I am sure that there will be several Tournament Reports flooding the boards over the next few days. Because of that I was not going to write one. However, given the unique situation that I find myself in after the events of the melee, I decided to get some thoughts out before memory fails me.

Before getting to the good stuff I'll give a brief summation of my Joust experience. Over the past 3 to 4 months I have come to accept that while I have a modicum of talent in playing this game, I cannot build a T1 deck if my life depended on it. I built and play tested the heck out of a Martell - Summer - Bannermen deck for several months prior to worlds, but ultimately decided that it was just too predictable to make a deep run. Luckily for me, geography is my friend, and I happen to live less than 10 miles from several of the most brilliant aGoT minds on planet earth (a fact which I did not even realize until shortly after I found aGoT and joined the DC Meta, when I received an email from a one Erick Butzlaffe, yelling at me to stop clogging up our listserv with basic rules questions, and I recognized the name from the bottom of Blackfish card). So long story short, I did not play the Martell deck, and opted for a very small variation of the DC Stark Winter build in Joust.

I drank a LOT of alcohol on Saturday so I dont really remember much of the details of these games, so I'll just make a comment or two about any significant moment from each one. Disclaimer: some of the names might be wrong, and the order of opponents might be transposed.

Round 1 - Loss
Martell (summer?) - Kyle (wolfangsenff) I had a 2 card setup (old nan and meera) and he steam rolled me.

Round 2 - Win
Bara Maesters - Morgan. Got meera and a flank out early and won several 2 claim chals. Morgan is really the best. She always wins and loses with class and smile. Somehow I end up paired with her at every tourney we have ever been at together. That makes sense in the 15-20 person regionals, but hilarious that it happened at the 81 person worlds.

Round 3 - Win
Martell Quentyn - Ryan. I was able to blank and no quarter quentyn in round 1.

Round 4 - Win
Martell HH - Ryan. He got a Bannermen out in round 1 or 2, but almost no resource locations so he couldnt play much else. I recall that i old nan -> ally -> dissension'd the bannermen, but the cards he got didn't really seem to help. I dont think he ever found a cyvasse.

Round 5 - Win
Greyjoy Summer - Steve from team covenant. Glad to meet him, really nice guy. Second best beard at worlds. He probably would have won this game because I started really slowly after he got some choke in with river blockade and dromond, but he drew something like 17 locations in his first 25 cards. Horrible horrible luck for him.

Round 6 - Win
Targ Maesters - Raf (spanish champ from what i heard). he was playing the demons dance, raven kill recursion theme but had a horrible setup and could never really get the combo started. i made my strategy to just assault his hand, playing all my int chars and 2 claim plots to start the game and caring about nothing else. i was able to pull many of the cards he needed for int claim so he never got the combo or the recursion up and running, and when a shagga deck fails, it fails hard. This game ran remarkably smooth considering he spoke little to no english, and all his cards were in spanish.

Made the cut at 5-1 then lost in a mirror match to Chad B in top 16 game (f- you chad ) then spent the next 9 consecutive hours partying with the greatest community of people on earth (even had a sick theorycrafting discussion with a one John Bruno who will henceforth be referred to by me as the DC Steamroller).

Final result was 13th place in Joust. 49% of the credit to Erick and Corey for the list.

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Melee - Below is my candid feelings on the events leading up tourney, the play of the tourney, and the DQ. I made a quick statement directly after the event just to calm some of the ragers down, but I now have some time to get a more complete and coherent thought out, along with how I think FFG should word the rules in the future to make it so that if this situation happens again in the future, I would have been the only one who would/should have been DQ'd

This was my first melee tournament ever. I generally do not like melee as a competitive game. To me it is more akin to getting together with friends and playing poker with a few beers. It should be a social focused party game, and I treat it as such. Before this tourney and a few prep games, the last melee I played in was New Year's Eve 2011. When I made the decision to attend World's, I was looking forward to playing the melee almost more than the joust, mainly because I take the Joust so ridiculously serious, I wanted to finally play 'the fun version' of aGoT with all of the people on the boards that I talk with on a regular basis, but have never met. I had no idea what I was going to play because my lack of experience gave me no real sense of what a 'good' melee deck should be. Fast forward to a few weeks ago and I started to hear some chatter about the now infamous Hellholt - Scourge combo. On paper it is completely ridiculous. For those who weren't there or have no idea what I am talking about I will explain. If two people are at the same melee table, and both have The Scourge and a Hellholt Engineer in play, they can both infinitely respond with the engineers to kneel then stand their scourges to wipe out all the icons on the table. The engineer can also be used to great effect in marshalling. If you are not first player you can kneel and restand your reducers several times to build up a big resource buffer to play a ton of stuff for cheap. I thought it was a cute idea, but ultimately decided not to play it because I couldn't comprehend how the deck could win on its own. I thought it needed the combo to be in play to have any chance to succeed. A few play test games amongst the meta quickly proved that assumption vastly incorrect.

