Matthew Hayes (karonofborg13) Tournament Report - 2E Standard - Rura Penthe Regional 2011-05-14 - 11:00 AM Dee-Naah-Mee-Tay, Must be Italian! Introduction Keith "Foreman" Morris hosted a couple of 'wild and crazy guys' - Americans - Mike 'Griffeyfanatic' and myself, for the second year in a row. We made the drive up to our neighbors to the North, from Fargo, ND, USA, to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, on Friday night after work. Thanks, Keith. We settled in, chatted up, and got in a casual game that went well for me. Well, after 7 good hours of sleep (a rarity for me these days) we woke up, Keith made bacon, eggs, and toast for breakfast for us and off we went to the shop. Met the owners/operators of Game Knight, Scott, and his two guys/employees. A great place to play and three of the nicest comic/game store people you could ever meet. We look forward to playing there again in the near future. Round 1 Mike Reid MW (0) With two Mikes involved in this tourney, Mike Reid got dubbed, by Keith, iirc, as 'Oboe.' He's a very nice guy and a welcome addition to the game. I did my best to help him learn the game strategies his deck was employing, so naturally it led to a mod win, rather than a full, but, no real complaints from me. I like it when we can help get new players into the game and assist them in improving their gamesmanship. His deck was similar to mine, in many of the usual Borg tricks, though he had a vastly different mission selection (three '40 points or more' ones, in fact). I got one of his Computation drones into his discard pile which offered me a target for my Assimilate Resistance. I couldn't wait for any of the big name uniques, as I had already gotten the Queen, Locutus, and Seven into play. I nabbed the mission on second attempt, I believe, for 50 points [two Distant Explorations on the Unicomplex and one ETC on AR] and snatched the Computation, placing him/it on my ship. This put me at 60 (from two Annexation Drones played earlier). Mike then proceeded to get his first mission in something like two more turns, a 40 pointer (after I voluntarily hit him with a dilemma I knew he'd use Locutus on for the 10 point gain, which was my intended set up in order to get Occupational Hazards to work, as he didn't have the Queen in play at this time.) He then got the mission on that next turn, putting him at 50. As time ran out, he succeeded in stalling me out at my primary planet mission, Assess Contamination [with another ETC on it], which would've nabbed me 50 more points for the two mission kill, full win, I was going for. Oh, and his combo, a doubly 'Unfair' one, ha ha, that of Unfair Terms and Unfair Comparison worked smashingly. His three picks from UT included by sheer random luck his Borg traitor/former Comp drone, which effectively robbed me of using my only drawn K&E, as I had earlier used my Adapt on the second UT he hit me with. Oh well, dem's da breaks. An extremely good game, and I so look forward to facing Mike the next time we're up in Winnipeg. My MW, 60-50. Round 2 Mike Rudolph FW (0) Mike #2, that of the Mike I face on a regular basis in Fargo. Ahhh, Caretaker's Array, let me guess...Equinox! Surprise surprise. [NOT REALLY!] Well, not much to say about this game, well, actually... Mike got off to a usual great start, getting two of his missions for 65 points. That's where/when luck turned in my favor. After getting my pieces in place, I was able to get my Assimilate Resistance for somewhere between 45-50 points again (the DE's and ETC, in some combination) and punch it up in relative short order by working on Genesis Planet, without an ETC on it [also why I didn't just go to work on Assess Contamination as that mission requires me to have an ETC on it, if I even want to consider completing it successfully], with all of the skills provided by my Borg crew of something like only 8 Borg. As I had nabbed Lore Brother and Son [from my Assimilate Resistance prior], he chose to hit me with Inequitable Exchange and chose his Lore to be taken from me, into his brig. Lore was One with the Borg for something like .68 seconds. Heh heh. [and this while he had already played copy no. 2 of the same Lore! i.e he commanded a Brother and Son and had another Brother and Son brigified!] However, my Borg had enough to get through his other two dilemmas, one of which was a We'll Never Know (I think?), in which I was lacking one or two of the three Physics, but, had my single copy of Ascertain in hand, and changed the Physics requirement to Programming (I had in abundance), stopped the right peep and I completed Genesis with exactly 43 Cunning [and the necessary skills] on six personnel, thanks to a Computation Drone and Three of Twelve being part of the team. Whoo hoo. My FW, 110-65. Love those comeback games. Round 3 Keith Morris MW (0)View opponent's ReportView original Report Keith Morris, what can I say about this man that hasn't already been said? He has a 71% win record against me...correction, he HAD a 71% win record against me going into this tourney, as someone so factually pointed out very recently and I guess picking the 'local favorite' is something to be expected from those who like to make predictions. How wrong you were, oh brother across the pond! [insert Smiley Face here]. Now that my jab has been made for the record, and no offense directed at Keith, in all honesty, be taken, please. Keith is an extremely good gamer, most certainly, and one of the most fun opponents I've ever had the pleasure to play against, every...single...time. I certainly will admit that I didn't expect to win this game. His Romulan mission solver seemed to be quite a good build. Over the course of the game, I hit him with a couple of well-timed/successful combos that involved a Tsiolkovsky at his space mission, and a Whisper in the Dark at his planet, that killed three peeps each time. The planet one of those left him with three peeps in the original 7 person team, so his B-o-P was destaffed, missing one critical command star of the two required {I'll come back to this, shortly.