Gen Con 2007 Report
Aug. 22nd, 2007 06:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwangoQuick facts - The Call of Cthulhu CCG is more fun than The Spoils, Phil and Kaja Foglio rock (skip to the second paragraph under "Thursday" for details), and my feet hurt. Also, this is probably the longest I've gone without playing a game of Carcassonne on BSW since I first started doing so.
Wednesday:
I arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare, and a mighty book to read while waiting for my flight - Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I've read it before, but wanted to read it again, and I was determined to have a book to read that I wouldn't finish before the trip was over, and that I would enjoy. It's not exactly the ideal size for a book to travel with at 800-and-some pages, but we can't have everything, right?
Passengers are not allowed to travel with liquids unless they're stored in little 3 oz bottles, but certain exceptions are allowed. I figured I'd want something to drink before I went through security, so I brought my usual half-frozen bottle of water, knowing I'd most likely have to throw it away. I ended up drinking the rest of the water before throwing it away, and if the airport staff had seemed a bit less humorless, I might have asked if I could take it on board now that there was only solid material in the bottle - the ban is, after all, against liquids and gels, and ice is a solid. The flight was unremarkable. The Carey Indiana limo picked me up promptly and took me to my hotel, the Sheraton that was a Radisson when I first booked my reservation there. I deposited my things and immediately departed for the convention center to pick up my program, bag of free loot, and possibly sign up for some events I missed before, but not actually cancel out of anything quite yet. I got lost on the way to the convention center. Then I got lost on the way back to my hotel. Day 0, and my feet hurt already. Not a good sign. Also, my hotel filled me with hate. I wanted to watch exactly 1 thing on TV the entire time I was to stay there, and I was unable to do so because my TV didn't get basic, local, network TV. It had things like Comedy Central and Cartoon Network, but not ABC, NBC, or FOX. Baffling. Also, when I first tried to call customer service to ask about this, the phone didn't work. I later discovered that I had 2 phones, and the OTHER one worked. The air conditioner was positioned directly over the door out of the room and into the bathroom, and it would occaisonally drip condensation on me when I walked under it. They printed in tiny type on the sleeve for my door key that unless I called to specifically opt out, they were going to deliver me a copy of USA Today every day and charge me $.75 for each one. Despite the fact that I called to cancel it, I still had it show up twice during my stay - both of which I brought to the front desk and complained about. Last year's hotel (the Hampton Inn) had a complimentary breakfast, which I sadly checked out only on my last day, finding that I could have at least had a free glass of milk and juice each day to balance out my diet a bit. This year's hotel appeared to have breakfast available only as an extravagently expensive room service option. All of this, and it's both more expensive and further from the convention center than last year. Truly, I regret missing the initial housing block offering and getting put on the waiting list. If I can afford to attend Gen Con next year, I certainly hope I can get the Hapton Inn again.
Thursday:
Didn't get lost on the way to the convention center this time, and arrived at about 9:45. The exhibit hall was scheduled to open at 10:00, and I went to stand outside the door and wait for it. I was going to stop by customer service and swap out some events for others, but it seemed like a rather long line to do so, and I didn't want to miss any exhibit hall time if I could help it, since I'd only have an hour in there before my Call of Cthulhu CCG tournament at 11:00. However, after waiting until 10:30, it was revealed that the hall wouldn't be opening until 11:00, so I hit customer service and then headed over to play Cthulhu. Originally, I had planned to start off the con with a Spoils tournament for a Wii, figuring competition for it would be lighter on Thursday, when there are fewer players in at the con than there are on Friday and Saturday. However, as I thought about it more and more, I realized that I have no real use for a Wii, and would only end up trying to sell it. I was already planning to play in several other Spoils tournaments, and if I dropped out of that would I could play in a Call of Cthulhu CCG tournament instead. I get to play Spoils at home, but typically not CoC, so I swapped that out. The Cthulhu tournament ended up consisting of 4 of us. One player hadn't planned to play and was only stopping by the booth to say 'hi,' and was forced to leave partway through to attend another event, which threw off our pairings a bit. In the end, we had 3 people with identical records left, and had to resolve 1st place by tie-breakers, which I somehow won. For this, I won 16 packs of cards, 200 Sanity, and a print of the art used for the Conspiracy cards in the newest Asylum deck. Pretty damned cool. I was playing my Yog-Sothoth and Agency deck glutted with character removal, which worked quite well against my opponent playing Shub-Niggurath. On the other hand, it crashed and burned against a characterless combo deck. I discovered that my deck had absolutely no way to break his combo or even slow it down because I lacked a way to destroy support cards. My only hope was to rush to victory, which I didn't manage to do. I resolved to tweak my deck a bit in case I faced this situation again at the World Championship - not that I planned to win the World Championship, but I figured it would be fun to play in regardless.
