Well I’m finally getting around to posting this huge post-GenCon report and not a moment too soon – I’ve been jaw-jacking about getting it done for a few days now but have just been super busy since getting home. Yeah, I know what they say about excuses. 
Okay, a few disclaimers first:
1. Just like all of us here, I have my own opinions on what’s right and/or wrong with W:I’s current “meta.” While they may either sound foolish or genius depending on your perspective, they are, such as they are, my own opinions and I certainly don’t consider them to be perfect, flavored as they are by my subjective thoughts and past experiences. Having not played any of the (reputedly) most challenging CCGs out there in any kind of professional capacity, I like to think that I can at least bring a somewhat different and potentially refreshing perspective to the table, if nothing else.
2. With any complaints or concerns I post, about anything, I’m always aware that nothing is perfect and that you can’t please everyone all of the time. I’m simply commenting positively or negatively on what I experienced in the hopes that FFG can get some good feedback AND that my fellow W:I gamers can either learn something from my experiences (successes or failures) or at the least, know that another gamer may feel the same way that they did about a variety of issues. If I don’t match your particular perspective, please know that it’s nothing personal and that just because I see things a certain way, certainly doesn’t mean you have to see it the same way or that I think my opinions are the only right ones.
3. Finally, this will be an INSANELY LONG post, please bear with me. If you make it to the end, I will give you a cookie.
Whew. With some of the recent grumblings around these forums, I figured it might be best to clarify that stuff first. Moving on…
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Like many of us here in these forums, I’ve been excited about the GenCon World Championships since I got this awesome game right after GenCon 09 (a kind friend nabbed a copy for me while at the Con). I’ve mellowed a bit since getting older so I wasn’t that bound and determined that I had to do really well but at the same time, I felt that I had as good of a grasp as anyone else on the game and should probably have a decent chance to at least make the final 8, which was my stated goal before the tournament began.
I had a disappointing finish in the FFG Regionals, falling prey to a lack of playtesting time, last-minute fiddly deck changes, and finally, a lack of recent tourney experience, which led to a few unnecessarily nervous mistakes. I came in the middle of the pack, finishing 6th or 7th out of 12 in that one. Ugh. So I’d hoped to mitigate nearly all of those issues for this big event and to some extent, I did.
I came down to the Con with two gaming buddies, one of whom has been on the same year-long Warhammer: Invasion love-fest along with me, enjoying the twists and turns of this great game as it developed all the way up until the Con (that would be my pal, Konrad). He’s generally been a craftier deck-builder than I, frequently surprising me with the quality of the synergies his decks have contained. My other buddy was Gio – he’d never played W:I before until our arrival Wednesday evening at GenCon but he has always been pretty good at games in general and is a fairly fast learner. We haven’t played much with Gio in the past year due to a new job situation with bad hours so it was nice to see him again. Gio was determined to play in the tourney with us rather than sit around on Saturday watching us have fun so we dutifully dug in to get him up to speed.
KONRAD AND GIO PRACTICING ON THURSDAY NIGHT.
Unfortunately, as an unexpected by-product of our tutelage, I ended up missing out on a ton of playtesting and playing time, while at the Con, which may have cost me a tiny bit in the tourney, in hindsight, but it was worth it to get another gamer interested in W:I.
Even up to the day before the Con, I was still unclear as to which deck I wanted to play. However, having heard so much hype over the Bolt-thrower deck, I did a bunch of new research on it and realized that I had just not really understood how people were playing it – once I realized how they were managing this deck, it hit me just how nasty it was. So that definitely flavored my thought-processes in the initial deck-decision phase of my GenCon WC planning.
