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Tennessee State Championship Report
by Unimatrix Zero One Twenty-one players assembled at the Music City Con in Nashville, TN on April 9, 2000 for the Star Trek CCG Tennessee State Championships. Veteran volunteer Jim Colson came up from Huntsville, Alabama to run the tournament, so no Tennessee resident was denied a slot due to administrative duties. Along with five other players from the Tri-Cities area of northeast Tennessee, I made the 300-mile trek down to Nashville. Late on Saturday night, I definitively decided between the Borg and Ferengi decks I'd brought to the tournament. I went Borg. My Borg deck is absolutely straightforward. The draw deck is sixty cards strong, twenty of those being Awakens. The rest are split between drones, Transwarp Network Gateways, objectives, Q's Tents (five copies), one Cube and three Spheres. The idea is to spend the first one to three turns staffing a Cube with an Awakened Seven of Nine and three or four other drones, plus the seeded Complink Drone, and getting to the spaceline. After that, I redshirt the space objectives from the Sphere, with the Cube at an adjoining spaceline location. Bariel of Borg waits for me in a Cryosatellite beneath either Runabout Search or Deliver Supplies, whichever is nearest the spaceline end. I don't have as good a memory for games as some other tournament reporters, and I didn't write anything down during the day. So some of the details below are a bit sketchy. Nevertheless, I'll tell you my story. Round 1 My PowerBook, which is running the tournament software for the Championships, betrays me and pairs me against Ray Lacey for the first round. Ray beat me handily at Origins last year, our first and only game prior to this one. He's consistently in the top two ranked players in our region, Cardassia Prime. Ray is playing Bajoran, with Deep Space Nine and the Chamber of Ministers co-existing at Bajor. The first few turns are set-up on both sides. Ray scores a very quick 10 points with Vedek Dax returning an Orb of Prophecy and Change to Bajor. With that Orb in play and Morn in Quark's Bar, Ray controls his draw deck well. I get to the Alpha Quadrant quickly and start scouting. Ray's hand is growing. I soon find out why when he drops a handful of Rogue Borg on my ship. Thanks to the Reassimilation Drone, the damage isn't too extensive. But it does shut down my ability to scout and probe at 50 points. I spend the rest of the game fighting Rogue Borg and watching Ray build up his personnel until he can overcome my dilemmas. Final result: Ray 100, me 50. My kingdom for a Reactor Overload! Round 2 With a 0(-50) I am paired against Morgan Crigger, a younger player who at that point had 0(-40). Morgan's deck was, as far as I could tell, a fairly straightforward Federation mission solver with multiple copies of Study Pulsar and appropriate mission specialists. This game gets off to a pretty good start for me when I assimilate one of Morgan's 35-point planet missions. At this point, however, the game grinds to a screeching halt when Morgan tries to complete that same mission - an assimilated planet, mind you - and insists on a long argument about whether or not that's permitted. It takes a while to resolve this dispute, as Jim wants to be 100% sure before he rules on the question and he has several other questions to answer concurrently. Ugh. I also end up with a very unfriendly spaceline when my lone drone hits a Q dilemma. This slows me down considerably. Morgan completes enough missions to earn 75 points (with AMS bonuses), although he loses 10 to Lack of Preparation. I am ready to probe for my final Assimilate Planet when time is called. Final result: me 75, Morgan 65.