After Cthulhu, it was off to the exhibit halls to pitch my art to people. I had some promising leads and some disappointments, but all of them were forgettable next to my visit to the booth operated by Phil and Kaja Foglio. I hadn't realized that they would be attending, so it was a surprise to see them. I lurked in the back for a bit while other people bought books and had them signed and such, and then stepped up when there was a free moment to tell Kaja how much I enjoyed Girl Genius, and that I had been a reader since the blueprints were first published. We then proceeded to talk about the comic for a while, and then somehow our conversation tangented off into strange topics. At some point during this, Phil looked over and remarked that he liked my t-shirt, which was incredibly awesome because the t-shirt happened to be my "Bad things happen to good people because Bad Things don't like good people" Cthulhu t-shirt. I explained that it was my art and my words, and they were both impressed. I showed them my Yule Squid and even left them with one so they could see some of my other work, and Kaya went so far as to write down the URL for the dead_cthulhu journal. She laughed when I told her that I have the mood set to "sleepy" for every post - it's always great to have people get and appreciate that joke. I must have stood there and talked with them for about 20 minutes. They were truly awesome people, and it totally made my day.
I stayed in the exhibit hall plugging my art until it closed at 6:00. The food court seemed to be momentarily out of chicken fingers, so I decided to go back to my hotel for a while before my 8:00 spoils tournament, planning to pick up food along the way. I got lost again. Grr. Eventually, I ate, took another shower since I was grubby from wandering the streets of Indianapolis in 90 degree, high-humidity weather, and then went back to the con. Sadly, I only managed 4th in the Spoils iPod Draft tournament. I should have mulligan'd away more cards in game 3, since I mostly lost due to being shorted Rage resources during the game. I had a pretty killer deck, too. After that I went home and tried to make a mono-faction Cthulhu deck for Friday's tournament, selecting Yog-Sothoth as my faction of choice. I got to bed a bit late due to how long that took, though.
Friday:
I got up a little late, but still had time to hit Customer Service and officially get a refund for the Spoils $13K. I was no longer interested in it after the format was changed to Constructed, and passing on it would mean more time for the exhibit halls and a chance to play in the Call of Cthulhu World Championships. Then it was off to the Spoils $2K Draft tournament. We started very late as they expanded it from the original 64-person cap to 77, which seems to defeat the purpose of having a limit for an event in the first place. I drafted plenty of cheap, fast Rogue cards, and some mediocre Warlord. I ended up playing only those 2 trades instead of squeezing in third. That meant more reliable resources with a slight risk of having too many, but the alternative was shaky resource base for only a slight improvement in card quality. My pod of 10 people for the draft turned out to contain Will Morgan (my nemesis from playing at TJ Collectibles in MA) and a guy I had played against the previous night in the iPod tournament, and who I ended up playing against again in round 1 of this tournament. I beat him in 4 or 5 turns in spite of his turn 0 Ritual of the Screaming Cheese against me. In round 2 I made a serious mistake but managed to scrape by a win anyway. I figured I might have to play Will in Round 3, or maybe later if I continued to win, and was astonished to learn that he had lost Round 2. Will is an excellent player with a lot of wins and top 4 or top 8's to his credit, so it was strange to see him out so early. Round 3 ended up killing my dreams of victory, though, with a catastropic "Yoink!" played by my opponent in the middle of combat to steal my Poisoned Blade and cost me my Arena Quarter-Finalist. Ouch. I hung around for round 4 to see if I could place high enough to at least get some packs, but lost that game, too. That got me 29th place, which got me 2 packs of cards. = P .
If I had managed to make it into the top 8 I would have been playing in the finals at 6:00 PM. Since I'd blown it, that meant I could play in the Monofaction Cthulhu tournament instead, which also started at 6:00, so it was hard to be too disappointed...although winning money sure would have been cool, too. Anyway, I brought my Yog-Sothoth deck, wondering if maybe I should have gone Syndicate instead, but decided that my Yog deck had a bit more to show for itself in a longer game, whereas Syndicate had to win fast or inevitably be overpowered. We all registered our faction of choice, and then the rules of the tournament were announced - overall best record would win 1st, and then there would be Best of Faction prizes. No one played Syndicate, but I was up against 1 or 2 other Yog decks for the Yog prize. Fooey - I was wishing I'd brought Syndicate, since at least then I'd be sure to have the "best of" for that faction. Still, if I remember correctly I only lost 1 game, and turned out to have the best record for Yog, so I sort of tied for 2nd in a way. It was a little confusing, since there were more than 4 different factions playing, but they handed out 1st and 3 Best-of prizes, so I guess you had to have a certain minimum record and not the same faction as someone who did better...or something. Regardless, I won a few more packs and something like 60-80 Sanity, and the guy who won 1st didn't need the Asylum deck he won and so he gave it to me, since I didn't have one yet. He also gave me most of the contents of the packs that he won, since there were very few cards he still needed. Some of the other spares went to another player at the table with a smaller collection, but I still got a bunch of free stuff. Perhaps the most amusing anecdote from that tournament was the ridiculous game that I had vs John Hartigan's Agency deck - he had the absurd problem of not drawing any characters during the entire game. The thing that makes this funny rather than tragic is that I played Revelation of the Spheres on him, which let me search his deck for a character and put it into play under my control, which meant that the only Agency character to see play the whole game was actually on MY side of the table.
