EC2008 - A first ever tournament for me

Tournament-Report from the Tournament "EC 2008 - Day 1". (Big-Event EC 2008)

Disclaimer: This is my first ever tournament report, so I hope you'll bear with me. It will not contain detailed tactical advice. It is merely my personal experience from my first ever tournament.

Well enough with that, onwards with the show:

My deck:

The first thing to note about my deck is that it is a themed deck, and not just the draw deck, the dilemma pile and missions where theme too. So everything was made with cards with images from the series Deep Space Nine. I know some of you might think: "What the hell, is he crazy, taking a theme deck for continentals?"... and to answer your question, yes I might just be a little crazy.
This actually wasn't the deck I planed to play originally, I had a themed Enterprise series all made up (a real annoying one with "Phoenix" and "Strange New Worlds"), but on the train ride from Århus to Berlin I decided it was to slow and went for designing the DS9 instead. I didn't have all the cards I needed for an ideal DS9 deck, but I still thought I would do better than the Starfleet deck. So I made the DS9 instead.

The basic idea of the deck is to combine high cost high integrity personnel to easily solve missions. With the boost from Worf and Kira I should be able to solve missions with just 4-5 personnel. To speed things up I used "Energize" and Runabouts for cheap ships (since I didn't need that many personnel for the missions). I was a basic idea, but I would be easy to play (which was just what I needed for my first tournament).

I know a deck with only DS9 images wouldn't do nearly as good as other decks, but I didn't attend the EC2008 to win, I attended to have fun. And by the gods did I have fun :)

If you wanted to see the deck take a look here:  http://www.open-cards.de/node/1516

The matches:

I won't go into details about each of my games (partly because I don't remember them in detail because of the overwhelming experience). But I lost the first 4 games I played. I didn't get my ass kicked in all of them and some of them where pretty close games. But I did loose. Then I had to wins follow by the last game against my arch enemy Søren

I enjoyed all my games and had a lot of fun playing each and everyone of of them, so a big thanks to all my opponents. My opponents included William Hoskin Android deck, and I did manage to scare Will by having solved 2 missions before he even got away from his HQ, but in the end when the Androids got up an running there wasn't much I could do to stop them. But it was a great and fun game. Thanks for that Will. I also played Paolo which was a very pleasent and easygoing game, I really enjoyed that too.

My last match was against my very good friend and fellow Dane, Søren. It was the perfect end of the tournament for me. I lost big time, but I never expected to win, his Voyager deck got a good draw and since he help me design my deck on the way down to Berlin he knew just what to do. But it was a perfect end to 7 great matches.

Out of the 7 games I won 2 of them, one of them against a Borg deck and the other against a Starfleet deck. It was nice to win a few games, no matter how much you just play for fun it's always nice to win sometimes. But the tournament would have been just as great if I had lost all of them.

I had planed to attend the day 2 events and the Biermeisterschaft tournament, but it was also a vacation for me and my girlfriend (who I got engaged to on the train ride home), so I had to spend some time with her too.


Tournament atmosphere:

For me the most important thing was not the prices and the competitiveness. I was there for the experience and the fun of it all. To meet new people and make friends and of course to have fun. I'm very pleased to say that all of the things happened to me. I met a lot of great people, had a blast. I can't wait to be back for more...


The Future:

I'll defiantly be going next year as well. Thanks to the great people there I got inspired to go to even more events, and to get tournaments up and running here in Denmark. In addition I will endeavour to contribute to this great community. Since I love to be different I will probably play themed decks for years to come... Heck I might even be know as "Mr. Theme" in the end