SuperWooper
New Member
Sandston, VA Gym Challenge Report
May 20, 2006
This one will be pretty short, sweet and to the point.
I got up at 7 AM, and we drove to the Conn household and picked their three boys up. We make the three hour drive to Sandston, a town near Richmond, VA, if you’re looking for a point of reference. We have a bit of trouble finding the tournament site, as I read something on the thread about an airport, but on the way past a hotel I see a kinda geeky-looking kid and I mention out loud, “He looks like a Pokemon player,” so my mom turns around and hey - it turns out that the tournament IS at the hotel. How amazing is that?
So we get there, and Mike, Johnny, the Andersons, TrueGamerX, Gymbo, eriknance (who I didn’t get to meet because he was at Table 1 for the whole tournament and I was tending to go in the opposite direction), and some other cool people are there. Luke is conspicuously absent, and NOT conspicuously absent is CFK, returning from his extended hiatus from the Pokemon TCG (college is for poor people). So we joke around, and David steals my deckbox and sees that I’m playing Ariados, and since he’s NEVER online and doesn’t talk to anybody, he can’t figure out what I’m playing. He asks Mike was Ariados does and when Mike tells him, he sees me shuffling and sees the Eevee, and he STILL doesn’t get it. So I just tell them because I’m sick of making them guess. ><
Sean and Daniel (the other Daniel) get into a GMU v. JMU fight, and other randomness ensues. We shuffle and wait for pairings and I play a fun game versus Melody in which I make like two misplays. =/ Pairings come up shortly afterward. And of course I play one of my losses in Round 1. Thanks, software pairings.
Round 1 versus Mike P (SHPanda) w/ BLS
Flariados has an okay matchup versus this deck. Mike offers to do “best poker hand” so see who goes first, and he rolls three 6s and two 5s. He goes, “Flush,” and I kinda just throw my dice on the table haphazardly after that. But he offers to reroll since it technically isn’t “random,” which it turns out I should have declined. I roll a 10 with two dice and go first, just attach to Eevee and CFF for Spin. His start is Pidgey, but then he goes “Celio Candy QS for Jirachi DX retreat Wishing Star pass.” UGH. I kill the Jirachi DX, he puts up Pidgeot and Mentors for Jirachi HL, Squirtle and Voltorb. Voltorb to Jirachi, MaW for Wartortle, go. I think about killing the Jirachi HL, but then he just kills my Flareon and I can’t go for the SSU. I go back to Spinarak and PETM for Ariados, play Frontier and gust the Wartortle, but he flips heads on the sleep check. His three card hand makes me think he doesn’t have the Stadium. It turns out I would have made the right play - had his two card Steven’s Advice not gotten him one. He works his way out of the lock, and at one point I have a chance to Spider Trap his Pidgeot and if he gets tails on sleep, I can possibly turn it around, but he flips the heads and runs through the rest of my guys with Mew ex. GG. 0-1
First round losses usually mean you play somebody new second round, so I hope that I can bounce back. Almost everybody I know has won their first round, and nothing too funny happens between rounds, so I’ll just fast forward fifteen minutes or so.
Round 2 versus ? w/ Aggron/Cradily d
Sorry I can’t remember your name. This is this guy’s first tournament, so when I see the Fossils and the Aron T1, I’m like, “Huh?” He was cool, though. I had to explain status to him a lot, but he got the general idea. Status from Flareon killed his Aggron, which was basically impervious to Ariados’s grassiness. With 2 metal and resistance, Reactive Poison would have done next to nothing, and I couldn’t draw energy to save my life, so I just let my Full Flame sit. I managed to get him to reveal that he didn’t play any switching cards, so Aggron’s 4 retreat cost made it impossible to shake the burn and confusion. Eventually he KO’d himself and brought up his last Pokemon, a fossil, which can’t be affected by Special Conditions, but after a couple turns I topdeck enough energy for Heat Tackle. 1-1
Lunch breeeak. The four of us cool kids trek on over to BK, where I am thinking of getting a job ... locally.
So anyway, I get their ownage Angus Burger with bacon. On the way over, Pramawat and the Andersons are heading to the BK, but they see the Arby’s across the street and jaywalk for the win. Pfft, I’ll take BK’s Angus Burger over Arby’s Curly Fries any day (the curly fries are still quite good though). On a side note, the Burger King’s bathroom was one of the cleanest public restrooms I have ever used in my life. Score. We head on back to the tournament site and Jon and Mike have their cell phones out and do this amazing trick where they dial each other’s numbers and their cell phones make this cool siren sound. Everybody in the room turned and looked. The pitch kept getting higher and higher until it sounded like a bomb was about to go off, and then it suddenly stopped. =(
Round 3 versus Johnny R (Time For Pain) w/ <3.dec
Johnny was playing a weird version with Holon GL over Multi and no Misdreavus. It would have worked well against my Flariados ... had I not flipped 2 straight heads on ER2 on his Grass Energy that stopped him from ever playing Holon GL. He never had more than 1 energy on the board. The game only lasted 3 turns - we both had bad starts, but I get an Ariados out T2 and poison and sleep him. He wakes up from sleep and I figure he has the Fluffy Berry, but nope. It’s still just the one lone Koffing. He confuses me and I have nothing, so I’m debating whether to pass for flip FTW. Ariados is my only in-play Pokemon, so he could evolve to Weezing DS and DRE for the win if I flip tails, but I decide to go for it since his hand is atrocious. Heads. Sorry Johnny. =( 2-1
We finish in about five minutes, so we get chosen for “random” deck checks. I get my deck sorted and head over to where CFK is chilling out. He’s 1-2 with Mike’s Arcanine ex, his Round 2 loss coming off a Flariados. Tough break. Anyway, he has some amazing cards, including a Saddam Electrode HL and Mexican Dunsparce by Pablo (I think). There’s also a bunch of cards signed by Japanese artists. The Slaking was MIA. (Or is that Luke’s?)