That tournament got over close to 9:00 PM, so I headed over to registration to see if there were tickets left for the 9:00 PM Spoils iPod draft. There were, so I got into that. I drafted Rogue and Warlord yet again, not really because I wanted to, but because it was the best stuff that was passed to me. My deck was the worst yet for the weekend, and I ended up 4th again. I was talking at length with my last opponent of the round, and I ended up showing him my portfolio. He recognized "hwango," and thought he'd played Spoils online with me, but we eventually figured out he just recognized it from the message boards, and that he'd followed the link from my sig there to my gallery, since he recognized the Hermit Crab in Skull. During the course of our conversation it was revealed that he used to play Call of Cthulhu, and he'd be happy to play again if I had decks. It was 1:00 AM and this was a bad idea, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity, so he played my Syndicate deck vs my Night deck, and destroyed me. But I at least made it Night, damnit! = ) Got to bed absurdly late.
Saturday:
Started off the day with the Call of Cthulhu World Championships. Sadly, the game is low enough in popularity that there were only 12 of us. The original plan was to cut to a top 8, but that's silly with a starting pool of 12, so they cut to top 4. I made a serious mistake vs a Shub opponent, forgetting that Mentor to Vaughn has Willpower. It's in such tiny print! That cost me a Child of Yog-Sothoth that I couldn't afford to lose, and I lost that game. I won the next 2 games, though I recall one of them being a close match. Then I lost to Chris Long's Syndicate deck, but it's no great failure to lose to him, since he was last year's world champion. Still, 2 losses put me out of reach of the top 4, so I headed back to the exhibit hall for the last few booths where I needed to show my portfolio. Once that was done I actually got to try some new games. I had been really looking forward to trying Infernal Contraption, but was a little disappointed by it. I'd try it again to make sure, but I didn't buy one. Then I tried Tsuro, which was interesting, but which I didn't like as much as many others who tried it. Oshi was good, though. If it weren't for the fact that it's only 2 player I might have considered getting that one. Once the hall closed I went and got food, and then tried to build myself a highlander format deck for Cthulhu. That took a lot longer than I planned, and I was still working on it when the tournament was supposed to start at 7:00 PM. There were only 3 of us, though. Not sure why others from World's didn't come back - I know Chris didn't have a deck built for it and would have had to cobble one together, but that didn't stop me. The deck I built was Yog-Sothoth and Syndicate, since those are the two factions I had the best cards for, and they synergized reasonably well. I was tempted to make a 3-faction deck out of Cthulhu, Shub, and Hastur, but it was looking more and more like it would just be a mess, and far too slow. Anyway, we decided to just play round robbin, and John Hartigan and (?) played the first match while I spent 5 more minutes on my deck and then got it all sleeved. I beat both of them, so I got 1st, which got me 200 more Sanity, 2 Asylum decks, and 15 packs.
A few more Cthulhu people showed up towards the tail end of the tournament, and we ended up playing a game of Condotierre, which the other 3 people had played, but which was new to me. the object is to conquer 3 adjacent areas of the board, or any 5 total. Battles are fought by playing cards from your hand into an army, with each player adding to their army until they decide to pass, at which point they're stuck with what they've played so far. My opening hand was dreadful, and so I passed almost immediately in the first battle, and withouth playing a card at all in the next 2, and just let the other 3 players fight it out for those areas. That meant I was relatively unopposed in a battle near the end of the round, and then I got to keep 2 cards from my hand and we all drew up to the regular hand size again. I did the same thing the next round, only deciding to fight when winning that battle would let me start the battle in the next round exactly where I wanted, and once again I got to keep the most advantageous 2 cards from my hand for the next round. Then I unleashed a nigh-unstoppable wave of doom. Mercenary cards range in value from 1-10, and then there are special cards like the Drummer that doubles your total army, the Bishop that destroys all of the highest-level mercenary in play, and other stuff. I lead off my attack with a 6, and on my next turn almost misplayed a Bishop, which unfortunately let everyone know that I had it. Oops. Anyway, I played a 1 instead, and the next turn I played the Drummer I'd been holding the whole game. To beat my total of 14, someone played a 10. I played another 6. Then another 6. The beauty of the situation was that no one could play a Bishop to stop me, since that would only destroy the 10. In fact, I specifically didn't destroy the 10 with my own Bishop, because it was protecting my 6's. In the end, the player to my left played a Bishop to destroy the 10 in the hope that one of the other players also had a Bishop, and could use it to destroy the 6's. However, before they got to do so, I played my own 10. Heh. Most of the battles that game were won with totals like 7, or 12, or 18. I won my battle with a total of something like 58.
