Yep, my congratulations to Damien, too!
COCLCG said:
wow. haha. didnt realise the dark byakhee sucked so much ( though it does take a bit to get used to ). do you know if he played the same deck on the sunday ??
I don't know if he also played it on Sunday - I had to leave early and didn't see what he played.
The funny thing is both me and Wolfgang (who picked me up on the to Liege) had independently considered playing the Dark Byakhee. We both had the problem that we didn't have the time to create a new deck and like Francesco our two latest APs arrived only a week before the tournament.
I had played four test games using Dark Byakhee against my old deck and DB won only once. Two games were very close, though, taking over an hour and ending with 2:3 stories. On the day before the tournament we played another two test games, one against Wolfgang's old deck and one against Christian's preliminary deck (based on Ulrich's deck from GenCon 2011(?)). DB didn't win against either so we decided to go with our old decks.
In the tournament I actually played against Jonathan in the second round (after being crushed by mzi in round one) and immediately recognized the deck. My familiarity with the deck caused me to become overconfident, though, so after leading with two stories to zero I made a small mistake, allowing him to score his first story, followed by a surprising win of the 'Village of Ash' helped by taking over my 'Julia Brown'. In the end we both had two stories and ran out of time. He was declared winner because he had one success token more than me.
Deserves me right, I guess. Well, at least I won the two last games but that was a small consolation.
Anyway, just like last year it was a great tournament with many interesting decks and to my big surprise a fair share of combo decks, as well. I was definitely glad I had decided to keep Snow Graves in my deck… I have few opportunities to play CoC between tournaments, so I played as many games as I could in the time I had.
I'll refrain from saying more about the other decks, though, before Worlds (i.e. November 11th), since several players asked for it.