Saturday, October 6, 2012

Draft tournament at the Czech ECQ

I am back after some time with tournament report. I have been swamped with other things, (work, personal life, organizing tournaments, etc.) so there was not a lot of time left for blogging. Czech ECQ was a lot of trouble for me, there were some organizational problems, combined with some loose ends and in the end, there were only 17 players even when I expected a lot more. In the end I ended up playing a lot worse than I intended, so I will not write about main even and instead I will focus on followup draft tournament.

With resources of diffent boosters thinning and some conversations, we ended up drafting two boosters of BH edition, three LotN and three 3rd edition boosters. Not totaly sure if this is ideal, but it was not totaly bad either.

I for myself made some pretty stupid choices in the beggining and it costed me a lot in the end. I must say I was hoping for Blackhorse Tanner or Owain Evans. Chances were pretty slim, but what the hell. Our entire drafting table of five did not open any of them so I was at least happy with that, but I ended up with unbalanced crypt with good supporting vampires bud bad "star" vampires. Idealy I would like to bring out Sebastian Gouled with DOM and Dominique (ADV) with AUS for their defensive capabilities, but this proved unreal in the end. In most games I ended up with one of them and 2-3 supporting ones. I had some stealth and some dominate punch which in the end worked out well and I got to finals as the second seed, but then my luck ran out.

I was a little tired before finals and not done enough scouting as I should, but in the end, I would probably made the same mistake. I sat as prey for deck I knew had limited ousting potentian and could give me a lot of space. I should of course realized, that first seed will see the same chance and he ended up as my predator. He had quick hogh cap assamite bleed with lot stealth and lot of + bleed cards. I had only two misdirections and very limited intercept, so I knew it will be bad for me. In addition, my grand predator did bring out Malgorzata, Owain and he had even Blackhorse Tanner and I was like What the hell? Who let him to have those three in one deck? It ended up bad for me as I expected. I was under a lot of pressure early and even if I was lucky to draw both of my telepathic misdirections, it wasnt enough. I was forced to go forward fast and even ousted my prey, but my minions got torporized and I have exhausted most of my resources and was killed in the end.

The three player game was very surprising, because My predator (exhausted from ousting me) and even grand predator (playing litlle recklessly) were ousted in the end and the game was won by my grand prey. There were a lot of mistakes during this game and I do not want to go into specifics, but even when I lost, I confirmed that draft is still my favourite format.

I screwed up a big time, when drafting a crypt. It was first mistake of this kind which I have ever made, because usualy I have  more problems with library decisions. Once again I have new eperience and I will learn from it - actualy I think that this is my best skill - capacity for learning from my mistakes, since there was always a lot to learn from:) Next time we will probably try to use a little different combination of boosters to provide a little different experience.


There will be probably no posts from me for some time, since the main focus now is on organizin Czech party and preparing for EC. It looks like there will be minimum of 15 participant from Czech Republic, so I have huge hopes for this EC. I would be much more happy if I had all of my decks in order, but at this point I am not satisfied with any of them entirely and I have before me a lot of testing, optimizing and preparing for different metagame, there is a lot of work before me and not a lot of time, so after publishing this article, I am going back to deck optimizing. I hope I will see as many of you as possible at EC and I am totaly looking forward to it.

So see you at the EC...

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