After that was over, I got James Black and Chris Long to try out one of my games, the Squid/Apple/etc. game. Reactions were mixed, but at least some fun was had by all, and they made some good suggestions. If nothing else, I valued their blunt criticisms. One of the Fantasty Flight people walked by while we were playing, and congratulated me on having my own home-made game. He made himself even cooler by recognizing the pangolin in the game and actually knowing what a pangolin is. I was stunned. I think he's the first person I've ever met face to face who already knew what a pangolin was. After that, it was well past time to sleep, since I'd missed so much sleep the previous day, and had another 10:00 AM tournament the next day. My right leg was really starting to hurt by this point, above and beyond just my feet hurting from so much walking and standing.
Sunday:
I had hoped to walk slowly to avoid irritating my leg more, since it still hurt when I woke up. Sadly, however, the elevator absolutely refused to stop at my floor, so instead of walking leisurely to the con, I had to run down 11 flights of stairs and then half jog to the convention center. Grr. I couldn't run down 1 flight of stairs and try the 10th floor elevator, because the doors lock you into the stairwell for security reasons. Sunday's tournament was the final $2K Spoils - the sealed deck one. My sealed deck was ridiculous. Pluck, Impeccable Timing, Summary Judgement, Irresistible Bribe, Tad Disingenuous...lots of very cool stuff. As I recall, I won round 1, lost round 2, and my round 3 opponent simply failed to show up, so I won by default. Sadly, I lost the 4th round, so once again I was just playing for packs at that point. I ran off to the exhibit hall to make one last purchase before they closed, then came back for Round 5, which I won. Alas, round 6 I was up against Jason Tian, who is sort of famous within Spoils circles. He pretty much destroyed me, and I got knocked down to 27th place. Still, out of 4 tournaments, I at least managed to never lose more games than I won, and at least got packs in each one. I do wish that I'd ditched the higher-profile tournaments and played in some iPod tournaments while they were going so I'd have less challenging opponents and maybe actually walk out of the con with a nicer iPod. That's only in hindsight, though. At the time, I still wanted the chance to win a few hundred dollars in prizes if I managed to pull off a place in the top 4 somewhere.
During one of the rounds in which I had a short game, I ran over to the Fantasy Flight guys and traded back some of the promos I'd gotten on Friday and combined them with my new haul of Sanity from Saturday to get myself a Yithian deck, which is something I never thought I'd own. Looking forward to facing off against that if I can get someone to play it against me.
I left the con at about 6:00ish, I think, and got a little disoriented walking around in daylight. I didn't exactly get lost, but I did take a slightly different route than I planned, and missed the restaurant where I'd planned to buy food. My feet hurt too much to turn around, though, and I wasn't really all that hungry yet. I took a shower and did lots of packing, and considered going back out again for food. I even went so far as to get dressed again and walk out onto the street. However, three factors contributed to me turning back. 1) lightning in the distance seemed to indicate that I might get rained on if I pressed on. 2) the streets had considerably fewer people on them than they had any other day, now than many con-goers were back in their hotels for the rest of the night or had already left town, and I felt a little unsure about the wisdom of walking around a strange city in the dark, alone, without other pedestrians around. 3) my leg was killing me. So I subsisted on snack food until I made it home on Monday.
Monday:
In the terminal, waiting for the plane, I saw one person reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and another reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Tee hee. The airline had overbooked the flight, and were looking for volunteers to wait 6 hours for the next one, for which they would be compensated with a free round-trip ticket. I really didn't want to wait 6 hours, though, and would have had to reschedule my shuttle pickup and stuff, so I stuck it out. I was regretting this when it seemed that two very small children were going to be seated near me, but they were moved to the back of the plane. Then, during the demonstration of how the oxygen mask worked, the cord broke on it, which didn't exactly fill me with confidence. I found myself thinking how upset I'd be if there was an accident, and we were all killed...you know, above and beyond being upset about dying. I pictured the wing tearing of the plane and us plummeting towards the earth and me thinking "damn it, I had a chance to take that other flight, and I blew it!" Thankfully, the flight went just fine. There were some amazing cloud formations out my window, and I wish I'd had a camera at that point. Once I got home I had some real food, followed shortly afterwards by dinner, and shortly after that I decided to journey to the magical land of sleep, because I was exhausted. I went to bed at 8:30ish PM. I woke up briefly at 4:18, but decided I really wanted more sleep. Woke up again at 8:00ish, but still wasn't quite ready for the world. I finally got up around noon, mildly horrified to have slept almost continuously for 16 hours, but I almost certainly needed every bit of it.
