Tournament Report – Carlow 23^rd July 2000

Soul of the Empire was legal. Proxies were legal.

Well, this tourney was our last real chance to really get some serious testing in before GenCon US. And I am glad we did it. It was back to the drawing board for me last night!!

There were 17 of us in total. Ralph came up from Waterford, Tom, Justin and J K came up from Limerick (via Waterford), Richard came up from Cork (via Dublin) and myself, Gordon, John R, Brendan, Greg, Baz, Emmett, Gary, Ollie & Brian came down from Dublin. Hosting the show were Jim and Greg from Carlow itself. A special thanks goes out to Jim for organising this event. It gets bigger every time!

So we had 3 Scorpion, 3 Crane, 3 Crab, 2 Fox, 2 Mantis, 1 Dragon, 1 Shadowlands, 1 Phoenix and 1 Monk.

Well, I got a bye in the first round, so that gave me an opportunity to have a look around and see what the score was. (I wasn’t scouting as such. I wasn’t using Hantei!!) It was quickly evident that the dishonor decks were going to be troublesome. Scorpion Dishonor saw off a Fox Oni deck and Fox Dishonor saw off a Scorpion Rat deck.

In the 2^nd round I was matched up against Greg McRandals scorpion dishonor. Bummer!

I have played this deck about 20 times and I have beaten it about twice! Today was no different. He got me down to minus twenty just as I was about to get goin’! (Actually I was pretty dead regardless I imagine. I so desperately needed a Sagoten out it wasn’t funny!)

Next I got to play Toms’ Crane Magistrate deck using Shirasu Sensei. I enjoyed this game, but for all the wrong reasons. Kage xp5 came up on turn 1 and I just got this silly notion in my head that I wanted to bring him out! I played like a complete muppet, but I was really interested to see the magistrate deck working. Tom ran for honor (actually he more or less jogged!) and I just watched helpless, killing off people just to prove a point.

Oh dear, not having a great tournament, but I was strangely in high spirits. I went down to the bar to get some beer and decided to get some soup aswell (top notch stuff! Carrot and Ginger!) and sat chatting to my next opponent, Brian Mulcahy, who was, I think equally despondent about his deck. We had an interesting chat about the story and GenCon and the frustration of overpowered strongholds and hyper competitive players.

Well we eventually started our game and this time, my deck seemed to work. Slapping the Wasting Cheese and the Book on a Moshi Wakisa I made mince meat of all them little crab shuggies and the new Toritaka guy. I think he reached 33 honor before it was all over for him.

So I felt a little better about the deck and I really enjoyed playing it (which had never really been in doubt. I love my deck!)

On to face J K with his Monk Enlightenment deck! It should be mentioned at this point that J K found enlightenment years ago when he first set eyes on the WWF. And it is certainly a surprise to see a monk turn up with a T-shirt declaring that he will ‘layeth the smackdown on my Candy ass!’ As you guessed, J K, isn’t really a monk. He is a Shadowlands player, but he was playing a pretty good Monk deck. Well, he whupped my ass regardless.

Ah well………

Prizes consisted of truck loads of LBS awakenings starers and boosters. Everyone got at least a starter, with the winners getting’ loads of boosters aswell.

So……….. any observations.

Yep. Dishonor is strong in the current environment. Shirasu sensei looks very good, though the amount of dishonor in the environment might cause some problems for it. (Justin playing Phoenix Shirasu should have won the semi-final against the Fox dishonor. He had a superior tactics in hand when Gary dropped an entrapping terrain, but didn’t play it. When it was pointed out to him after the game. He just looked at it and declared that he hadn’t played the card in 18 months, he just forgot about it…)

Shrined Crane is pretty good too and the big surprise was the poor show from the scorpion rat decks. With so much dishonor in the environment they just got moidered!

Well there you go.

In case you were wondering, my deck was just a Mantis-Kolat personality denial. Its pretty good, but it just didn’t perform on the day. So I am looking at METH again…