I had a great time at Worlds this week, so on the flight home I wrote a long recap in case anyone was considering going in the future and might be interested in my experiences.
First, some background! Over the summer Shane Ivins, Josh Benjamin and I made plans to go to Worlds to represent NC and the Initiative One podcast, and we did a lot of army building and testing because we had aspirations of being competitive (later on, when the dates were announced, Josh was unable to get the vacation time to join us). We settled on Uthuk lists, partly because of how Josh and I smashed our Regional Championship with them. In the last month, though, with the release of new units for the other factions, it was obvious that the game's landscape was changing rapidly; in the weeks before final list submission, I became convinced that we were disastrously behind the meta. Testing against the new units was revealing weaknesses in our Uthuk builds, particularly versus Baron Z crossbow lists. Shane's the kind of guy who says, "Well I'm going to make my list HILARIOUS then," and he made changes to maximize his fun factor, fielding only three units in his "Ravos goes to the beach" army and dangling a 13-point bid. I considered switching factions entirely. Shane convinced me that I was better off with a weaker list I knew well and that I ought to stick with a play style I enjoy (specifically, the "face-check it and then punch it until it dies" style: I'm not a friggin' surgeon). My concession to the changing meta was to make room for Kethra in the list, hoping she would provide an answer to high-defense heroes and blockers even though I find her skill too inconsistent for my tastes.
On Thursday we played five grueling Swiss rounds. I was fortunate to draw a first-round pairing against Tony Backhaus's Daqan crossbow list that, while good, was not optimized to deal with an all-out Uthuk charge through Raider Tent from Meeting Engagement zones. It afforded me a 10-1 win. I think the high margin of victory vaulted me over some of the other crossbow lists, which tend to score closer margins; that may have contributed to my later success, since I know a strong fortress list would have been a weakness for me. Shane drew Sondra's Daqan fortress and lost 4-7.
In round two, Shane got his second San Antonio pairing against Matt and won 9-2. I went up against Tom's dispatch-runner Uthuk army, which was really cool since I have a love affair with Dispatch Runner going back to my Daqan days, where I liked to use Deepwood Archers to spam Oathsworn attacks. This game was a slugfest that went to time in turn 6 I believe, and I remember some artifact-seizing in both directions late in the game. It ended up 8-3 to me.
In round three, Shane faced his third straight San Antonio pairing and beat Colby 10-1, leap-frogging into third place with 23 points. My victory over Tom in round 2 kept me at Table 1 so I could conveniently be kneecapped by Church, 9-2. The details elude me except that it was a trouncing despite my having the better deployment zone in Unprepared. At this point, I was sitting in 5th with 20 points and a tough road back into the top 4. I thought I probably needed to average 7+ points per round overall to make the cut, and that meant non-marginal victories in my last two rounds against tough opponents at high tables.
I spent lunch studying up on my most likely round-4 matchup (Andrew's Latari), only to get paired against Dion's Waiqar instead. It's been a while since I faced Death Knights, and their maneuverability got the better of me early in the game. It was touch and go, but I think eventually the threshers chewed through them with help from Ravos. It was also my first entanglement with Lord V; Kethra earned her keep and blew him up along with some knights, IIRC, for a 9-2 result, putting me right back up in third place. With 29 points being just over 7 points per game, I felt I still had little margin for error in game 5. Like Icarus, Shane found he'd flown a little too close to Table 1, and Tom's Lord V Waiqar list burned him right back down to 8th place, where he assumed he was out of the running.
Round 5 was more Waiqar, Dustin's archers this time, and though they blighted and baned the heck out of my poor crabs, Dustin's dice refused to deal damage. Lord V and a 2x2 Death Knights couldn't keep my threshers out of the archer ranks, for a 10-1 that I figured should put me in second place. Stunned, I wandered off to chug a $7 can of beer. My brain was such applesauce at this point that I tried to walk off without paying for the beer. I'm inclined to think that running six dials contributed to mental attrition; the planning demands of coordinating three scuttling units and Ravos eventually got the better of me.
Meanwhile, Shane was having it out in a long game with 2017 World Champ Ben Fox's Uthuk, which went nearly to mutual destruction but left Shane with the remnants of his thresher star and enough artifact tokens to secure a 10-1 and bounce back into third place like a demented ping-pong ball. We were beside ourselves that we had somehow BOTH made the cut, which given our last month of testing and the high caliber of competition at Worlds, had seemed extraordinarily unlikely.
I won't get into the Friday morning team game (except to say San Antonio had their revenge) or the painting contest (congrats, Curtis!), but by the time the top 4 rolled around at 3:30, I knew I didn't have my "A" game. Mental and physical fatigue were obvious -- I felt like I was misfiring on mulitple cylinders. Early on in the semifinals, Shane was chewing through my threshers fast, and I was using my non-scuttling unit to chase down his tanky Kethra to blow her up with my Kethra's help. In retrospect, she might have been better off turning to fight them. I didn't have an answer for his thresher star with embedded Ravos, however (which was winning the race to eat my Ravos before I could add up enough flanking damage to get rid of it, despite swinging for 10 at a time). I decided to dial in some panic, swinging for big morale checks that after a couple of tries yielded a Discipline Breakdown, removing Shane's Ravos upgrade and sealing the game. After that it was just mop-up. At the top table, Church steamrolled over Tom's Waiqar. Both games were done well in advance of the timer.
The final against Church was an exercise in trying to remember what his berserker star could do, failing, and playing into his plans a lot more than I'd like. He did a scuttling terrain ballet with his 4-tray of threshers that tied up half my army until it was too late for them to help with the berserkers, and I misplayed Kethra and let her get eaten by Ravos. Overall, I was just completely outplayed, though maybe less badly than the first time around. I'll definitely be testing versus War Sprinter from now on; in combination with Aggressive Shrieker, it was incredibly powerful and difficult for me to predict. I just couldn't wrap my head around the speed-unstable march skill.
Though I wish I'd played better on camera, I'm not disappointed with the final results. I am floored to have finished second in such a competitive lineup of players. I know it took luck in my match-ups and dice, in addition to the best play I could bring to the table, to carve out second place. Things could easily have gone another way at any point in the Swiss.
The entire experience was a blast, but I was most impressed with what I discovered about the national Runewars culture. From the time we met up with some players for dinner Wednesday night to when we finally kicked San Antonio out of our AirBnb at 2am Saturday morning, I never got a bad vibe off of anyone. Folks were understanding about rules mistakes, helpful in remembering game triggers, I never caught even a whiff of intentionally slow or dishonest play, and there was zero gatekeeping. Everyone was welcoming and friendly, and it was great to connect screen names with real names and get to know folks.
Brooks and Matthew, our Game Marshalls (and members of the RuneWars design team) both seemed genuinely flattered by everyone's enthusiasm for the game and were complimentary of our play and list-building ingenuity. They were also excellent judges. Jimmy The Organized Play Guru (sorry Jimmy, I don't know your actual title) ran a tight ship and kept everything on schedule (not easy with 21 wayward minis gamers and several other concurrent events).
If you're inexplicably still reading this post, thanks for coming along for the ride. Hope to see folks at Worlds next year, and maybe AdeptiCon or GenCon if we can make it happen. Kethra knows I could use some more practice in long events.
