Here you go, guys! Give us a listen ! Also, I've been slowly having more details of my games come back to me since we recorded, soooo....... yeah. I'm not completely worthless.

With the Regional season over at this point, did anything surprising come out of the events?

I for one, was surprised by the very high ratio of Greyjoy choke decks at our event.

I was surprised that even with the new box, Targ still doesn't have the gas to compete.

I was surprised to see Stark do so well.

Kennon, you drew all the choke decks, I drew every champ in the meta, plus Nate. Fair is fair. XD

Haha, did you play Nate in the draft, I take it?

And wow, you must have had a strong SoS. I wish I could have remembered more details of our game. In particular, do you recall what you did to stop me on turn 6 that lead to me not winning and having to play Valar as plot 7?

Kennon said:

Wouldn't you have been forced to Valar on 7? or were you running some plot acceleration?

Oh yes, I would have been forced to on turn 7 regardless, but I was hoping to win before having to do that. Or at least find a way to keep the Mad Huntsman around.

Mad Huntsman got claimed for one dupe as Military, then you (inexplicably) let a Wintertime Marauders through during winter on a Power challenge, letting me discard the second dupe before you had to flip Valar on turn 7. Of note, I'd completely forgotten that you even could have had a Valar.

And my strength of schedule was the best of the 3-2's because of Dobbler and Kat. I think numerically it was 45-50, which was high enough for the one 3-2 slot. I played Kat (4-1), then Dobbler/Greg (5-0), then one of the MN guys that went 2-3 or 3-2, then the guy that was playing Greyjoy/Maester's Path who went 3-2, then the girl that made the Power Tokens who went 3-2.

I had a BLAST playing that tournament. I'm really sad that my prospects for getting to GenCon are shaky, at best. I love this community.

Nerdcore said:

Doesn't Wintertime Marauders only work on non-unique cards, and Mad Huntsman is unique?

I believe when a card becomes a duplicate it loses it's unique designation...

^This exactly. Duplicates are effectively blank, non-unique, traitless cards that read "Response: Save attached character".

We had Nate French sitting right there who said that this worked.

Yup, I remember asking him beforehand just to make certain.

Now I recall the whole scenario. I didn't actually have any power icons on the board. In fact, I'd seen a dearth of them all game. So you got the power challenge unopposed because I had no Orphan for the Marauders that turn, nor did I have a Burning on the Sands. So I didn't really have any choice but to suck it up and get screwed.

Nerdcore said:

Unless I'm wrong, Jayke, I think only the Nick-ler was present from Minnesota. The rest of the Northerners came from Iowa. What did they play?

And please, quite telling me how much fun the tournament was, I'm just barely happy with my decision to be mature, stay home and get my studying done. :/

Maester_LUke said:

~Studying is so overrated.

Maester_LUke said:

Lol, studying? That's no excuse, and also what car rides are for. And I probably heard someone say "Minnesota Regional" and confused it with "I'm from Minnesota". I do get clubbed about the ears a lot.

The one deck I remember was some kind of Maester's Path/Greyjoy deck that made fantastic use of Maester Wendamyr and Citadel of Old Town to provide 2 saves a turn.

WOOT! I got in the podcast. I played Will in his first round Joust, and he made me feel the pain of the Beric deck... In my meta we'd never seen anyone use the brotherhood agenda before, so Ken and I both were pretty much a loss for words when we had no responses to the Beric decks.

I had a Great time, and I can't wait to come up again, though it won't be anywhere in the near future as I need to save up for a wedding.

Awesome podcast. Keep em coming!

Nerdcore said:

~I'll take no guff from you, son. Until I have a laptop, I'm not hand scrawling a work I have to send via the interwebs.

On the other hand, you were actually quite right, Nick was running a Greyjoy/Maesters deck that totally wrecked me the week before when we're practicing in Iowa... and that was against my deck that won in MN. Congrats again on your performance.

Another great episode, guys. However, I have to register my disappointment that you had Nate in town and couldn't get a quick interview with him. I'd still love to hear any designer talk about the game in audio form.

It really was on our list of things to do, but sadly, I think FFG expected him to be back at work on Monday, so he and Nick left very early on Sunday morning. Friday night and all of Saturday day were just too busy with their respective tournaments to squeeze anything more in. :S

GenCon. No excuses. You'll have them both there and I'm sure if you supply the liquor they'll find some free time.

Haha, but if we supply the liquor, will they be intelligible at all?

Kennon said:

Having been both at GenCon and supplied with liqour every year for...um....too many years, I have to say this is a recipe for disaster.

I can't wait actually! Drunk draft podcast!

Good episode, you guys are getting more and more polished - less people talking at once (other than you and Z a couple of times saying the exact same ting), obviously very scripted at least on the direction of the episode. Congrats!

Ruth Bader Ginsburg!

Ah.... Iove that joke.

But yeah, we do sound more polished lately? This is good. I always worry about it during edits.

Just listened to the podcast (somehow listened to ep27 first?), and a few notes:

+1 to Mumford and Sons, The Decemberists, and The National. Get with the program, Dobbler. Especially the National. I thought for a brief time that the M&S album might overtake High Violet for me, but I keep coming back to High Violet more. I actually like the Avett Brothers slightly more than Mumford, but they've been around a lot longer so it's not an entirely fair comparison. They're both fantastic. (Weird, though, that my least favorite M&S song was the first single...)

Sounds like some interesting and creative decks abounded in MO. Always great to hear the humorous stories behind the games. Having Melee the day after Joust sounds like a nightmare, though. Hopefully you guys can fix that for next year.

On the matter of breaking deals in Melee, I'd have to agree with Kennon that I'd feel more uncomfortable "gaming the system" than I would breaking a deal in Melee, within reason. So what do I consider reasonable deal-breaking? Any time we play a war game around here, we always have the expectation that if a deal is made, the one time it's acceptable to break it is if doing so wins you the game. That's how I play Melee. I know there are lots of exceptions for some players in how they view certain situations. But breaking a deal just to screw someone over seems counter-productive to me, and could easily come back to bite you later if you get a reputation for that kind of thing. I know I wouldn't make any deals with someone who had screwed me over just for fun (in the current game or a past one). But I wouldn't hold it against someone for breaking a deal with me if doing so won him/her the game.

I realize not everyone has the same opinion.

Just for curiosity's sake, Longclaw, what about the deal that I broke with Dobbler up in MN? Discarding the Horn of Dragons didn't win me the game (at least not directly that turn) but it sure kept me from losing as Dobbler used my character every turn.

You can make an argument that any play that doesn't go your way could eventually lose you the game. The Scurvy Cutthroat on my Horn of the Dragons happened on round 2. Game ended on round 4.