We did extensive testing as a meta with the deck playing at a solo table by itself, just to see how it would perform on its own. We knew with such a large field it was a slim chance that any of us would ever be at the same table together. Throughout testing it became apparent very quickly that because almost all the popular melee builds/archetypes, including all houses, have multiple locations that kneel to activate their effect in the challenges phase (the targ influence and dragon stuff, the bara hook and cove, the martell scourge (whether they know about the combo or not), the greyjoy warships…) that no matter who or what else was at the table, that deck going to bend the table over and dictate exactly what was going to happen. And that is ultimately the reason we all decided to play the deck. Had playtesting proven that the deck sucked unless it happened to be in tandem with its mirror, no one would have played it. It was its outstanding performance against all comers that sealed the deal, not the fact that it was completely broken with its mirror.

After its beast status was confirmed, and because as you all know im a gigantic blabber mouth who generally discusses his decklists publicly even BEFORE a tournament starts, word got out and several other people (i am refering to non-DC non-WISC folks now) decided to play the deck as well. This is why people think we had 20 people in the field of 51 playing deck.

So the melee pairings are announced.

Game 1 - No meta mates at the table, I take 1st.
Game 2 - No meta mates at the table, I take second, and only miss first because Derek forgot to take syrio out of shadows to execute the deal we made for me to get first and him to get second after it was determined he couldn't win, so we reversed the deal and I dumped to him.
Game 3 - One meta mate at the table, I take 1st.
CUT
First playoff table - No meta mates at the table, I take 1st (are you starting to see the pattern yet?).

I am not going to discuss the final table details. Because it was live streamed, everyone knows what happened and it was discussed to death already. If I have time this weak, I am going to re watch it and make a log of each player, the challenges and control actions each player made, and who the target of those actions was. I cannot back it up with hard numbers right now but I guarantee that those numbers will show you that Erick, Rick and I beat up on each other orders of magnitude more than we did with Mathieu. It is just unfortunate that because of the plots he essentially became a spectator for three rounds (and for anyone who dares to suggest that we pre-determined what round each of use would play that plot, I swear here and now, may my 14 month old daughter develop leukemia and die if I'm lying, that never happened).

The Final Round: It has already been proven in great detailed analysis in other posts that if we did not strip Mathieu in that last round, since he was going first, that he was going to win. He had to be icon stripped in order to prolong the game. So there is no collusion there we all worked to keep the game active. If you say you would have acted differently in that spot in our shoes, then your are either a liar, an *******, or both When it came to my challenge, I needed 1 power to win the game, and the title of World Champ Melee 2012. A decent amount at stake no? Here is the juice, I needed Erick to icon strip Mathieu like he did earlier in the phase so that I would be in the position to win like I was now sitting. He could have stood pat and let Mathieu win, and he opted not to do that. Erick did this for me because I made a deal that I'd try to find a way to get him into second position if I could on my turn before I won (he was currently sitting in 3rd and wanted to move up in overall standings). Erick had 11 power, Rick and 14 power, and Mathieu had 7 I believe. Rick had the redirect title. The plan was to attack Erick win a dummy challenge, let him get to 14 power with his 2 renown, I'd steal a power from Rick with my Ellaria because I'd have lost the challenge (putting Rick at 13 power), then I would make the final challenge and win the game. The reason that the analysis of the final challenge took so agonizingly long, was because I strongly suspected Erick had seen something on the board that would allow him to backstab me in conjunction with Rick, allow him to work with Rick to take 1st Place from me (something that I assure you he has done several times before in our private games, and would have given him a GREAT deal of pleasure to do on this big of a stage, and on a live stream no less), and I wanted to be 110% sure that this was not possible. There was so much on the line, so many different variables, I wanted to make sure I checked, double checked, and then triple checked every scenario before I made that last challenge.

(note: some people have said we colluded to make Mathieu take 4th, but hopefully above you can see that him taking 4th would have just been an unfortunate byproduct of the only way I could have kept my deal with Erick, and not the whole intent of the deal in the first place)

In my opinion, here is where the entire collusion issue should be compartmentalized, and where I believe FFG decided to step in. When I became the active player in the final round, I needed no further assistance from anyone to win, as I had already received the assistance that I needed via the deal I made with Erick. Once I started trying to move Erick up in the standings, even if I was only doing so to honor the previous deal, I did not strictly need to do that in order to win the game, the tournament, and the championship. Once I was in position to win on my own, I decided to do something else first, and was thus no longer acting in solely my best interest, and in a loose sense that can be considered collusion. I no longer needed to fear any deal-breaking retaliation from Erick because he would have had no further chance at retaliation during the current tournament if I had just ignored the deal and ended the game. Now we can debate for pages and pages about whether or not ignoring my deal with Erick would hurt my deal making reputation in future tournaments, but I don't want to so **** off

If the collusion rules are changed so that any deals about position jockeying are fine, so long as making/honoring them does not falsely extend the entire tournament (something that is only possible at the final table) then I think I would be the only one guilty of it since I had the opportunity to end the tourney with an action and opted not to take that action, I would have been legitly DQ'd and the title would have gone to Rick.

