I finally got a chance to post after the awesomeness at FFG's event center last weekend. Four of us made the trip up from Ohio on Thursday evening to play in the Warhammer and Call of Cthulhu events. It was a 12 hour drive for us, but the good times with the FFG staff and our fellow players certainly made the trip worth it. This was my second time to the event center after last year's Path of the Master event for UFS. I highly recommend checking out the event center if you get an opportunity, it's always a blast. Now on to the events.
Friday - We get to Minnesota early and take a tour of the FFG offices. After chatting about the state of the games with James and Steve for a while we head over to the event center. We get some staff games in as well as test our Orc decks a few last times before the big event on Saturday. I also finally was able to pick up my elf boxes and go through the dark elf cards as I know they may be a threat to my Orc deck.
Saturday - The three members of our group playing Warhammer (our 4th Jeff only plays Cthulhu) played nearly the same deck on Saturday. We all had Orc decks based around an aggro build that I've been running for a while. My deck was only one card different from the other two guys. Our Orc decks seemed to be a bit different from most of the field though as I saw a lot of Skaven running around. I prefer to only run Clan Moulder Elite and Greyseer. Snitch is too costly and slow for what I'm doing.
I won't get into too many details with the swiss rounds but I ended up playing Paul, one of my travel mates and long time teammate from UFS, during the second round. During the final round of swiss, Tim and I, the only undefeateds, decided to just draw since we were both going to make the cut no matter what. After swiss, the top 4 was announced - 2 Orcs (Paul and I) and 2 Dark Elves. For the record, 2/3 of the field that day were Orc decks and 1/3 was Dark Elves.
Top 4 vs. Paul Bittner
Paul and I seem to get matched up against each other a lot when we travel. We had to play during the Path of the Master event a year ago and during the swiss rounds as I mentioned above. Game 1 goes pretty much like the swiss rounds where I just outpace Paul in the damage department. Game 2 goes pretty much the same way but in the opposite direction as Paul gives me my first game loss of the day. During game 3, Paul gets a pretty terrible draw part way through the game and has to end up passing his turn. This gives me just enough of an advantage to finish him off before he can put together enough damage to burn my last zone. I advance to the finals.
Final match vs. Tim Lyons
This was the most fun I had playing cards all weekend. It was an intense match and it really felt like a championship match. The first game started off well for me as I put out some major damage and quickly burned his battlefield. However, the tide started to turn when Tim was able to get two sorceresses out in his quest zone. I knew that I was in trouble and went for one last final assault, sending four units backed by WAAAAGH! to try and finish the game. Tim had the answers. He used Chill Wind and We Need Your Blood to destroy nearly all of my attacking units. After that he had complete control behind his sorceresses as he picked apart my capital and took the first game. Going into the second game, I knew that I needed some higher health units and was luckily able to draw into 2 Clan Moulder Elites pretty early on. I got my rats swinging early and often. One of them even had 2 Choppas at one point and was thrashing Tim's capital. Tim responded with a lot of tricks to eventually take down the double-sword-wielding-5-health-monster, but by that time it was too late. I only needed a few more damage to finish him off. I forced a game three and at this point we both knew that it could go either way in a heartbeat. Tim plays first in game 3 and drops Har Ganath. I end up mulliganing into a warpstone and contested village, which I play turn one on either side of my board along with a Follower of Mork guy. Tim answers with some early game rats and looks like he will control the board with the Deathmaster and his fellow Skaven. I of course have the best answer and Troll Vomit all over his rats after an Innovation. He answers with another Greyseer and smacks me for a couple more damage. Then I draw into a Pillage and already have a Lobber Crew. I use the lobber and pillage to completely clear his board, leaving with only 2 cards left in hand. At this point, he is ahead on damage, but I know that I should be able to control the game through my card draw advantage. The rest of the game goes pretty much as planned for me, with my extra card draw fueling more and more units to burn his zones down before he can recover.
Overall, the event was a lot of fun and FFG supplied some great prize support. For winning, I received the awesome board holder/trophy as seen in the picture in the FFG article. They also gave me a really cool banner that has the artwork from the Elf boxset. Top 4 also received uncut sheets, art prints, pins, and playmats. I received a Regional Champion playmat. Great stuff, FFG. I'm looking forward to the next time I visit the event center.
Props:
- All the players who travelled to the event, some from quite a distance (Ohio, Iowa, etc).
- Paul, Karcher, Jeff - success
- Tim, you were a great opponent and a **** good deckbuilder and player. I look forward to talking more Warhammer with you at GenCon.
- Martha and Derek - good times seeing you as always, let's get some more Warhammer in soon
- Steve and James - we don't get to hang with you guys enough. See you two at GenCon. I can't wait.
- Mike - thanks for the running events and playing in the 3 on 3 match with us.
- Dave - the last minute testing the night before against your deck was the critical breakthrough, haha. Thanks for the games.
- FFG - thanks for letting us play in a great environment with a friendly staff, and for supplying some really cool prize support. I've already hung the banner up next to my UFS Matt Kohls banner, woo!