} After I completed Assimilate Resistance for only 35 points, knowing I couldn't wait around for my ETC's nor my DE's to show up and just had to run and attack three missions for the win, I got Mareth for my trouble. And here I have to give credit where credit is due, a couple of suggestions Jerad (our resident Borg expert) made to me, I took half to heart, including one of the two suggested copies of Unrelenting he recommended I put in the deck, along with the trick I had seen him do of milling the Harvest Drone to the discard in order to Queen swap him/it in for a 1 coster drone, thereby allowed me on the subsequent turn to use Abduction [with the trio of Invasive Drone, Reconnaissance Drone, and the Harvest Drone beaming down, wherein I stopped the Invasive and Recon] to grab Data from the City of Rateg as I knew he was Keith's only Intelligence peep in play at this point, the Harvest Drone grabbed me another by doing his shenanigans/going to the bottom, which turned out to be the Romulan Darrel, I mean, D'Ral. I sent Data up to the ship, used Mareth (of Borg) to power Unrelenting to grab a third Rommie, that of one of his Ptol's, in the turn, my fourth 'assimilated victim' and the final one for the day. On his next turn, Keith efficiently played Alternate Identity to turn one of those remaining/surviving non-Command peeps into the smashing figure of Donatra, and thereby was able to fly his BoP away and work on a different mission. He nabbed it in two turns, iirc, and tied us up at 35-35. I began working on Genesis Planet, yet again without an ETC on it, and Keith kept removing my Science and/or my Treachery to keep me from it in the three or so attempts I made passes at it. As time was ticking down, [Keith had gone first], I got what turned out to be my last turn. As I already had one Unimatrix Zero in play, I was getting an eighth counter for a number of turns and also had Surprise Party in play for an additional counter each turn. My final turn, I drew into my lone copy of The Perfect Tool, and as I had four Borgified Romulans under my command, got four more counters from it. I drew into my first Annexation Drone this game, played him for the last three counters I could spend with all that, and Mod Won, 40-35. Awesome game! I had a feeling that I would probable end up at the head table with Matt. Agian I drew into Tal early, which let me know exactly how much assimilation I had to be afraid of, also I believe he had 3 interrupts in his hand, so I was getting to download each turn. P'Tol was an all-star during the early game, when he scouted out and let me know that there was a Pitching In, a Healing Hand, and an Issue of trust. Looking at my personnel, I had only 1 personnel with treachery, and one with medical, so I left the medical at home predicitng that Matt would play the Healing Hand and went and attempted with 7. I didn't know what the other dilemmas he would draw would be, but i hoped that one missed dilemma would be enough. He dropped the expected Healing Hand, which whiffed, followed by a Show Trail (turns out I had no Leadership either, so that whifed too) I can't remember the third dilemma, but I think it was an Occupational Hazard I do rememeber that it killed my only stooge in the deck. After only losing one personnel in the mission attempt I completed it on the first try. Matt began attempting assimilate resistance, and I started making mistakes. Mistake #1. I didn't play greasy Dukat and remove the personnel in my discard pile from the game like I had considered doing. This would have left him with no one to assimilate when he completed the mission. Mistake #2. I played a SI followed by a He Wasn't Nice on Matts second attempt at teh mission. The idea was to look through his personnel, and name the one that would make him fail the attempt. I figured taking out Locutus with the SI would drop his strength lower than it needed to be to complete the mission. Aparently Locutus was actually the Borg Queen, but she wasn't nice. She did have time to swap in a Harvest drone before she died though. My stupidity was that I didn't realise that he was attempting from the queens sphere, so he had more than enough attribtues to complete the mission. I had been looking at Matts hand every turn with Tal, and had also managed to grab all 3 of my At and Impasse, so he was locked down pretty good and all he had in his hand was an Abduction, and a Unrelenting. Mistake #3. I went and attempted my second planet mission. (seriously, why did I do this?) Matt managed to stop my attempt, and then next turn came over and used abduction, harvest dron, and Unrelenting to assimilate 3 of my personnel, leaving me destaffed, and giving him enough personnel to start making some serious attempts at his planet mission. I managed to get staffing back for my Bird of Prey by using Alternate Identity to swap in a Donatra, but Matt and I stalled out against each others dilemma piles, and neither of us scored a second mission. Unfortunatley for me, Matt managed to draw into an anexation drone (due to the many extra counters his assimilated personnel gave him) and played him for 5 points to win 40-35.