On Saturday I finally went to a tournament at Patriot Games in Sheffield. I double booked myself so missed the Regionals there early this year.
I took a bog standard Pre-Paid Kate deck and a HB:EtF Mega Server deck which ultimately was there to score out but hoped to pull of a Marcus Batty and NEXT Gold combo. I took Kate because she’s so damn reliable! Up until the morning of the tournament I was going to take a connections Andromeda deck but changed back to my Kate deck purely because she gets set up faster. Kate is even better when you remember to trigger her ability.
Turns out ~6 out of the 10 people playing also took Kate. Kate is *fair. *HB seemed to be well represented along with filthy Jinteki. I think the least well represented faction was Anarch with only one deck on show.
I won half my games but there appeared to be a faff about one win which went to time (and won on points) being counted as both loosing. In the end I finished 5th of 10. Not a bad result given that I am fairly crap at the game. Everyone in attendance got an alt art Swordsman (pictured above). I absolutely love that art. I find most of the alt art cards to be a bit crap (especially Pop Up Window) so I was very pleased with getting this, even if it probably wont see much play. There was no chance of me winning a deckbox or playmat but to be honest I’d probably just flip those on eBay[1].
My decks seemed to work fairly well. My Kate deck managed to win a game without seeing a Pre Paid Voicepad the entire game. Another highlight was scoring a Government Takeover. The worst moment was having 7 points of agendas in my archives and in HQ simultaneously. Safe to say I lost that game.
There’s another tournament next weekend in Wargames Emporium next weekend that I’d like to go to but that depends on how finishing my dissertation goes.
[1] – I’ve come around to a fairly minimal way of protecting cards. I use KMC Hyper Matte transparent sleeves so you see the beautiful card backs and used a plain red playmat. The added visual nose of fancy sleeves and playmats hasn’t been my jam recently.