Konrad and Gio did a ton of playing on Friday and I got to catch a few matches with some really cool people. Met a great guy named Corey (sp?) who played a league match with me and was going for an Empire mill deck achievement but my Dwarf deck notched an easy win since his mill deck as so unbalanced toward milling. He was a very good sport and clearly knew how to play CCGs. Tried to find some other people from the forums and had little luck (most people said they either lurked or just didn’t go there much) until I ran into Jon (ShubFan76). He’d brought his Bolt-Thrower deck and was going to be using it in the tourney. Since I needed the practice we played a match. I didn’t tell Jon but I brought out a crazy deck intended only and solely to destroy Support cards and Developments, figuring it should surely be the bane of a BT deck. It was destruction-based and used Grimgors, Pillages, Burn it Down, Smash ‘em Alls, the Orc units that you can sacrifice to kill Supports and/or Developments…to name a few. Well to my utter dismay, the BT deck just crushed it like nobody’s business. It didn’t hurt that Shub has played on the Magic Pro-Tour and won quite a bit of $$ playing on the Vs. circuit and the WoW:TCG circuits – the guy really, really knows his stuff. He’s also a super friendly player who is a very good sport whether crushing you or not. It was great to meet him and get some excellent advice and ideas from him during the weekend.
Having seen the awful devastation and cyclical recursion tricks that the BT can throw at a deck, I marveled at how anyone could expect to defeat it. This was particular galling to me because I’d frequently trumpeted here in the forums that it didn’t seem that bad to me (how wrong I was, apparently). After our match, I was super deflated and considered actually not even playing in the big dance but some other gamer nearby tossed some encouraging words my way, stating that it certainly wasn’t unbeatable and that picked me up some. I went back to our hotel room that night, on the eve of the World Championships, determined to at least NOT lose to a BT deck. Little did I know that I would achieve my goals in that regard.
Unfortunately, once we got back Konrad and Gio got into several more matches as Gio still felt he needed the practice. With only 3 of us there, I was the odd man out and just rested a bit and thought about what deck to use while they finished up their series. At that point, Konrad had decided to run with a Dark Elf/Chaos hybrid using a DE capital board. I wasn’t terribly confident in his choice but I know he’s a crafty player who could probably get more out of it than I could. Gio’s deck, a Dwarf deck, was in disarray (60+ cards in it) and he needed my help to build a better one before the tournament so I got to work and tore his deck to nothing and rebuilt it from the ground up. It was challenging for me because I was leaning towards playing Dwarves anyway and didn’t want our decks to be carbon-copies of each other. So I suddenly decided to have him run a sub-theme of Empire with a couple of Verenas, the 0-cost Peasant Militia for Loyalty symbols and to act as damage sponges against early Skaven/Orc rushes, and finally all 3 Free Companies for their scouting abilities. I figured that matching them up with the Dwarven scouts could help Gio against BT decks, potentially.
So having built his deck, I decided to tweak my Orc/Skaven deck one last time and my beloved Dwarf deck (I’ve loved the Dwarves as a deck for several battlepacks now, and not just because they were getting stronger each time, either). I decided to see how the Orc/Skaven would do against his Dwarf deck. It won 1 out of 5 matches, maybe 2 out of 5 (can’t totally recall) and I decided that it just wasn’t good enough for my tastes. Dwarf it would be – sadly that decision came at 3:30am the night before, so I was pretty tired and didn’t do any more tweaking. My deck was set. Here’s what I went with (with some comments afterwards for why I used what I did and what I’d change in retrospect):
WYTEFANG’S DWARVEN DECK O’ DOOM:
Units:
2x Longbeards
2x Troll-Slayers
3x Dwarf Ranger
3x Dwarf Cannon Crew
3x Slayers of Karak Kadrin
2x Grudgebearer
2x Defender of the Hold
TOTAL= 17 units
Supports:
3x Mining Tunnel
3x Ancestral Tomb
3x Contested Village
3x Warpstone Excavation
2x Great Book of Grudges
3x Dragon Mage Awakening
TOTAL= 17 Support
Tactics:
3x High Elf’s Disdain
2x Master Rune of Spite
3x Master Rune of Valaya
3x Demolition!
3x Innovation
2x Will of the Electors
1x Judgment of Verena
TOTAL= 17 Tactics
FINAL DECK SIZE: 51 cards
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My deck’s build was heavily flavored by a desire NOT to lose to the stupid BT deck, at the least, and to also have a strong shot at handling Orc/Skaven or Skaven/Anything, which I expected to see a fair amount of at the World Championships. To that effect, I included High Elf’s Disdain x3 at the last minute as well as Will of the Electors to move around the BT deck’s developments and just possibly disrupt it for a turn or two, to buy more time. I only used a single Judgment of Verena because it was going to be expensive and because I was also using 2x Rune of Spite.