Tonight I resume work on art, so I can follow up with companies I spoke to at Gen Con and say "Remember me? Look, I made more pretty stuff!" After that, I think I might treat myself to a short break and replay Riven, or work on one of my novels or something.
Wednesday:
I arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare, and a mighty book to read while waiting for my flight - Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I've read it before, but wanted to read it again, and I was determined to have a book to read that I wouldn't finish before the trip was over, and that I would enjoy. It's not exactly the ideal size for a book to travel with at 800-and-some pages, but we can't have everything, right?
Passengers are not allowed to travel with liquids unless they're stored in little 3 oz bottles, but certain exceptions are allowed. I figured I'd want something to drink before I went through security, so I brought my usual half-frozen bottle of water, knowing I'd most likely have to throw it away. I ended up drinking the rest of the water before throwing it away, and if the airport staff had seemed a bit less humorless, I might have asked if I could take it on board now that there was only solid material in the bottle - the ban is, after all, against liquids and gels, and ice is a solid. The flight was unremarkable. The Carey Indiana limo picked me up promptly and took me to my hotel, the Sheraton that was a Radisson when I first booked my reservation there. I deposited my things and immediately departed for the convention center to pick up my program, bag of free loot, and possibly sign up for some events I missed before, but not actually cancel out of anything quite yet. I got lost on the way to the convention center. Then I got lost on the way back to my hotel. Day 0, and my feet hurt already. Not a good sign. Also, my hotel filled me with hate. I wanted to watch exactly 1 thing on TV the entire time I was to stay there, and I was unable to do so because my TV didn't get basic, local, network TV. It had things like Comedy Central and Cartoon Network, but not ABC, NBC, or FOX. Baffling. Also, when I first tried to call customer service to ask about this, the phone didn't work. I later discovered that I had 2 phones, and the OTHER one worked. The air conditioner was positioned directly over the door out of the room and into the bathroom, and it would occaisonally drip condensation on me when I walked under it. They printed in tiny type on the sleeve for my door key that unless I called to specifically opt out, they were going to deliver me a copy of USA Today every day and charge me $.75 for each one. Despite the fact that I called to cancel it, I still had it show up twice during my stay - both of which I brought to the front desk and complained about. Last year's hotel (the Hampton Inn) had a complimentary breakfast, which I sadly checked out only on my last day, finding that I could have at least had a free glass of milk and juice each day to balance out my diet a bit. This year's hotel appeared to have breakfast available only as an extravagently expensive room service option. All of this, and it's both more expensive and further from the convention center than last year. Truly, I regret missing the initial housing block offering and getting put on the waiting list. If I can afford to attend Gen Con next year, I certainly hope I can get the Hapton Inn again.
Thursday:
Didn't get lost on the way to the convention center this time, and arrived at about 9:45. The exhibit hall was scheduled to open at 10:00, and I went to stand outside the door and wait for it. I was going to stop by customer service and swap out some events for others, but it seemed like a rather long line to do so, and I didn't want to miss any exhibit hall time if I could help it, since I'd only have an hour in there before my Call of Cthulhu CCG tournament at 11:00. However, after waiting until 10:30, it was revealed that the hall wouldn't be opening until 11:00, so I hit customer service and then headed over to play Cthulhu. Originally, I had planned to start off the con with a Spoils tournament for a Wii, figuring competition for it would be lighter on Thursday, when there are fewer players in at the con than there are on Friday and Saturday. However, as I thought about it more and more, I realized that I have no real use for a Wii, and would only end up trying to sell it. I was already planning to play in several other Spoils tournaments, and if I dropped out of that would I could play in a Call of Cthulhu CCG tournament instead. I get to play Spoils at home, but typically not CoC, so I swapped that out. The Cthulhu tournament ended up consisting of 4 of us. One player hadn't planned to play and was only stopping by the booth to say 'hi,' and was forced to leave partway through to attend another event, which threw off our pairings a bit. In the end, we had 3 people with identical records left, and had to resolve 1st place by tie-breakers, which I somehow won. For this, I won 16 packs of cards, 200 Sanity, and a print of the art used for the Conspiracy cards in the newest Asylum deck. Pretty damned cool. I was playing my Yog-Sothoth and Agency deck glutted with character removal, which worked quite well against my opponent playing Shub-Niggurath. On the other hand, it crashed and burned against a characterless combo deck. I discovered that my deck had absolutely no way to break his combo or even slow it down because I lacked a way to destroy support cards. My only hope was to rush to victory, which I didn't manage to do. I resolved to tweak my deck a bit in case I faced this situation again at the World Championship - not that I planned to win the World Championship, but I figured it would be fun to play in regardless.
