Joshua Grace Old Skool Strikes Back Mpls MN 10-10 (tournament report)

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Joshua Grace Old Skool Strikes Back Mpls MN 10-10 (tournament report) is the tournament report Joshua Grace posted on DeckTech on 16 October 2000 about October 2000 Minneapolis tournament.[1] Joshua Grace went 4–0 at the weekly Mirkwood Coffee & Comics tournament in Minneapolis on 10 October 2000 with a Dantooine Base Operations deck and an old-school Jabba's Palace manipulator, beating Garrett Larson, Herb Macy and Graham Neal.

Report info

Games

Games as the author describes them; margins are as stated in the report.

Round Opponent Author's deck Opponent's deck Result Margin
1 — Light DBO Random TIE stuff (Meditation Chamber start) Win (opponent not named (a newer player)) +33
2 Garrett Larson Dark Old Skool Manipulator Hidden Base B-wings Win (report spells 'Garret Larson') 40-something
3 Herb Macy Light DBO Endor Ops / Death Star Construction Win +11
4 Graham Neal Dark Old Skool Manipulator EBO - Baraguin Win +41

Side event: October 2000 St. Cloud tournament

The report also covers October 2000 St. Cloud tournament (14 October 2000). Joshua Grace played a tournament in St. Cloud, Minnesota on Saturday 14 October 2000 but did not report it, keeping his decks secret until the Minnesota Grand Slam.

Original report

old-skool-strikes-back-mpls-mn-10-10

  • Author: Joshua "Stormcrow" Grace
  • Published: Oct 16, 2000
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

See also

Sources

References

  1. ↑ old-skool-strikes-back-mpls-mn-10-10, DeckTech (Joshua "Stormcrow" Grace, 16 October 2000). Preservation copy: GitHub Pages.
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