool solution. I just needed to use an end of turn draw to get a Rituals of the Hunt targeting Vedek Dax for the mission skills. But I had tossed that with a Handshake. So on my next turn, I used Mutation and The Power to draw my deck down to two cards and then card played and Isomag. Then the end of turn draw was a Rituals. Pretty brilliant huh? On this turn, Rem finally attempted a mission. He had used GPL to buy a multidimensional transport device (black market has everything) and sent a big crew over to Mirror Bajor, where he had a self seed. they waltzed past a Hanonian Land Eel, due to having a lot of people Vedek Dax and no Neelix. But that was a horrible horrible thing and I knew as soon as I saw it. The follow up was Unscientific Method. which. killed. Dax. So now I didn't have the skills for my mission!!!!! The final dilemma was Scientific Method and Rem had a ton of Science Remaining, but ironically - no Medical. My Olarra reached the end of the spaceline and scored 15 points, they then attempted the mission at the end of the spaceline and blew through the dilemmas to bring me to 50. The only bad part of this attempt was that Kejal had picked up a Komar possession. Interestingly, i was at 2 security and on the previous turn had blown up my ASP to get a Security - to the other ship (idiot). I needed to fly the ships together to get the Security to cure kejal. While they went along, I attempted Salvage Operation (with Olarra) and cleared that down to a Garbage Scow with little incident, though my people were stopped by my recently played Mission Debriefing. This meant that I needed to get Kejal cured to move the scow and solve and then needed to move the solvers to the previous two space missions to solve those. Rem brought the Medical over to Mirror Bajor and solved it to get his City of B'hala. Next, Rem went out to space and failed the very first dilemma; Cytoplasmic Life Form. I then got my ships together and had to decide where to go first (Note: couldn't move the scow as Kejal was cured but stopped). I decided to go to Answer Distress Signal and clear the final dilemma as I needed to break up my solves to avoid In the Zone. Since I was certain that there were not too many turns left, I needed to bust that this turn, but my huge crew failed Ankari Spirits by one Honor (as almost anyone who had died so far was an Alpha Hirogen). This left me with three cleared missions and one solved where I needed all of my space missions to win and different ships and people in all kinds of strange places on the spaceline. Quite a puzzle. At this point, Rem had to go to work, so I had to solve the puzzle over the night. I kept running the situation through my head on where to fly what ship to use range to get to each mission to not get In the Zoned and it looked like I needed 3 turns no matter what. I really should have turned my last turn draw into a third ship, but that would have made things easy. Then I hit upon it. I had a ton of people on my ship at Answer Distress Signal and Anakari Spirits would pick two of those at the start of my turn. Only one was absolutely integral, as he was the only Engineer there and that was needed to solve, but he was a hologram and would only be stopped by Ankari Spirits if chosen. If he was chosen, I would have to solve Reinitialize first and that would force me into a three turn plan. but if he wasn't I had it mapped. Drop the people off at the outpost except a minimal crew for solving. Then send the solvers to complete Answer Distress Signal. They would then be stopped by Mission Debriefing and could do no more. So I STP them to hand. Next, move the Olarra to Salvage Operation. That ship still only had one Engineer on it (Kejal) but by returning the Hirogen ship to hand I could replay the Holo Engineer directly to the Olarra on the next turn. I then converted my end of turn draw into a new Venatic Hunter. Final turn: Olarra with two engineers moves the Scow over one mission and returns for the solve. Then everyone on the outpost boards the shiny new ship and flies to Reinitialize (first cleared, last solved) FTW. This means that Rem had two turns to win before I could win. But he had to get at least some points on his next turn or risk being In the Zoned. he attempted Refuse Immigration with the dilemmas in reverse, and interestingly that combo works well forward and reverse. It was supposed to be Maglock + A Fast Ship + The Cloud. Instead, he was able to fail The Cloud right away,as he still only had one Medical (though another one was left on DS9). He then sent a second crew to see the Fast Ship (who took the slacker Medical) and found Maglock with not even 3 Officers in play. Since he scored no points this turn, it was locked in my favour. There was no reason to In the Zone me, as I got up to 95 points on the second to last turn and only needed to get 45 points for the win on the last turn, I ended up getting an impressive 170. Round 2 Sebastian Kirstein ML (-25) Seppel managed to get ahold of Kazon and he came through with the obligatory Kazon battle fleet deck. It was pretty amazing really. My deck was built as a speed solver and had no answer to this; no cloak, no landed ships, only the one outpost. Since my holograms were engineers, I couldn't even set up on a planet in the hopes of rebuilding an outpost (didn't get Kejal over there