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Author: Joshua "Stormcrow" Grace
Title: old-skool-strikes-back-mpls-mn-10-10
Date Published: 2000-10-16
I wanted to write a tournament report again for the heck of
it and was going to write about Saturday’s (10/14) tourney
in St. Cloud, MN, but I decided that I wanted to keep my
decks and my opponent’s decks as secret as possible until
after the Minnesota Grand Slam. So, instead, I decided to
write about the Tuesday night tourney at Mirkwood Coffee &
Comics.
We play a tournament at Mirkwood every week, and I found out
that I could only play the same (and against the same) silly
purple cards for so long before I needed a break. My Dark
Side decks, especially, had seen so little variety (BHBM &
Hunt Down) that I needed to completely rethink the whole
process. Meanwhile, I had *finally* managed the week before
to regain possession of a Dantoine Base Operations card
which I had really wanted to play since Death Star II had
brought out Menace Fades. I figured I could play DBO a lot
like RalOps. So I built a DBO deck and decided to play an
Old Skool Jabba’s Palace manipulator complete with Mi’yoom
(yuck), Scanning Crews (yuck, yuck), Dangerous Times (yuck,
yuck, yuck) and only two Death Star II cards: Lord Vader &
the Chimaera.
We had some mid-teens number of players. Chad Steger wrote a
report about the same tournament and might have had more
general information.
Game 1: My DBO vs (sorry, forgot his name) Random Tie Stuff
This kid seems like a nice guy and just recently started
showing up for tourneys with his brother. Between the two of
them, they seem to have each specialized in one side of the
force, borrowing the other brother’s left-overs to play
their weak side. He played his brother’s random left-overs
against me. Which was okay with me since my DBO was fairly
weak. He started Meditation Chamber... and that was it. So I
had no clue and started with my usual Signal and Goo Nee Tay
to kill deployment at Dantooine. I can’t remember much
about the game other than that we both deployed sites and
drew for a few turns until he left a Dreadnaught on its own.
The Falcon came down and was soon Legendary, and that was
about all that was needed. Can’t remember what else I deployed
or why...
FW 2(+33)
Game 2: My Old Skool Manipulator vs Garret Larson HB B-wings
Hmm... Well, Garret had expressed many times in the past how
he hates manipulation (and frequently starts Scrambled
Transmission just to kill it), so since he’s a bit larger
than me, I tried to make him promise not to beat me up after
the game (he didn’t promise). When we sit down to start, I
say the only Style Points I might get for this game are
Old Skool points, and when I reveal Jabba’s Palace and
Expand the Empire, we both agree that I got those. Then I
proceed to Scanning Crew and Monnok and do crap to him and
force drain with Gailid (pulled him with Audience Chamber
since Garret had no characters in his hand) and Dangerous
Times so that his B-wings, Surprise Assaults, Intruder
Missiles and stuff are all clumped into doubles, and
Monnok comes back to chew up cards. Vader and his Saber add
to my drain and back up Gailid, and Garret later reveals
that he didn’t have enough systems in his deck to flip,
having constructed the deck in a hurry and forgotten one
of his usual systems. Nonetheless, I’ve been holding a
bunch of cards in my hand and have taken a few drains of 2
or 3, not wanting to put a ship down against his B-wings
until I was safe from the Missile / Power Pivot combo.
FW 4(40-something)
Game 3: My DBO vs Herb Macy’s Endor Ops / Death Star Constr.
Herb plays this objective a lot, and I’ve seen it most
frequently (and recently) with high-ability guys like Vader,
the Emperor, Janus, Sim Aloo and such. So I start Goo Nee
Tay, and it turns out this is some variant of his deck that
plays a lot of 2-ability pilots and matching ships. This
was a fairly ugly game for a dispute in the middle, but at
some point, I flipped to reduce his drains. He got his Death
Star constructed and was getting me for 2 with that and 1 at
Endor. I had a hell of a time getting a ship and finally
drew the Tantive and started battling with that. At one
point, I battled against some stuff at the system the
Death Star was orbiting, and he shot my Tantive (I had
forgotten about his Superlaser and That Thing’s Operational
- even though I was losing force to it)... so I lost it and
a couple pilots and Han to the Bacta Tank. Next turn, Han
came back out and got on the Falcon with Leia w/Blaster,
wrecked some ships of his (over the course of two turns,
since I actually lost the first battle and had to wait on
Legendary) and got Legendary Starfighter out and Honor of
the Jedi (to stop his Death Star damage) and landed the
Falcon at the Landing Platform (instead of facing 5 or 6
Star Destroyers at Endor). He never deployed to Dantooine,
so I just drained there for one a turn, one at the Landing
Platform and Legendary for 2 each of his turns, while he
was getting me for a grand total of 1 at Endor.
FW by 11.
6(+50-something, maybe 60... do you really care?)
Somehow it turned out that all the 2-1 players were on the
same side of the force as me, so I ended up playing against
the top 1-2 player--Graham Neal. Graham Neal? He’s one of
the better players in our area. What was he doing at 1 and
2? It turned out he was playing SYCFA Ties without the
Sienar Fleet Systems that Jim Li had borrowed...
Game 4: My Old Skool Manipulator against Graham’s EBO -
Baraguin.
I thought he would beat me because he would get EBO
out with non-unique aliens and drain with pilot & ship
combos he would pull with Squadron Assignments. Instead,
I managed to set Gailid at the Audience Chamber first turn
(again no characters in his hand--well, apart from the two
Ishi-Tibs) and back him up shortly with Vader and his Saber.
Scanning Crews tore him apart. Dangerous Times and Monnok
and Secret Plans (why weren’t more people playing with this
and Aim High at worlds?) made life hell for him, and I
pulled off the biggest win of my career. FW +41.
So, the whim that brought me back to Old Skool JP
Manipulator proved successful in the local meta (I was
lucky not to face Profit--it would have been a much more
difficult game), and I managed to successfully use DBO
before No Escape comes in and needlessly kills an already
challenged deck type.
Josh "Stormcrow" Grace
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