The Dreamblade Tournament
As you may recall on Friday I was unsure whether I wanted to go to the Dreamblade tournament on Saturday or not. Part of my reluctance about going hinged on getting my Saturday hike in. Once I scheduled that for 8:00 am, I figured I could do both. My plan was to go, play the first two rounds and take it from there. If I was 0-2 then I could just leave, if I was 2-0 then it would be clear that I should stick around. If I was 1-1 then I would just be mad...
I got done with the hike earlier than I expected, but there still wasn't enough time between it and the tournament to get anything to eat, though if I had known that they were going to be an hour late getting things started... I'll leave my rant on how poorly run it was for a little later. I don't want to whine, but... actually that's precisely what I want to do, my pull was really bad. I not only had sucky pieces I had duplicates of sucky pieces.
The first game was ugly, possibly the ugliest I've ever played, mostly because I was still learning the pieces. I won it on time (in other words the game hadn't finished when time was called, but I was ahead). I hate it when a game goes to time, it always feels like you're winning (or losing) on a technicality. I probably shouldn't feel as bad as I do, since it was the other guy who was playing slow.
Right when I was in the middle of that ugly first game, my friend Wil called. He had had a dream the night before about the tournament. In the dream I was bummed because the #2 player in the world had driven up from LA to attend the tournament. As it turns out the #2 player had driven up, and was standing right next to me when the phone rang. Since I was in the middle of the game and since the #2 guy knows Wil pretty well I handed him the phone and said talk to Wil for awhile. Now remember I had no idea about the dream. Well after having that dream to call and have that very guy pick up the phone... Well apparently it was like something out of the Twilight Zone.
The second game was with a 12 year old girl. One might think that it would be an easy game, but she's ranked fourth in the state, and has made it to a couple of 1k top fours, so she's no slouch. But apparently sealed is not her favorite format, so I beat her, though I felt bad about it, I think she might have even teared up a little at the end, I thought that was a pretty underhanded play myself. I mean if I tear up people just think I'm a pansy.
The third game was against the aforementioned #2 player in the world. This was was when my bands weakness really hurt me, also the die rolls did not go in my favor. I only say this because I have a witness. On a couple of rolls I made my opponent agree to testify to anyone who asked that the dice just weren't going my way. So anyway I lost on time, but I managed to keep reasonably close. Of course with all my games going to the time limit I didn't have any opportunity to rectify the food situation. Certainly that had to play a role in my performance right?
The fourth game was for all the marbles so to speak. If I win I go to the top four and make some money, if I lose then it's all over. I won't bore you with all the details, but it was a hard fought match and we ended up tied at 5-5, whoever won the next round would win the game. In Dreamblade the average damage per die is 1. (three faces that do no damage, and three faces that do 1,2 or 3 points of damage respectively, for those that don't trust my math) To win the game I needed to roll 5 points of damage on 7 dice or 6 points of damage on 8 dice. I didn't need to do both, just one or the other... well I think at this point you can guess what happened, I didn't make either roll and I lost.
This wasn't the worst result in the world. The tournament had already gone a lot longer than it should have. Part of the delay was in distributing the playing rewards. The tournament organizer, claimed that Wizards hadn't told him how to do it (that was his excuse for a lot of things) so he was just going to do it randomly. When I mentioned that it was on the website he retorted that, the website wasn't official. At which point all the dreamblade players rose up en masse and clubbed him to death with our unused Gun Behemoths. Okay not really, but that's what should have happened. Eventually he saw the light, but then he had to look up all of our points on his crappy dial-up connection, which added another 45 minutes to things. So a tournament that should have taken five hours ended up taking nearly seven, and don't even get me started on his complete lack of rules knowledge.
50k here I come
I got done with the hike earlier than I expected, but there still wasn't enough time between it and the tournament to get anything to eat, though if I had known that they were going to be an hour late getting things started... I'll leave my rant on how poorly run it was for a little later. I don't want to whine, but... actually that's precisely what I want to do, my pull was really bad. I not only had sucky pieces I had duplicates of sucky pieces.
The first game was ugly, possibly the ugliest I've ever played, mostly because I was still learning the pieces. I won it on time (in other words the game hadn't finished when time was called, but I was ahead). I hate it when a game goes to time, it always feels like you're winning (or losing) on a technicality. I probably shouldn't feel as bad as I do, since it was the other guy who was playing slow.
Right when I was in the middle of that ugly first game, my friend Wil called. He had had a dream the night before about the tournament. In the dream I was bummed because the #2 player in the world had driven up from LA to attend the tournament. As it turns out the #2 player had driven up, and was standing right next to me when the phone rang. Since I was in the middle of the game and since the #2 guy knows Wil pretty well I handed him the phone and said talk to Wil for awhile. Now remember I had no idea about the dream. Well after having that dream to call and have that very guy pick up the phone... Well apparently it was like something out of the Twilight Zone.
The second game was with a 12 year old girl. One might think that it would be an easy game, but she's ranked fourth in the state, and has made it to a couple of 1k top fours, so she's no slouch. But apparently sealed is not her favorite format, so I beat her, though I felt bad about it, I think she might have even teared up a little at the end, I thought that was a pretty underhanded play myself. I mean if I tear up people just think I'm a pansy.
The third game was against the aforementioned #2 player in the world. This was was when my bands weakness really hurt me, also the die rolls did not go in my favor. I only say this because I have a witness. On a couple of rolls I made my opponent agree to testify to anyone who asked that the dice just weren't going my way. So anyway I lost on time, but I managed to keep reasonably close. Of course with all my games going to the time limit I didn't have any opportunity to rectify the food situation. Certainly that had to play a role in my performance right?
The fourth game was for all the marbles so to speak. If I win I go to the top four and make some money, if I lose then it's all over. I won't bore you with all the details, but it was a hard fought match and we ended up tied at 5-5, whoever won the next round would win the game. In Dreamblade the average damage per die is 1. (three faces that do no damage, and three faces that do 1,2 or 3 points of damage respectively, for those that don't trust my math) To win the game I needed to roll 5 points of damage on 7 dice or 6 points of damage on 8 dice. I didn't need to do both, just one or the other... well I think at this point you can guess what happened, I didn't make either roll and I lost.
This wasn't the worst result in the world. The tournament had already gone a lot longer than it should have. Part of the delay was in distributing the playing rewards. The tournament organizer, claimed that Wizards hadn't told him how to do it (that was his excuse for a lot of things) so he was just going to do it randomly. When I mentioned that it was on the website he retorted that, the website wasn't official. At which point all the dreamblade players rose up en masse and clubbed him to death with our unused Gun Behemoths. Okay not really, but that's what should have happened. Eventually he saw the light, but then he had to look up all of our points on his crappy dial-up connection, which added another 45 minutes to things. So a tournament that should have taken five hours ended up taking nearly seven, and don't even get me started on his complete lack of rules knowledge.
50k here I come
posted by DireKobold at 10:46 AM
4 Comments:
Sorry to hear it was so sloppy... when's your next one?
There's another 1k in Idaho on the 16th, but I have a fathers and sons outing on that day, so it's entirely possible that my next tournament will be the year-end 50k championship at GenCon.
Bummer about the the rigmarole. But your draws and dice rolls are due to come up on the "better than average" sometime I'd think.
Very cool Twilight Zone story however, I really like those eerie occurrences.
One friend of mine said he saw me winning the California lottery in his dream. I figured what the heck...and did no better than 2 of 6 numbers in the 10 I bought. Too bad dreams tend to prognosticate smaller details. :)
Post a Comment
<< Home