After Cthulhu, it was off to the exhibit halls to pitch my art to people. I had some promising leads and some disappointments, but all of them were forgettable next to my visit to the booth operated by Phil and Kaja Foglio. I hadn't realized that they would be attending, so it was a surprise to see them. I lurked in the back for a bit while other people bought books and had them signed and such, and then stepped up when there was a free moment to tell Kaja how much I enjoyed Girl Genius, and that I had been a reader since the blueprints were first published. We then proceeded to talk about the comic for a while, and then somehow our conversation tangented off into strange topics. At some point during this, Phil looked over and remarked that he liked my t-shirt, which was incredibly awesome because the t-shirt happened to be my "Bad things happen to good people because Bad Things don't like good people" Cthulhu t-shirt. I explained that it was my art and my words, and they were both impressed. I showed them my Yule Squid and even left them with one so they could see some of my other work, and Kaya went so far as to write down the URL for the dead_cthulhu journal. She laughed when I told her that I have the mood set to "sleepy" for every post - it's always great to have people get and appreciate that joke. I must have stood there and talked with them for about 20 minutes. They were truly awesome people, and it totally made my day.
I stayed in the exhibit hall plugging my art until it closed at 6:00. The food court seemed to be momentarily out of chicken fingers, so I decided to go back to my hotel for a while before my 8:00 spoils tournament, planning to pick up food along the way. I got lost again. Grr. Eventually, I ate, took another shower since I was grubby from wandering the streets of Indianapolis in 90 degree, high-humidity weather, and then went back to the con. Sadly, I only managed 4th in the Spoils iPod Draft tournament. I should have mulligan'd away more cards in game 3, since I mostly lost due to being shorted Rage resources during the game. I had a pretty killer deck, too. After that I went home and tried to make a mono-faction Cthulhu deck for Friday's tournament, selecting Yog-Sothoth as my faction of choice. I got to bed a bit late due to how long that took, though.
Friday:
I got up a little late, but still had time to hit Customer Service and officially get a refund for the Spoils $13K. I was no longer interested in it after the format was changed to Constructed, and passing on it would mean more time for the exhibit halls and a chance to play in the Call of Cthulhu World Championships. Then it was off to the Spoils $2K Draft tournament. We started very late as they expanded it from the original 64-person cap to 77, which seems to defeat the purpose of having a limit for an event in the first place. I drafted plenty of cheap, fast Rogue cards, and some mediocre Warlord. I ended up playing only those 2 trades instead of squeezing in third. That meant more reliable resources with a slight risk of having too many, but the alternative was shaky resource base for only a slight improvement in card quality. My pod of 10 people for the draft turned out to contain Will Morgan (my nemesis from playing at TJ Collectibles in MA) and a guy I had played against the previous night in the iPod tournament, and who I ended up playing against again in round 1 of this tournament. I beat him in 4 or 5 turns in spite of his turn 0 Ritual of the Screaming Cheese against me. In round 2 I made a serious mistake but managed to scrape by a win anyway. I figured I might have to play Will in Round 3, or maybe later if I continued to win, and was astonished to learn that he had lost Round 2. Will is an excellent player with a lot of wins and top 4 or top 8's to his credit, so it was strange to see him out so early. Round 3 ended up killing my dreams of victory, though, with a catastropic "Yoink!" played by my opponent in the middle of combat to steal my Poisoned Blade and cost me my Arena Quarter-Finalist. Ouch. I hung around for round 4 to see if I could place high enough to at least get some packs, but lost that game, too. That got me 29th place, which got me 2 packs of cards. = P .
If I had managed to make it into the top 8 I would have been playing in the finals at 6:00 PM. Since I'd blown it, that meant I could play in the Monofaction Cthulhu tournament instead, which also started at 6:00, so it was hard to be too disappointed...although winning money sure would have been cool, too. Anyway, I brought my Yog-Sothoth deck, wondering if maybe I should have gone Syndicate instead, but decided that my Yog deck had a bit more to show for itself in a longer game, whereas Syndicate had to win fast or inevitably be overpowered. We all registered our faction of choice, and then the rules of the tournament were announced - overall best record would win 1st, and then there would be Best of Faction prizes. No one played Syndicate, but I was up against 1 or 2 other Yog decks for the Yog prize. Fooey - I was wishing I'd brought Syndicate, since at least then I'd be sure to have the "best of" for that faction. Still, if I remember correctly I only lost 1 game, and turned out to have the best record for Yog, so I sort of tied for 2nd in a way. It was a little confusing, since there were more than 4 different factions playing, but they handed out 1st and 3 Best-of prizes, so I guess you had to have a certain minimum record and not the same faction as someone who did better...or something. Regardless, I won a few more packs and something like 60-80 Sanity, and the guy who won 1st didn't need the Asylum deck he won and so he gave it to me, since I didn't have one yet. He also gave me most of the contents of the packs that he won, since there were very few cards he still needed. Some of the other spares went to another player at the table with a smaller collection, but I still got a bunch of free stuff. Perhaps the most amusing anecdote from that tournament was the ridiculous game that I had vs John Hartigan's Agency deck - he had the absurd problem of not drawing any characters during the entire game. The thing that makes this funny rather than tragic is that I played Revelation of the Spheres on him, which let me search his deck for a character and put it into play under my control, which meant that the only Agency character to see play the whole game was actually on MY side of the table.