Probably the oddest inclusion in my deck were the High Elf Support cards, Dragon Mage Awakening, which was a 0-cost, 1-loyalty support that adds +3 to a unit’s hit points. I wanted it in the deck for a few reasons: One, it usually worked as a decent protection against stupid Deathmasters because I’d begun to notice that most Deathmasters fire off without having all that many Skaven to tap into, so the extra +3 hit points would make it pretty tough for ol’ Sniktch to get an easy kill of an important unit. Secondly, it would give me more damage-soaking ability for a low-cost against Rush decks early on, Third, it would also be a bit of a deterrent against anyone splashing amounts of DE hit-point reduction in their decks, and finally, but most importantly to me, it provided me with a dual-purpose means of getting HE loyalty on the table so I could use my High Elf’s Disdain more easily. And I can say without reservation that it was absolutely worth including this odd little Support card – it came through for me many times during the tournament and seemed to constantly surprise my opponents, who almost always had to ask to read the card to find out what it did. The other risk I took was in only having 17 units AND in not running a Grudge-Thrower support to better tap into the Dwarf Ranger damage ability. I’d learned a while back that the Grudge-thrower wasn’t as necessary anymore due to the ability to simply use your own Slayers of Karak Kadrin to kill one of your own Attacking Units thus triggering the Rangers’ effect. It seemed more efficient and freed up some critical slots in my deck build so I’ve gone with it ever since. For the most part, it was the right choice though I probably could’ve used at least one GT in my deck, just to be safe, in hindsight.
Some mistakes made in my build were NOT including any way to get back a development (something that cost me in at least 2 games) – I should have put at least 1 or 2 Abandoned Mines in my deck. Sigh. I wanted to do this before I got to the tournament but had left my cards in the Van and had no time to go back and get them, so my build was locked in. D’oh! Another card that I could have probably ditched was the Defender of the Hold, which I had 2 of, figuring if anything, it would help against Lobber Crews (it did not based on my tournament pairings, which you’ll see below). I could have better used that slot on a Pilgrimage, a Called Back, and/or a Burn it Down. Sigh. I had also removed Stand Your Ground because it never seemed to work consistently enough for me due to the same-turn usage limitation and I have to admit, it might have been nice to have had at least 1 or 2 in my deck again.
Other than some of those things, I wasn’t unhappy with the deck and felt more confident with it than anything else so I felt mostly ready.
So after listing our decks, the pairing began. We were going to be playing 5 games Swiss Format with a cut to a Final 8, as expected, though several players were a bit surprised at them only running 5 rounds and I can see why they might have been dismayed.
ROUND 1 OF WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS BEGINS!!
GAME 1: Anyway, I was paired up with a very cool guy named Jeremy, for my first match and he was playing Dwarves, too – great, a mirror match, which in most cases means a coin-flip type of game, all things being equal. I got lucky and started first with a pretty strong opening, so I was thankful for that. I don’t recall much about his deck though I think it was (of course) similar in many ways to mine and ran Grudge-throwers, if I’m not mistaken. But I’d raced out to a pretty fast lead and won the first match, settling my nerves and setting a good tone for the entire tournament, imho. Time unfortunately ran out on him for the second match and if I recall correctly, the game was pretty close. I definitely didn’t play slowly (which would’ve been a lame thing to do, imho) but it just worked out that way with 2 Dwarf decks chugging away at each other. Jeremy was a class act and a good smart opponent who just lost to my good luck of a start, for the most part. My Record: 1 Win, 0 Losses, 0 Tied.
GAME 2: Yay, lucky me, another Dwarf deck. Sigh. I forget my opponent’s name but he was also a strong player (he ended up making the Final 8) and his surprising usage of Bounce-type cards caught me off-guard, as I’d already used a couple of High Elf’s Disdains as Development, thus giving me no real counter to his usage of Called Back or Pilgrimage. Grrr… He won game 1 fair and square and then it was up to me to try to nab Game 2. I was starting to turn the tide in that game though he had a disturbing way of always seeming to get just what he needed at the right time, but then time ran out on me and the tie-breaker gave him the win. Snif. I wanted to feel bummed but at least I hadn’t had Konrad’s luck as he had to play Shubfan’s nasty Bolt-thrower deck in the first round and loss very quickly to it. My Record: 1 Win, 1 Loss, 0 Tied.
