City Championships Tournament Report
Location: Broken Arrow, OK
Store Name: All In Games
Date: April 14, 2007
Attendance: 12
Metagame: Avengers Reservist - Hardware Store - Underworld - 2x JSA/Defenders - Checkmate/Thunderbolts - Future Foes - Future Foes/Darkseid - Spider-Friends/HoG - Mental - Glock - Checkmate/Squadron Supreme/Fantastic Four


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We arrived home in Wichita, KS around 1:30am this morning, road weary and parched. Two jubilant passengers and one sullen driver. (That's me) I had gone to city champs with a mission. Playmat or bust. As I'm typing this the only playmats I see are MHG and MTU, so you can probably guess what happened. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Arrival

We left Wichita at about 1:30 pm to arrive at All In Games in Broken Arrow, OK with enough time to gather a few remaining cards for our decks, catch up with friends we only get to see about once a month and purchase gaming rations and supplies from the friendly shopkeep. The City Champs didn't begin until 6:30 pm so we had plenty of time. It's about a three hour drive so we talked strategy and ate truck stop food and played a game of car dodge-ball with a green stress ball. No one lost an eye, though there were some hurt feelings. We eventually arrive safely, no worse for the wear and unload our gear. So far all is going according to plan...

The Tourney

The three members of our team all have very different tastes for the kinds of decks we like to play. Jeff, for instance, favors aggro. Me, I prefer consistency and power over all else. Eric, on the other hand, doesn't really care and usually picks a deck out of a few we've been testing mere minutes before a tourney starts. He plays by feel and sometimes it pays off and sometimes it doesn't.

Jeff and I had been working on his decklist for a few weeks. He wanted to play a Hardware Store variant, but as you know MMK is no longer a legal set, so we had to tune it. I kept making Checkmate Hybrids with unorthodox teams to see if I could stumble across something keen. I found my answer in Checkmate/Thunderbolts. I found it to be highly aggressive all while possessing that Checkmate consistency that we love so much. So as Jeff and I tuned our decks Eric would be our Silver-Age Gauntlet monkey and just play us with anything and everything. I believe the gauntlet he constructed was Avengers Reservist, Squad No-Hand, AGL, CM/HoG, Quicksilver variants and few others.

I'm telling you all of this for a reason.

So at around 6:15 Eric and I walk down to my car so he can get his deck. As he opens his bag he looks at me and asks "1, 2 or 3?" to which I reply "Do I get to know what deck correlates to what number?"

"No."

"I'll roll a die." I said "On a 1 or 2 you use deck one, on a 3 or 4 you use deck 2 and on a 5 or 6 you use deck three."

Eric nods.

I roll the die and it lands on a five. Without hesitation he grabs a red deck box from his bag and closes the trunk. I ask him which deck it is, he replies "the red one."

So at this point I have no idea what he's playing.

Our T.O./Head Judge/shop keep/all-around-nice-guy Todd announces the first round pairings and wouldn't you know it, I have to play my teammate Eric. Things are starting to go downhill and we haven't even rolled for initiative yet.

I win the roll and take evens.

He sets a resource and plays a Rick Jones hidden.

"Awww damn it!" I lament. Eric starts to laugh. You see, he's laughing because when we were testing I was able to beat everything he threw at me except Avengers Reservist.

Turn two, I play Sarge with a Knight Armor and he plays Natasha, I take a little of his life.

Turn 3 He recruits Black Panther and reveals 3 reservists and I recruit Ahmed visible with a Knight Armor. He teams into Sarge and Natasha stuns Ahmed.

Turn 4, I recruit Alan Scott with a Knight Armor and he plays Doctor Druid. Scott flies over Natasha and into the Doctor, he plays a Heroes in Reserve revealing 3 to stun me back. I send Ahmed into Natasha and flip Threat Neutralized and a bevy of locations one of which is Brother Eye, he bounces Rick Jones to reinforce. He swings Panther into Ahmed and play Call Down the Lightning to stun me without stun back. He shows me the War of Attrition in his hand and says "You're lucky we're friends." I start to laugh because this game is going just like all the other ones. I can't brickwall anything because he has nothing but pumps, and therefore I can't maintain any board advantage and he's got 7 free points a turn in the hidden area. I've already lost this game.

Turn 5 I recruit Hawkeye, Leader by Example with a Knight Armor and flip Stormfront-1, he recruits Submariner. I send Alan Scott into Mariner and stun him without stunning thanks to Hawkeye, I send Hawkeye into the Doctor Druid and he activate the mansion for +4 and a Heroes in reserve for a +4, mutual stun. He again stuns my board with his hidden Panther.