fast enough). I almost had a mission, my big crew atempted and cleared the first D only to get Cytherianed. There was no choice but to STP to hand. After that I built up a second attempt, but they were stopped by Scow + Mission Debriefing. Seppel pulled out all the stops to get a ship across the spaceline and damage my ship so I couldn't move the scow and return. Plus, the Battle Bridge Door cleaned out my staffing. By the time I had anything else going, he had eliminated my outpost. Very fun game (honestly, I love battle). Round 3 Jeremy Huth FW (+97) This game went similar to the one I had vs. Rem. I had a significant advantage over Jeremy as I had Hirogen. His dilemmas were a constant walk for my Holograms and he couldn't pull out enough Officer with his Ferengi to get through a single mission. He really did have a great/fast deck though. He might have gotten enough officer out if he had a bit more time (if his dilemmas had done anything against my deck). It really was just a matter of my dilemmas being perfect against his deck while his being shit against mine (bad pairing for him). Round 4 Matthew Zinno FL (-100)View opponent's ReportView original Report I probably should have gone interaction on this one, but honestly, Voyager Feds have a lot of answers to that and my deck wasn't really built for it. I tried to outspeed Matt to the solve and honestly almost made it. My first attempt at space found me a Cytherians and I used/wasted Kes to bounce me to the opposite end of the spaceline and net the 15 points. This openned up the possibility of a two mission win if I completed the right space and the right planet. The planet was closer, so I went there and cleared it down to the last dilemma -> which was an Executive Authorization (that my deck has no answer for, due to the 3 non-Hirogen card limit). This meant that I couldn't solve any planets (my deck can only go after one, that was another build mistake, in retrospect), so a loss was inevitable. I tried to go after Matt at this point for some battle, but he was way over at the end of the spaceline and when I got there he solved the space catapulgt to buonce to the other side. Then he had a few turns buffer before I could get THERE to solve the last mission. Well deserved tournament win for old Matt. From J's good performance so far, and his high seed position, my guess was that he would be playing Hirogen, and I was right. We duplicated three missions, so of course I put my three KMS on his other ones. Marika was in my opening hand, so I used my DH for Tabor, and a holodoor for Weiss to staff the ship, and started my Ancestral draws on my first turn. Turn 2 had us both attempting missions: J ran all his people into Cytherians, and I found a PunBox/HazDut combo that needed one more (meatbag) officer than I had. He used Kes to solve Cyth, then needed to fly all the way back. I flew to the opposite spaceline end to try Null Space Catapult, exposing first Whale Probe, then Maglock and although I had 3 officers, two were not strong enough. At this point J united his old and new crews at Ha'Dara, finding Fdr/DNP (which "killed" a lot of holograms)/HLE (whose only target either way was Garren). But by now, 2 Alphas had been taken by KMS. I reported another Officer and was ready to return to the PunBox planet and solve -- Chakotay in the box, then Mariah and Stadi pass HazDut. Hint: if you see another dilemma after HazDut, send only OFFICERs. Stadi died, for no point loss. J reattempted and passed HLE, to find Exec -- which he said his deck could not pass. Good thing I rearranged my combos, putting that there instead of with the Horta/Quake under his other planet mission which was Liberation (shared; in case I needed to solve it, I put fewer dils). I returned to RNSC with strong Officers, and found FastShip/TheCloud (with no Medical). While stopped at the Cloud, I kept reporting 2 people a turn to the ship, but the Venatic Hunter came by and shot at me. Counting a boost from my Gelpack, he was 2 WEAPONS ahead of my SHIELDS, so I needed 2 defense from a tactic -- and got it: Plasma Energy Burst, which saved my already-damaged ship and damaged his even without a hit. I solved the cleared mission once the Cloud lifted, and used the RNSC text to relocate to the other end of the spaceline and my other unduped mission, Interment Site. I had to wait until next turn to do anything there because I was both stopped (by his Mission Debriefing) and in stasis (from the Whale Probe which had reached this location). On his turn he reattempted his first mission, losing to an Astral Eddy, and on my turn I beamed down with a large team, leaving behind some solvers including the newly reported Harry. First in line were Rudy, Suder, and Weiss (now with MHE), because Seven had used Ocular Implants to tell me QGTP was first. After that was HLE for which the team was just large enough; then Firestorm which would have killed only Weiss, but for Kukalaka; and finally ITPM, which J thought stopped me since there were no Firestorm targets, but Weiss actually passed with his Federation Treachery. The team solved and we were done, 110-15. Closing Thoughts I certainly could have done better on the pairings, given how I built the deck. But my biggest regret was choosing Hirogen as I had no achievements to get with them. My first choice was Non-aligned DQ...