GAME 3: Are you kidding me, another Dwarf deck? Yep, it appeared that I was cursed to play a Mirror match tournament. Bah. Anyway, my opponent for that match was also a really cool guy named, Rich (and his brother made it to the final 8 using a non-BT Empire Jumping Jacks deck). He was a really good sport, had a great friendly attitude and was a pleasure to play against. I’d say that even if I hadn’t won our match. I got off to a good start and he was running a Grudge-Thrower Dwarf deck but my quick start really solidified my chances for the win. This was the match, I think, where my Dragon Mage Awakenings came into play and really helped me keep some key units alive against a Master Rune of Spite. Again, despite having a win under my belt, I definitely played quickly so that he wouldn’t think I was trying to stall or something. In our second match, a moment came where I realized that I could seriously disrupt his card draw as he’d left himself a bit open to attack in that regard and I pressed the advantage, leaving him pretty hungry for cards – from that moment, it was pretty much headed my way and I actually won our second game before time ran out, giving me the official win. Very cool guy, would love to play him again. Rich, if you’re reading this, I hope you play again next year. My Record: 2 Wins, 1 Loss, 0 Tied.
GAME 4: For some reason, I just knew it would be a Dwarf deck, YET AGAIN, and it was. For crying out loud. Can’t recall the guy’s name who I played but he was a very strong player and really, really knew his stuff. Nice guy, and a very good sport but also deadly efficient with his Grudge-Thrower based Dwarf deck. I was feeling really good when I won the first game but it happened probably a bit too quickly and with my natural inclination NOT to try and be cheesy and stall, the second game suddenly got pretty dicey for me due to his strong usage of the Grudge-throwers. I’d also (foolishly) not gone after the 2 (!!) Dwarf Rangers he’d put into his Quest zone. This was a game where I made a few tiny mistakes and they cost me a win. The biggest one was that I was sitting on a game-changing Judgment of Verena for much of the middle-part of the game but didn’t have Developments in all my zones and couldn’t afford to hurt myself at that point. But looking back it would probably have been better to just slow things down since time was an ally for me, really, especially with one win already under my belt in this game. Anyway, through some pretty good luck, he managed to burn 2 zones in one turn due to the stupid Grudge-thrower and Dwarf Rangers – even when I finally had blown the GT up, he had another ready to use. Gah. We ended up Tying, which I was pretty concerned about since it meant that I definitely had to win my last game to make the Final 8. My Record: 2 wins, 1 Loss, 1 Tie.
GAME 5: This was it. Win this or go home. I figured it had to be another Dwarf deck, right? Wrong. It was Jon’s (Shubfan76) horrifying BT deck. My heart sank as I’d just witnessed it in all its hideous glory the day before and it had already destroyed Konrad earlier in the day. But a small part of me said, “We’re not going down without a fight at least.” A stubborn part of me wanted to prove that it was NOT an auto-win against a Dwarf deck. However, the first game certainly didn’t do much to boost my confidence as Shubfan smoked me in no time, easily winning in classic BT style. Ugh. I was starting to get that feeling of doomed inevitability as the second game started but then things changed. I decided to use a Ranger as a Scout instead, since I’d noticed that Shub had put only a single Support into his Quest zone (a Dwarf/HE banner). I also blew that up right away with a timely Demolition!. This left him precariously low on card draw while I’d just gotten two convenient Innovations in a row and was rapidly building up my resources at that point. He still was having trouble with card draw as we went forward partly due to some of my focus on it but also I suspect due to some bad luck, as well. Before I knew it, I had the win. Suddenly the BT deck didn’t seem so scary. Final game in the match, winner takes the match. I start strong and he seems to have only an average start. I get a quick burn and continue to press but he’s starting to build up a good resource base, though I’m still focusing on keeping his card draw down, which seems to be working pretty well. In this game, my High Elf’s Disdain came through I think at least twice (though I could be remembering it incorrectly, sorry to Shub if I am) and I was really pleased by that. Things were tense as I had a burn and 6 or 7 damage on his Quest zone while he was taking his turn and mulling over the two cards in his hand. Did he have that horrible Bolt-thrower in his hand and was he just figuring things out or was he taking his time because he didn’t have a lot of options? I didn’t know but I felt the incredible suspense building. Suddenly, Shub put his cards down and said, “I concede.” I could see that he honestly had nothing to help him and I would’ve been able to get the burn the next turn. I’d done it! I’d gotten the win it seemed that I would need to almost certainly make the Final 8. And I’d beaten a hated BT deck with my little Dwarf deck o’ Doom. I was super encouraged by the win and even more so because Shub was clearly a very, VERY good player. He was also a very good sport about the loss and I liked that he played quickly and assuredly during the match. My Record: 3 Wins, 1 Loss, and 1 Tie.