Turn 6 he recruits Wonderman, who can't stun anyone and I recruit Genis Vell - at this point I scoop it up because I am at 15 and he has three characters to my two and I don't have any tricks.

Me: 0-1
Eric: 1-0
Jeff: 1-0

Game two, my opponent is playing Future Foes/Darkseid - unfortunately he missed his 4 completely and he under dropped on 5, I hit my curve and all my pumps and ended the game on 5.

Me: 1-1
Eric: 2-0
Jeff: 2-0

Game three, my opponent is playing JSA/Defenders with The Rock. He drew his Wong on turn 2, his Jack Knight on turn 3 and so on. That's the story of it. I remember he sent Samantha Parrington into my 2 drop Melissa Gold, I activated two Safehouses and discarded Genis Vell to force him to play Imperius Rex to stun my 2 drop. It was an ugly game, which is unfortunate because he's a friend.

Me: 2-1
Eric: 3-0
Jeff: 2-1

Round 4 I had to play another friend, you know him as Em7add11 here on the Realms. He was playing Spider-Friends/Heralds of Galactus. I knew dedicated stall was going to be a rough match up for me, so my plan was to be as aggressive as possible. It's good to have plans so when they fail miserably you can say to yourself "Nice plan, idiot." I think I attacked twice in 5 turns. He did a great job locking down my board, and it would have been a hell of a lot worse if he had used Blade every turn. There were two high points in this game for me. He sent his 5 drop Silver Surfer into Ahmed and removed his counter, I stunned Surfer without getting stunned myself. And on Turn 9, I sent a 36 attack Karla Sofen into Galactus. Other than those two moments, it was a thorough ### whipping.

Me: 2-2
Eric: 3-1
Jeff: 3-1

My round five opponent was a real nice guy named James who got paired down into my sorry ###. I conceded to him so he could make the Top 4 and then we played it out anyway. He missed his 4 completely and I ended up winning on 6.

Me: 2-3
Eric: 4-1
Jeff: 3-2

At this point the standings were
Tim Batow: 5-0
Eric: 4-1
James: 4-1
Jeff: 3-2
Em7add11: 3-2
and then a bunch of other people

Eric's one loss had been to Tim, and Jeff's two losses had been to Tim and Eric, so his breaks were pretty good.

The Top 4

We cut to the top 4 and Eric with Avengers Reservist plays James and his Mental deck. Jeff with his modded Hardware Store plays Tim and his Diabolic Creation. I don't know if it had a name but it was the bane of people who hate math. It was amazing to watch him play it though. The man is machine, I swear.

I went out to grab a smoke and a bite to eat, seeing as I now had an abundance of free time. When I got back Eric had beat James and Tim had beat Jeff.

So our finals were Eric vs Tim, and as well as Eric's Avengers had performed all day it just had a terrible match up against Tim's beastly creation.

Eric finished 5-2 going undefeated against all people not named Tim Batow.

Tim won the Mat and threw down the gauntlet to R&D.

"Play my deck," he said "I dare you."


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So all in all it was a great day and lots of fun. We walked away with a stack a of EAs and a head full of memories. And really, that's all I wanted in the first place.

I'll take a guess that "Checkmate/Squadron Supreme/Fantastic Four" was Tim.

Yeah, but just listing the teams doesn't do that deck nearly the amount of justice that it deserves. Although, since it's Tim creation I'll let him come on and spoil it if he'd like.

High point of the entire tournament:

Tim vs. Jeff and watching them trying to work out just what the hell was going on between Tim's already over-complicated board and then Shape/Joystick on Jeff's field making things even worse as cards got tossed everywhere.

Em's right. It doesn't do it any justice at all. It was brutal. Also there were more teams than that in it, I just don't remember any more.

Very nice report. I also really liked your deck; it hadnt occurred to me how well Thunderbolts and Checkmate play together before. Karla Soften on turn four is certainly a beast, and I hadnt really playtested her since MAV/MXM modern age.

I will post my decklist sometime later tonight. For those wondering, its basically just a Equipment deck using Checkmate to set everything up. Everyone else from the other teams are just in there because they mention "equipment" in their text box.

Its just as I assumed it would be. Since we recieved "The New Baxter Building" I've been dying to take a crack at such a thing. I look foward to the decklist.