That tournament got over close to 9:00 PM, so I headed over to registration to see if there were tickets left for the 9:00 PM Spoils iPod draft. There were, so I got into that. I drafted Rogue and Warlord yet again, not really because I wanted to, but because it was the best stuff that was passed to me. My deck was the worst yet for the weekend, and I ended up 4th again. I was talking at length with my last opponent of the round, and I ended up showing him my portfolio. He recognized "hwango," and thought he'd played Spoils online with me, but we eventually figured out he just recognized it from the message boards, and that he'd followed the link from my sig there to my gallery, since he recognized the Hermit Crab in Skull. During the course of our conversation it was revealed that he used to play Call of Cthulhu, and he'd be happy to play again if I had decks. It was 1:00 AM and this was a bad idea, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity, so he played my Syndicate deck vs my Night deck, and destroyed me. But I at least made it Night, damnit! = ) Got to bed absurdly late.
Saturday:
Started off the day with the Call of Cthulhu World Championships. Sadly, the game is low enough in popularity that there were only 12 of us. The original plan was to cut to a top 8, but that's silly with a starting pool of 12, so they cut to top 4. I made a serious mistake vs a Shub opponent, forgetting that Mentor to Vaughn has Willpower. It's in such tiny print! That cost me a Child of Yog-Sothoth that I couldn't afford to lose, and I lost that game. I won the next 2 games, though I recall one of them being a close match. Then I lost to Chris Long's Syndicate deck, but it's no great failure to lose to him, since he was last year's world champion. Still, 2 losses put me out of reach of the top 4, so I headed back to the exhibit hall for the last few booths where I needed to show my portfolio. Once that was done I actually got to try some new games. I had been really looking forward to trying Infernal Contraption, but was a little disappointed by it. I'd try it again to make sure, but I didn't buy one. Then I tried Tsuro, which was interesting, but which I didn't like as much as many others who tried it. Oshi was good, though. If it weren't for the fact that it's only 2 player I might have considered getting that one. Once the hall closed I went and got food, and then tried to build myself a highlander format deck for Cthulhu. That took a lot longer than I planned, and I was still working on it when the tournament was supposed to start at 7:00 PM. There were only 3 of us, though. Not sure why others from World's didn't come back - I know Chris didn't have a deck built for it and would have had to cobble one together, but that didn't stop me. The deck I built was Yog-Sothoth and Syndicate, since those are the two factions I had the best cards for, and they synergized reasonably well. I was tempted to make a 3-faction deck out of Cthulhu, Shub, and Hastur, but it was looking more and more like it would just be a mess, and far too slow. Anyway, we decided to just play round robbin, and John Hartigan and (?) played the first match while I spent 5 more minutes on my deck and then got it all sleeved. I beat both of them, so I got 1st, which got me 200 more Sanity, 2 Asylum decks, and 15 packs.
A few more Cthulhu people showed up towards the tail end of the tournament, and we ended up playing a game of Condotierre, which the other 3 people had played, but which was new to me. the object is to conquer 3 adjacent areas of the board, or any 5 total. Battles are fought by playing cards from your hand into an army, with each player adding to their army until they decide to pass, at which point they're stuck with what they've played so far. My opening hand was dreadful, and so I passed almost immediately in the first battle, and withouth playing a card at all in the next 2, and just let the other 3 players fight it out for those areas. That meant I was relatively unopposed in a battle near the end of the round, and then I got to keep 2 cards from my hand and we all drew up to the regular hand size again. I did the same thing the next round, only deciding to fight when winning that battle would let me start the battle in the next round exactly where I wanted, and once again I got to keep the most advantageous 2 cards from my hand for the next round. Then I unleashed a nigh-unstoppable wave of doom. Mercenary cards range in value from 1-10, and then there are special cards like the Drummer that doubles your total army, the Bishop that destroys all of the highest-level mercenary in play, and other stuff. I lead off my attack with a 6, and on my next turn almost misplayed a Bishop, which unfortunately let everyone know that I had it. Oops. Anyway, I played a 1 instead, and the next turn I played the Drummer I'd been holding the whole game. To beat my total of 14, someone played a 10. I played another 6. Then another 6. The beauty of the situation was that no one could play a Bishop to stop me, since that would only destroy the 10. In fact, I specifically didn't destroy the 10 with my own Bishop, because it was protecting my 6's. In the end, the player to my left played a Bishop to destroy the 10 in the hope that one of the other players also had a Bishop, and could use it to destroy the 6's. However, before they got to do so, I played my own 10. Heh. Most of the battles that game were won with totals like 7, or 12, or 18. I won my battle with a total of something like 58.
