TempleCon 2011 aftermath, Post #1: VTES

Ah, VtES. The reason I know about TempleCon, the reason I know most of the people I saw over the weekend, and part of the reason for my little corner of fame in the gamerverse.

First tournament: Friday night

Not much to write home about here.
I got to TempleCon just in time to turn round 2 of the Friday VTES tournament into 20 players. I played my Malabranca Breed-Boon-PallaGrande deck, and got crushed by a Ventrue Law Firm deck (played by Amber). Nothing notable happened. I don't even remember the rest of the table.

Qualifier: Saturday
After a little bit of Glen More and time-wasting Drafting in the morning, we were ready to play the main event. There were 27 players.

I ended up playing a Kiasyd Stealth Bleed But A Little Toolboxy deck, along with at 3 other people playing more-or-less the same exact crypt.

Round 1

Round 1 was a 4-player table.
Me-> Dave C (Gangrel fight) -> Amber (Setites) -> Peter K (!Tremere toolbox?)

Peter got out Valerius (the version who shuts down obfuscate, great defense for being the prey of setites), Antonio d'Erlette, and a few Nephandi.

I happened to be drawing most of my Deflections early on, and Peter was "irresponsibly" firing bleeds of 2-3 down the pipe to "test the waters". In addition to my own Stealth Bleedy Sleaze, Dave really didn't have a chance.
He was ousted before he could say "Raven Spy".
I ended up playing Pentex Subversion on Amber's poor little 2-cap to wipe her out, and then Peter just couldn't handle my obt/myt stealth and all of the bleed action cards I hadn't had to waste yet.
Table sweep for me!

Round 2

Round 2 was also 4 players, which actually worked out in my favor.

Me -> Mark (Tor/!Tor aus/cel gun deck, I think) -> John W (Enkidu) -> Adam (!Tor palla grande something?)

Why don't I know what my prey and predator were playing?
Well, when we sat down, Adam warned us that John was playing Enkidu (they're both from the New York Crew).
Turn 1, my prey disregarded this warning, and played Dragonbound.
As soon as my prey brought out Sheila Mezarin, John dropped a Pentex on her. As soon as Adam brought out any minion at all, Enkidu smushed them.
But Enkidu didn't have any backup friends. Just a bunch of 1 caps.

I decided to sit pretty where I was, and let my prey attempt to rebuild himself.
He was unable to burn the Pentex, and I pretty much could have ousted him any time I wanted, but I preferred the meat-shield.
I sat back and let the Dragonbound pluck at the table (including Enkidu's controller himself) and held back my bleeds, just playing a few cards to cycle, pretty much until I drew into my own Pentex Subversion.
At that point, I contested it cross-table, Adam was ousted, and I still gave my prey a bit of a chance to go forward with un-Pentexed Sheila for a little while. When the time was right (Enkidu low on blood didn't hurt), I ousted my prey, survived Enkidu's last turn as an acting minion, dunked his last 1-cap, and then fired the bleed cannons. Easy 3VPs.

I don't often get 1 Game Win in big tournaments, never mind 2, so I was pretty excited.

Round 3

But then came Round 3.
In Round 3, a 5-player table, it was something like this:
Me -> some prey I don't remember -> Dave Z (same deck as me) -> someone else I don't remember -> Ben P (same deck as me)

I kinda sat that one out. I tried, but I zeroed, and don't remember the details.

Final Round

In the Finals, there were "only" 2 Kiasyd decks; me and Greg W (yes, someone I hadn't played with yet).
But between us was Randy....

An aside about Randy

Randy is a player from Sweden, who recently moved to Florida, and came to TempleCon just because I was talking about it on IRC a few days ago. It's nice to be able to pick up and do stuff like that.

Ahem, back to the finals...

Me -> Randy (deck description below) -> Greg (Kiasyd) -> Sonam (Giovanni Bruise Bleed with Sewer Lids) -> Prescott (Cornelius and Quira and ..?)

Randy was playing a variation on a deck that is apparently "going around" these days: Cybele, Aksinya, lots of other huge vampires with +bleed, and a library with about 75% master cards.

I just couldn't do anything about that.
I could bleed big and get bounced (either by Aksinya's special or Lost in Translation) or Archon Investigated.. or he could just not care because he was bloating so much... or I could bleed small and he still didn't care. Not to mention I was already trying to defend myself against OBF and +bleed upstream...
Suffice it to say, Randy swept the table. And won the tournament, fair and square.
It was totally worth his trip.

All-in-all I enjoyed the event, and am proud of my performance (even if it was sleazy, boring, and just plain lucky).

...and then we played Chaos and Galactica (see future posts).

Sunday: the Free Draft

Matt has a ton of extra starter decks and boosters.
So we got free cards, and drafted. Choice of a large selection of packs.
I played the Ishtarri, added a few things, but maybe made the deck too small.

In Round 1, I ousted my prey (KoT Toreador starter) with the things that Ishtarri usually do (big bleed at 2 stealth as the first action of every turn, etc). But it took pretty much my whole deck to do so.
I was down to an empty deck, but just managed to squeeze in my second oust (!Tremere) before getting combatted and death-of-a-thousand-cutted by the !Gangrel deck.

At this point, people needed to catch flights and stuff, but we cobbled together a set of second rounds... In the second round, I got identified as a table threat, still managing to run out of deck but I don't think I actually got an oust.. we were all getting punchy and not really caring what we were doing now anyway.
And we just didn't do a final round.
Still, the act of drafting and playing even a single round is still something fun...

So that's pretty much it for the notable VTES of the weekend.
Please leave comments here if you want any more details, of course.