Feeling a little bit hopeless now for my overall standing, I am paired against my friend Harvey Morrell. Harvey is one of six players from my area (far northeast Tennessee) who has made the five-hour trek to Nashville for the tourney. Harvey is a relatively new player, and a relatively weak player at this point in time (though we are working on this). With a 1(-40) after two rounds I am not feeling good about myself. Harvey is playing Klingon. I quickly assimilate his Fever Emergency, then go on to my own dual-icon missions. I moved ahead to 75-0 pretty quickly. Harvey could have scored 40 points in his last turn by solving A Good Day to Live with Kor and Jadzia (the only dilemma left was Primitive Culture, and he knew that), but he got too excited about Blood Oath and used it to download Koloth, thus ending his turn. My next probe was successful, so the final result was me 100, Harvey 0. Round 4 With only 3(+60) I am surprised to find myself at the fourth table (in descending order) as we start round 4. Am I really in the top eight with 3(+60), or is this a glitch due to avoidance of repeat pairings in the upper tier? My opponent this round is John Carter, someone I had never met before. He's playing Romulan. John passes a lot during the seed phase, and I wonder what he's up to. We end up double-passing and I place several dilemmas out of play along with Bareil and the Cryosatellite, but one of my dual-icon missions has only one seed card under it. In the facility phase John makes what turns out to be a big mistake, seeding his Romulan Outpost at a 35-point planet mission. I promptly assimilate the planet along with a D'deridex Advanced and 10 and 01. Within two more turns I have completed Establish Gateway at one of my dual-icons and am ready to probe for Assimilate Planet. John calls Devidian Door and drops Lore on Romulus. He doesn't have a Devidian Door in his deck. Final result: me 100, John 0. Round 5 I've never met Brian Simmons before, my opponent for round 5, but he turns out to be my evil twin. He's playing Borg with a spaceline full of Construct Depots and dual-icon missions - just like me. Brian gets both his Runabout Search and his Deliver Supplies out before I do. So we both know that this round is going to be a race to the dual-icon missions. We both hurry to Establish Gateways and grab our Bareils. The scores stay pretty much neck-and-neck right up to the last minute. With fewer than 15 minutes to go in the round, I am getting ready to probe for my fourth objective at a mission Brian and I both have targeted. Brian has two Cubes; I have a Cube and two Spheres (one docked, one not). Brian decides to change his plans from Assimilate Planet to Eliminate Starship. His two Cubes fire on mine. I take Evasive Maneuvers and am just damaged, not destroyed. Now here's where I get stupid. I forget that, in order to impede my probing, the battles have to happen at the location targeted by my objective. At this point I should have moved the damaged Cube one location away. Instead, I counterattack and time runs out. Final result: Brian 75, me 75. Round 6 With only 6(+160) I'm thinking the final round is probably meaningless for me. Oh, how wrong. I find myself at the second table playing against Ben Lacey. Ben is the older brother of the aforementioned Ray Lacey, and Ben also consistently stays near the top of our region in rankings. Ben has a Nor, Central Command, and a somewhat high number of self-seeds that turn out to be Mysterious Orbs. With HQ: Return Orbs to Bajor on Borad, Ben quickly acquires a Mysterious Orb, relocates Seven of Nine to his Ops, captures her with Intruder Alert! and then Brainwashes her. Losing Seven is unfortunate, but since Torture is irrelevant and all my mugs is Swedish (hence no fear of Dixon Hill's Business Card), I press on. I complete my Establish Gateway where I have seeded the Cryosatellite + Bareil, but because of the one-turn delay in acquiring artifacts with the Survey Drone I never retrieve the artifact. Instead, Ben's Naprem swoops in and grabs it and Bareil. With a large number of personnel out, Ben completes a couple of missions in short order and the score stands at 75 me, 70 Ben with me read to probe for my last objective. Ben loads up the Naprem and beams one Cardie at a time over to my Cube to battle and thus impede my probing. Awaken + Reassimilation Drone + Talon Drone + special downloaded Intruder Alert! give me a new drone (Dakol, I think), but not permission to probe. After being spanked by battle with Brian Simmons in round 5, I'm thinking more clearly. Since the Cube is not damaged, I move it out of Naprem's reach. Ben attempts a space mission with a loaded Naprem, but he already suspects what he'll find - a Borg Ship dilemma. I move the Cube back and the probe goes my way. Final result: me 100, Ben 70. A few minutes later, when Jim announces the final standings, my jaw hits the floor when I learn that my measly 8(+190) was the second-place score! My friend Anthony, whom I mentioned before, placed third with 8(+163). So it was an exciting day for me personally, and a great day for the Upper East Tennessee contingent. The entire slate of final standings was as follows: 1. Ray Lacey 12(+423)
2. Chris Heard 8(+190)
3. Anthony Oliver 8(+163)
See you in Milwaukee on Day 2! by Chris "UZO" Heard
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