# We Be Games July 1997 - Report

by Stefan Vincent
July 29, 1997

Hey All,
Sunday's demo & tournament was fairly well attended -- by the folks from this mailing list! Only one local person showed up and played. A couple others were floating around but came up with various excuses why they couldn't play.

Tournament was the typical multi-player, double elimination that we know and love so much. Nine players started in three games of three:
1. Mike N.'s Hand/Architect deck, Brandon's straight Architect deck, and my new 40 card Architect Tank deck (as usual, no rares for me). Surprising everyone, including me, I won. The Midnight Whisperer in the MegaTank was unstoppable by two other Architect opponents (not so in the later games, though...)
2. Jason's usual Ascended deck (huge sites and lots of power generation, then Shadowy Mentors out the wazoo), Ernie's brand new (just made it there) straight Ascended deck, and Matt (I didn't see what deck you were playing, Matt). Jason gets the win here.
3. Conrad (I didn't see what deck you were playing, either, Conrad), Brad's straight Hand deck, and Caroline's straight Ascended deck. Caroline pulls off the win here. (hmmm. Did I get Matt and Conrad switched here?)

Round two put the three winners together:
1. Jason, Caroline, and me: Always fun to talk a big game with Jason playing his Ascended deck. Caroline had control of the game for most of it, but unfortunately listened to Jason once too often :) and was beating up on me (I think I got one tank out the entire game. Not good - I couldn't get a Magic resource to get the Pocket Demons going, and without the power, well, those Tanks are just clogging up my hand...). That wasted just enough of her cards and Power on me to let Jason sneak in and take the win....
2. Matt, Ernie, and Brandon. Ernie gets the win here, but he and Brandon have to leave...
3. Brad, Conrad, and Mike N. Mike gets the win here.

Semi-final then puts the four folks remaining together: Mike N., Jason, me, and Caroline.
I started slow with the Plasma Trooper being my opening foundation character; Mike N. also got a slow start waiting for his Architects resources to show up. Of course that gave the Ascended folks time to build up, and with Jason's deck that's a big build up. Typical of games with the Ascended, the characters tended to make the rounds of the table - one turn CHAR works for me, then he works for Caroline, then he works for Jason. The game goes on for a looooong time, with everyone's run for the win being stopped by that last minute event (Operation Killdeer from Caroline and Jason; Neutron Bomb, Imprisoned, and Nerve Gas from me & Mike). At one point we ran out of stones in the pool - Jason had more than 30 power accumulated! After seeing Caroline's go for the win stopped three or four turns in a row, then having Mike stopped for a couple of turns, I thought it was all over when Jason Shadowy Mentored my Arcanotechnician in the MegaTank (yes, all my other characters were long gone, so she was my hitter), but what does he do with this 8 Fighting, Toughness:2, immune to Architects events character? He turns the Arcanotechnician to return a card to his hand. Of course, my Ring of Gates said "no" to that, and we all yelled at him. It's now about 8:45pm. Matt got disgusted and enforced the time limit after Caroline's last turn (after realizing that the next turn would deck me out anyway, and then we'd have to deal with my cards coming off the table - several of my cards had, uh, joined the Lodge, so to speak) - Jason used two Roars of the Beast on Mike to smoke two of his feng shui sites in typical Ascended spoiler fashion to break the tie and ensure that he only had to play Caroline in the final. So, Caroline gets the win in the semifinal.
(as I type this now, I realize that, as usual, we forgot to deal the 2 points of damage to each Family Estate when Lodge characters died. There were a *lot* of dead Lodge characters during this game...I doubt it would have made any difference, though)

The final is yet to be played: Caroline vs. Jason at some unspecified future date. Matt handed out prizes anyway, such as they were - a couple of Jackie Chan posters from the San Diego Comic-Con, and some miscellaneous other stuff. No, Jose didn't come through and send us anything. This tournament once again shows that the Ascended are pretty much the rulers of LA Shadowfist. I've never played with Chains of Bone, but it sounds pretty good right now...

Always fun to get my butt kicked. Next get-together will probably be after Gateway '97. Matt is running three tournaments, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, as usual. Gateway is again at the LAX Wyndham hotel (corner of Century & Sepulveda blvds.) on Labor Day weekend Aug. 29-Sep.1. Preregistration is $27.50 for all four days, and must be in by Aug.16th. Fee at the door is $33 for 2-4 days, or $17 for a single day. They also have the usual $5 per day "shoppers pass" to get into the dealer room but that doesn't allow you to play any games (well, at least not until you get caught, anyway).

No official word on Throne Wars yet. We'll see what Jose brings to GenCon, I guess. I'll be buying a couple of boxes, and I imagine a lot of other folks will want some as well - if you're interested in getting together with me to do a "bulk buy" and seeing if we can get a bigger discount than normal from our friendly mail-order suppliers, let me know how much you'd like. The word right now is that it will be packaged like Flashpoint, 36 packs of 9 cards each. I'd guess that puts the retail at about $54 per box (provided Jose doesn't up the price) which means the normal mail order price should be about $35 per box. We can maybe get that down to $30 per box if we make one big order together. Or not, depending on how much gets printed and what the demand is. Anyway, let me know if you're interested and how many boxes (or 1/2 boxes; we can always split one open if you don't want a whole box for yourself) you'd be looking for. I'll deal with that after GenCon.
That's all for now. I'll let you know how the tournaments go at GenCon...

Last modified: January 23, 1998.
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