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A couple of quick thoughts about my deck’s performance – I didn’t notice very many of the Dwarf players I faced, if any, using Master Rune of Valaya to cancel damage, even though it easily saved my butt on at least 3 different occasions. I was surprised by that. My usage of Dragon Mage Awakening surprised nearly everyone I played which I found amusing. It really helped me out in several games for a variety of different reasons, so I was gratified that it came through for me because it surely seemed an odd choice to some. I was also happy I used High Elf’s Disdain, despite the high cost, as it helped me out in my most critical match, despite being mostly Development fodder in several other matches. Ancestral Tomb was awesome for me nearly every game, as well. And a few players were caught off-guard by my usage of the Slayers of Karak Kadrin to kill my own Attacking Units, so I was happy that I’d thought of doing so on my own, without having to see someone else do it first. In retrospect, though, I badly needed either another Verena or some way to get back played Developments as that omission did cost me a few games, I suspect.
So the big moment is here. Gio is going nuts because he’s won 4 games and only lost 1, which is insanely impressive for a total new player who only just learned the game about 3 days before. I was feeling a bit jealous since he’d had such great match-ups for his deck – facing only one Dwarf deck, and 2 Orc/Skavens, 1 DE, and a BT deck. But then I remembered that I built his entire deck and that cheered me up a bit. So James Hata steps up to announce the Final 8 and my jaw dropped when I wasn’t on the list. ShubFan also looked confused as he said it was very, very unusual for a 3-1-1 to NOT make the final cut in this amount of players. After asking about it, it turns out that another guy (who was the brother of my Game 3 opponent, Rich) had the same record but ostensibly a better SOS (Strength of Schedule) according to the tournament software. This was pretty frustrating for me since I have zero control over that aspect of my tournament. It may not be feasible but I think that in situations like that, the two tied players should have the right to play each other in a one-off, as it didn’t seem terribly fair to me. 
But to be honest, I was pretty happy with the win over Shub’s uber-tough BT deck and it nearly felt like a Championship win to me, in all honestly, so it took some of the sting out of the proceedings. Gio ended up losing a match he could have and probably should have won (Rich and I watched it go down to the wire) and that was it for our little group’s efforts on the day. Still, in retrospect, it was super enjoyable. All my opponents were very good sports who were enjoyable to play against. I had secured 9th place out of 40. Not too shabby for a father of 3 with little time to truly playtest and very little real tournament experience. 
My only disappointment was in how little time we had for our matches and in the quality of prize support – which from my perspective was pretty laughable/embarrassing. But that’s just my opinion and it’s based on the quality of prize support I saw given away not even 2 years earlier from FFG for the UFS World Championships, so take it with a grain of salt. Still, it was pretty sad, all things considered, I thought.
Anyway, after seeing how things went down at the World Championships, it’s pretty clear that 1. Dwarves are the new standard of awesome, 2. Bolt-Thrower decks are no less tough but they are beatable if you play against them in certain ways and have a bit of luck (which is something that any player would want anyway), 3. Orc/Skaven and/or DE decks are hurting right now, and 4. Chaos is dead-in-the-water, sadly.
Okay, it’s 2 am and I’m tired. Signing off for now. Feedback is appreciated. Hope this proved interesting and/or enjoyable to someone at least.
But, lets let this issue die.