I will always remember Ben, he was my first ever Star Trek CCG role model.   Back in 1996, I was just starting out as a tournament player.  There were 2 major tournament scenes in England at the time, one in London and another in Warwick.  Sanctioned tournaments were the new thing and the idea of ‘Ambassadors’ had only just been introduced.  In those days, I was a Warwick player and knew nothing of the London scene.  On my first trip down to London I won my first ever tournament with other Warwick players Rik and Martin finishing 2nd and 4th.  We thought we were amazing.

On my next trip down to London things were different though.  A player called Ben Janes turned up with a deck that was later named ‘Loca R’Mor’.  I maintain to this day that Ben was the first person in the world to use this deck.  He beat me in about 3 turns and I was thoroughly humbled.  Now back in those days, tournaments were major events.  Warwick was considered quite active because it had about 6 tournaments a year.  For the next 6 months, all we could think about was ’How could we beat Ben’s deck?’  This all cumulated in the 1997 regional.  This was the first ‘serious’ tournament ever to be held in the UK.  I built my deck especially to beat Ben’s using Radioactive Garbage Scow and DRAGS to hurt him when he attempted missions from his outpost.  I also borrowed a lot of concepts from his deck using Federation STA drops instead of Romulans to complete Space missions quickly.

Predictably, given its success, Ben turned up with the same deck to the regional.  In one of the best moments of my career I beat him 100-0, stealing his Quash Conspiracy on my first turn and then killing all the people at his other outpost with DRAGS.  To this day it remains one of my proudest victories ever.  I went on to win the tournament beating a hungover Rik Thomas into second place with Ben finishing 3rd.

This game seemed to mark a change in fortunes for both me and Ben.  I went on to win 2 more UK regionals and become one of the top ten players in the world.  Ben disappeared into obscurity within a year.  The next time I saw him was at one of Marcus Sheppard’s tournaments in London.  He played a Borg deck and finished about 4th.  He claimed he was now taking the game less seriously and had just played the deck for a bit of fun.  After that I never saw him until the 1998 regional.  Such was the regard that he was held in that I still considered him my biggest rival.  My fears were ungrounded however as he finished about half way down the field.  I never even found out what he was playing.  Paul Bartlett and Ian Vincent took 2nd and 3rd place behind me.

This was the last time I saw Ben.  You may remember that he was one of the people I was looking for in my ‘Where Are They Now’ article in Ruling Britannia a few months ago.   Apparently Marcus has spoken to him recently and he is getting married to a Swedish girl.  Good luck to him.  Reading this article you may come to the conclusion that Ben was an average player who just discovered one good deck.  I can tell you for certain that this is not the case.  Funnily enough it was Ben who introduced us to Pages Bar.  He was no great drinker but was one of the old school Star Trek players who actually really liked Star Trek.  We were geeky enough back then to always talk about cards when we were in the bar.  In our gang were two ambassadors Ringo and Rik and two future world number 1’s.  However, whenever we had a disagreement on rules, decks or the relative usefulness of cards it was always Ben we turned to for his opinion.  He was simply the best.