After that was over, I got James Black and Chris Long to try out one of my games, the Squid/Apple/etc. game. Reactions were mixed, but at least some fun was had by all, and they made some good suggestions. If nothing else, I valued their blunt criticisms. One of the Fantasty Flight people walked by while we were playing, and congratulated me on having my own home-made game. He made himself even cooler by recognizing the pangolin in the game and actually knowing what a pangolin is. I was stunned. I think he's the first person I've ever met face to face who already knew what a pangolin was. After that, it was well past time to sleep, since I'd missed so much sleep the previous day, and had another 10:00 AM tournament the next day. My right leg was really starting to hurt by this point, above and beyond just my feet hurting from so much walking and standing.
Sunday:
I had hoped to walk slowly to avoid irritating my leg more, since it still hurt when I woke up. Sadly, however, the elevator absolutely refused to stop at my floor, so instead of walking leisurely to the con, I had to run down 11 flights of stairs and then half jog to the convention center. Grr. I couldn't run down 1 flight of stairs and try the 10th floor elevator, because the doors lock you into the stairwell for security reasons. Sunday's tournament was the final $2K Spoils - the sealed deck one. My sealed deck was ridiculous. Pluck, Impeccable Timing, Summary Judgement, Irresistible Bribe, Tad Disingenuous...lots of very cool stuff. As I recall, I won round 1, lost round 2, and my round 3 opponent simply failed to show up, so I won by default. Sadly, I lost the 4th round, so once again I was just playing for packs at that point. I ran off to the exhibit hall to make one last purchase before they closed, then came back for Round 5, which I won. Alas, round 6 I was up against Jason Tian, who is sort of famous within Spoils circles. He pretty much destroyed me, and I got knocked down to 27th place. Still, out of 4 tournaments, I at least managed to never lose more games than I won, and at least got packs in each one. I do wish that I'd ditched the higher-profile tournaments and played in some iPod tournaments while they were going so I'd have less challenging opponents and maybe actually walk out of the con with a nicer iPod. That's only in hindsight, though. At the time, I still wanted the chance to win a few hundred dollars in prizes if I managed to pull off a place in the top 4 somewhere.
During one of the rounds in which I had a short game, I ran over to the Fantasy Flight guys and traded back some of the promos I'd gotten on Friday and combined them with my new haul of Sanity from Saturday to get myself a Yithian deck, which is something I never thought I'd own. Looking forward to facing off against that if I can get someone to play it against me.
I left the con at about 6:00ish, I think, and got a little disoriented walking around in daylight. I didn't exactly get lost, but I did take a slightly different route than I planned, and missed the restaurant where I'd planned to buy food. My feet hurt too much to turn around, though, and I wasn't really all that hungry yet. I took a shower and did lots of packing, and considered going back out again for food. I even went so far as to get dressed again and walk out onto the street. However, three factors contributed to me turning back. 1) lightning in the distance seemed to indicate that I might get rained on if I pressed on. 2) the streets had considerably fewer people on them than they had any other day, now than many con-goers were back in their hotels for the rest of the night or had already left town, and I felt a little unsure about the wisdom of walking around a strange city in the dark, alone, without other pedestrians around. 3) my leg was killing me. So I subsisted on snack food until I made it home on Monday.
Monday:
In the terminal, waiting for the plane, I saw one person reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and another reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Tee hee. The airline had overbooked the flight, and were looking for volunteers to wait 6 hours for the next one, for which they would be compensated with a free round-trip ticket. I really didn't want to wait 6 hours, though, and would have had to reschedule my shuttle pickup and stuff, so I stuck it out. I was regretting this when it seemed that two very small children were going to be seated near me, but they were moved to the back of the plane. Then, during the demonstration of how the oxygen mask worked, the cord broke on it, which didn't exactly fill me with confidence. I found myself thinking how upset I'd be if there was an accident, and we were all killed...you know, above and beyond being upset about dying. I pictured the wing tearing of the plane and us plummeting towards the earth and me thinking "damn it, I had a chance to take that other flight, and I blew it!" Thankfully, the flight went just fine. There were some amazing cloud formations out my window, and I wish I'd had a camera at that point. Once I got home I had some real food, followed shortly afterwards by dinner, and shortly after that I decided to journey to the magical land of sleep, because I was exhausted. I went to bed at 8:30ish PM. I woke up briefly at 4:18, but decided I really wanted more sleep. Woke up again at 8:00ish, but still wasn't quite ready for the world. I finally got up around noon, mildly horrified to have slept almost continuously for 16 hours, but I almost certainly needed every bit of it.
Tonight I resume work on art, so I can follow up with companies I spoke to at Gen Con and say "Remember me? Look, I made more pretty stuff!" After that, I think I might treat myself to a short break and replay Riven, or work on one of my novels or something.
