Now, last weekend sixteen people converged on the Sentry Box in Calgary for the annual Alberta regionals. I've been noticing that there wasn't all that much coverage of the event on WNOHGB, so I thought I would take the time to tell you about it.

It all started at about 11 AM, when myself, Michael Hoskin and Olav Rokne turned up at the tourney. Tom Solway, Khalid, Earl Prusak, Earl's friend (whose name I can not recall, so for the sake of argument I will call "Ricky") and a few others were already there, trading STCCG and playing a couple of warmup games.

I want to point out that I was, as per usual, playing Borg. It was a good deck other than the fact that I had built it at 4 AM the previous night, that it included no interlink, vinculum, adapt, queens, counterparts, treachery, diplomacy, or hope of winning.

Of course I didn't find any of this out until I had played the first two games.

I faced "Ricky" in the first round. He was playing a Guardian of Forever deck with two time locations. It was relatively fast and well balanced, obviously going to win half of it's games and lose half of it's games. Not fast enough to challenge gods and demons (like Olav or Earl) but also not stupidly weak enough to lose to a deck with no adapts, treachery, counterparts, vinculum, hope, queens, diplomacy, q-bypass, drawing mechanism or objectives that can target planets.

So... I obviously lost it 100-0

Which meant that I faced an easier opponent. Garry Tompkins, an Edmontonian playing one of the only two original decks of the day... a Khan eel deck. I crushed him to paste, but there was no satisfaction in it.

Defeating Garry, you see, is kind of like kicking a puppy; it just gets easier each time.  He's this delightfully nice guy, who doesn't take it to hard when he looses. His decks are huge and unwieldy, and they are bloated and slow... and somehow he defeated Olav last tourney in Edmonton. The last was confided to me by Olav under the promise that I would never tell anyone. Sorry Olav, I had to tell people, because your loss makes the fact that my decklist didn't match (thereby giving me a loss) at least bearable.

So after being humiliated in the first two rounds, what happened next you asked? Well... more humiliation! Yay!

I played this guy named Khalid, who's new to the tourney environment. This was even his first tourney ever. Now he had fared about as well as I had in the first rounds. His dominion deck aggressively brought out jemmies and then beamed over using invasive beam in to take his opponent down Ol' School!

For some unknowable reason, he was afraid of attacking Borg drones... possibly thought that I had in my deck that had no hope, no queen, no planet objectives, no counterparts, no treachery, no diplomacy, no inteligence, no adapts, no vinculum, no skill sharing mechanism of any kind and no chance of winning... that I had found room for an assimilation drone or five. There was room for them with the curious absence of anything that I would normally play with, but in the end, there wasn't anything to stop his smackdown.

This didn't stop me from a timed win though... as he never got around to attacking me, instead focussing on attempting his missions, and running up against all my walls he couldn't pass.

The humiliating thing was that I knew he could have won.

Cumulative score 1 (-125) Damn.

There was no where to go but up I guess.

Jess Brown was next. He was playing a dial a skill deck with Cyrus dilemmas.
I managed to plough through several of his dilemma combos. Oddly I didn't see any implications, because those would have taken me down hard that tourney. He obviously didn't understand the deck, as he hadn't played the game in two years and had borrowed one of Olav's spares for the tourney. We timed out, me unable to complete more missions, and he, unable to complete more missions.

I won 75-50 Cumulative score 2 (-100) Which meant I had the unequaled privilege of playing Patty Gillard. Queen of STCCG and wonderful person all around. Now I've played Patty more times than I can count. She's not what I would call "Good at the Game" but she is what I would call "Good at being good." I went into the game thinking that I had it wrapped up; I've never lost to her before... she is one of the lowest ranked STCCG players of all time, and I think to myself "Wow, if I win this one and my next, then I might come in third!"

More humiliation. Patty out played me plain and simple. It was kind of cool to see what she did when faced with a Borg deck. I've never seen anyone play like that before.
I lost by 25 points.

Cumulative score: 2 (-125)

In the sixth I faced Olav's Diplomacy elimination deck played by Nathan. I managed to steal my way to a win, when I realized that I had seen Olav build the deck, and that he was complaining about the fact that he didn't own enough Q-the Refs to stock it in all of his decks. I feel a little dirty over this win, but I guess cest la vie.

I won 100 to nothing, for my only real win of the day.

The best part of the tourney, was seeing Olav's Frool deck at work in the finals. Or should I say Olav's deck fail to work in the finals. Or more accurately, Olav at work in the finals.

He had lost before it had even begun, but he tooled around and made everyone laugh with his antics in the final. Everything from deliberately mis seeding his dilemmas face up and asking for rulings on everything, to playing a bunch of frools, STPing them to hand and then re-playing the same frools. It was like watching an incredibly funny car accident, you can't avert your eyes, and you know you shouldn't laugh, but you do anyways. It was like having sex with a dwarf while you're drunk; I mean it feels great at the time, but you feel awful afterwards.

Now, Olav was only doing it because he knew everyone enjoyed watching it (especially Allen Gould), so it wasn't like he was being that much of a dick about it. People jokingly threatened to kill Olav, but you should see that they were laughing at him more than anything.