The Newington regional took place this past Saturday with a decent turnout of 13 players, from across the Northeast. The day started with one round of melee followed by 4 rounds of Swiss joust and then a cut to the top eight. Every house was represented with Stark being the most popular pick, with 4 players choosing the house of wolves.
The final top eight standings are as follows (with apologies in advance if I get any restricted cards wrong!).
- Stark/No agenda/Meera Reed
- Lannister/Power Behind the Throne/Pyromancers Cache
- Baratheon/Long Voyage/ Refugee of Highgarden
- Greyjoy/Aeron Damphair/Fear of Winter
- Targaryen/Maester’s Path/Maester’s path
- Stark/No agenda/Fury of the wolf
- Targaryen/Hollow Hill/Hatchlings Feast
- Stark/HoD-Harrenhal/No Quarter
While I came into the event thinking my Stark deck could hold its own, I was really expecting to use this event as a way to scope out the field and make tweaks based on what it looked like the big powerful builds were going to be. I entered the elimination rounds as the sixth seed, facing a Stark deck that I had just played and went to time against. It was a very war crest heavy deck and I needed to use Meera to blank out his strength boosting characters and locations. His deck was a bit lighter in intrigue than mine, so I chipped away at his hand as best I could. The major turning point here was actually the reset plot. He was running Wildfire instead of Valar, so I was able to keep three big characters on the board. From there out I was able to keep control of the board and take the game.
Top 4 game was against the Baratheon Long Voyage. We both had a lot of characters on the board, and since he was running a lot of holy and renown, a good deal of his power was on his characters. I overextended a bit, thinking he wouldn’t reset the board because of it, but he did. From then out it was a game of who would make the least mistakes. A miscalculation on his part of swinging in for a late challenge when it wasn’t needed was I think did him in, but being able to capitalize on mistakes is a huge part of competitive play, something that was really driven home in the championship match.
Power Behind the throne was the deck I was dreading most coming in. I was running enough intrigue to stave off the first intrigue challenge each turn, but that was it. I got off to an early lead, being able to kill off the smaller characters and use Maege a few times to bulk up my location base. Once Cersei came in and she was able to claim double renown, it started going to Lannister’s favor. In hindsight, I may have waited one turn too late to reset the board, especially as Cersei kept raking in power and I was expecting to see a Power of Blood on the turn that I did Valar. It didn’t come and I was able to drop two characters, Maege and Rickon. The mistake came when my opponent mistakenly stealthed past Rickon instead of Maege on a power challenge. I knelt and stood her with Frozen Outpost, winning the challenge as a result. As I had no hand at that point, so he Valared next turn, hoping I wouldn’t draw anything I needed. Luckily I drew two characters and he was only able to drop one. That was enough to seal the victory, in one of the most exciting matches I have ever been fortunate enough to play. One mistake can really make or break a game for you, and it was really unfortunate that that was the play that probably sealed my victory.
Many thanks go out to ConnetiCon for holding the event, Adam and the other Connecticut players for being our gracious hosts, the Boston players that came down and discovered that they do in fact have a meta(!), and of course my fellow NYC meta mates, both Jim and Dave who made the trip up with me, and all those that couldn’t. The help with my deck and the level of competition you provide on a weekly basis has been invaluable in making me a better player.