That's really all I have to say about it at. I do not think FFG owes me or anyone else an apology. What's done is done. Nate and Damon both came out to the bar after the Joust and I talked to both to make sure they knew I had no issue with the ruling, they are both great people and FFG is going to kick ass in 2013.

TLDR - http://bit.ly/QBGckM

cheers,
Dennis Harrison Jr. - AKA - DCDennis

Penfold should have given you a beatdown like he did to those colluders at 2003 Pokemon Worlds. Those young ladies will never collude again.

I didn't get to watch the video live, I've just heard about everything. So that's where I'm coming from, a new player who has only second and third hand knowledge of the actual events.

I'm not a fan of people making decks designed to work together in what is supposed to be a free for all environment. (And rather or not it is a good deck without the mirror aspect, it was obviously designed to work with all the other copies running around.) I think that bothers me more than anything that happened. Along those lines, I have a question, in your third melee game, where you played with a metamate, what position did the mate get in that game?

That said, if you legitimately believe you weren't doing anything wrong at the final table, (which I have no opinion about as I didn't see it) then you are handling it much better than I would have and props on that.

On the flip side if deal making during the game is considered collusion a large part of what I enjoyed about the melee format will be gone.

Editted in the parentheses to make my point clearer.

Shadowcatx said:

He finished second.

Note: The only reason he finished second instead of first is because I canceled his make an example so I could win. Otherwise he would have won and I would have been second.

dcdennis said:

You'll be more likely to have this information, of all the times y'alls decks were put together at a table, how many times did they capture all the top spots?

I dont know exactly, but I will say it is a lot less than you would think. Several of us never even got an engineer on the table all day, opting to grab Myrcella or the Viper instead.

Oh, and just as an aside, I think the deck is brilliant.

dcdennis said:

~Is no one going to call him out on using his daughter to weasel out of this?

dcdennis said:

~Another good cop-out. Are we to assume now that it wouldn't hurt your reputation?

From the sound of it on these boards, people love making Erick into a villain, so it may have made you a hero.

Come on dennis. I dare you. Go there.

hehe ya everyone keeps laughing that somehow im the only human where getting dq'd for collusion seemed to have HELPED my public image. i have had the full range of reactions though from 'we all know who really won' to 'you are despicable'.

The Cossack said:

Erick likes making himself the villain.

Dobbler said:

i can confirm this. during playtesting he wears a vader mask and never breaks character.

Shadowcatx said:

You need to change your thinking - the decks took advantage of the melee format and the ability to have someone of value on the table for other people to offer you deals. Yes, when those other people had the mirror the deal was even sweeter…but engineer stands on its own in melee without the whole 'combo'. This is not an example of a card that is terrible unless you have a friend who can power it up in some way.

papalorax said:

Where, exactly, did I say the card was terrible? As for needing to change my thinking, why, so I can get DQed next year? I'll pass, thank you very much. lol

___

Does anyone actually have a decklist? It can't be just the Engineer that makes this deck special.

dcdennis said:

The breathing alone would be quite distracting, I should think.

___

The only thing you need for the deck list is the hellholt engineer, The Scourge, and Brimstone. Have 2 players with that on the board. One offers the other the deal of "dont' scourge me, I won't scourge you" and the game is on. Well, for those two players. The othet 2 will not have icons. Venomous Blade took care of the hellholt each of them had in the 3rd game, but with Brimstone they were still able to remove tons of icons, which is where most of the time went.

Yes you did cancel your meta-mate's Make an Example, which he was extremely upset about, but then you also removed the majority of my icons so I couldn't take any of his power and get 3rd (or even 2nd) for myself. Which gained you nothing. From my point of view it was done to keep the standings the way they were, with him keeping 2nd and you getting to 1st on your To the Spears turn. But that is the way things go in melee. The worst part was his poor reaction to getting 2nd, which he did eventually apologize for after I called him on it.

I will say the deck actually did look a lot like the deck I was running myself in terms of character base, but the addition of the hellholt+scourge+brimstone is what sets it apart from mine. I am curious actually, were you guys running Quentyn? I don't recall you having an agenda.

he was in the first draft, but later removed. in testing our melee games rarely lasted past 3 plots, and that wasnt enough time to get much use out of him.

Slothgodfather said:

With the judges lording over us the whole time, I thought it was a good oppurtunity to let them know I hate Dennis.

The poor reaction was all part of the game of thrones--I wasn't trying to get DQ'd like those scrubs did in the finals.

Sorry if you were hurt by any of it, but I did what had to be done.

kr4ng said:

All part of the show eh? nice. But with that being your reaction to getting 2nd I wonder what you would have done if he had taken your icons instead and let me steal some power from you to get second, leaving you at 4th place? And now your meta-mates are scrubs after getting to the final table?