Devon and Ryan are both 3-0 in the 11-14 and 10-, respectively, both of which are playing 4 rounds. Top 4 will be played in 11-14, and Top 4 in 10-, so it looks like they’re both going to make it in as they usually do. Dan is 1-2 coming off a tough loss to Daniel’s Dustox ex with his Mewtric deck. Ewww, who plays Dustox? JK, love you like a brother TrueGamer. ;p
So pairings are up for Round 4 and I play against somebody who I’ve never heard of. I breath a sigh of relief that it’s not Gymbo or Jon, but I wasted my breath.
Round 4 versus Josh R w/ Flariados
Haha, the mirror matchup! I have no idea how the mirror works. I guess you just KO all their Ariados, because Spider Trapping Flareon is worthless due to SSU. Anyway, it doesn’t matter how the game plays out, because I lose T2. Lemme diagram this game for you. I mulligan five times. So he has 3 basics down and 9 cards in his hand. I finally draw Spinarak on my sixth hand, but there’s no energy in my hand, so I pass. He Double Great Balls making his bench one card from being filled, attaches to Spinarak and Collects. I draw and get no energy, but I have a Copycat. I used it and draw four gyms, two Flareon ex and a couple energy. No basics. I lose next turn, as he has the Ariados and Flareon ex in his huge hand. Five mulligans for the win? 2-2
UGH. This tournament is not going so well. There’s only one more round, and my prospects look pretty bleak. After Round 3 I had the sixth highest resistance of the 2-1s out of eight of them, but my opponents all do well in Round 4 so my resistance goes up. I check in with my Round 2 opponent and he’s 0-4, which is killing my resistance. I like free wins, but I don’t like it when they hurt my resistance. And I don’t like mulligans all that much either right now.
So while I’m already in a pretty bad mood, they announce the prizes for the players that didn’t make the top cut in 11-14 and 10-. Ryan’s only loss was to the 2nd place person in the last round, but somehow, he ends up in FOURTH PLACE out of nine people. What?! I ask to look at the pairings sheet while he’s calling out pairings, which I suppose was rather rude of me, and I’d like to apologize for that. I figure out that all of Ryan’s wins were versus kids who went 1-3 or dropped, so he got 4th with a 3-1 record. I couldn’t believe it. Ryan was unquestionably the best 10- player there, but because a bunch of younger kids who didn’t know how to play showed up and he had to play all of them because of software pairings, he ended up getting fourth place in a Top 2 cut. I was pretty frustrated because TOM screwed him out of a trip he would have won. Nobody else in 10- really knew how to play the game that day.
Devon makes the Top 4 in 11-14 along with Nick, Hunter and some guy from Canada who traveled twelve hours to come to the VA Gym Challenge. I quietly shuffle my deck, thinking about my chances for getting Top 8. I have the Maryland Gym Challenge, but I prepared a lot for this one, thinking a lot about my deck choice. I had heard Luke might not be there, and he had been the one I had expected to play Arcanine. Instead, Mike gave it to CFK, who was sitting at 1-3 with it. Dustox, Mewtric and other stuff looked good for me. I figured I might make it in since my only other really bad matchup in the field was Arcanine, which I wouldn’t be playing. Pairings go up and I let out a sigh of relief, as it’s somebody whose name I don’t recognize listed across from mine.
Round 5 versus Brandon w/ Deoxys Form Change deck
I win this game Turn 4-ish. I find out that you can use Deoxys’s power while it’s affected by a special condition, which doesn’t really matter because I paralyze him anyway, and he has no answer to that. I never really get set up, but Ariados single-handedly delivers it for me. GG. 3-2
We sit around and I play a practice game versus Dan’s Mewtric. I forget to take 2 prizes for the first Mew I kill and I still beat him. Rofl. The matchup is ridiculously slanted in Flariados’s favor. They can’t compete with 70 for 1 or the status either, for that matter. They still haven’t announced the Top 8 for 15+, so we’re chilling out and listening to Devon’s finals match in 11-14 (he beat Rock Lock in the Top with Arcanine ex). In the finals versus Nick, who is playing BLS, they play a grueling first game, taking up a good portion of the one hour time limit, with the prizes going down to 1-1 before Nick takes his last one. Devon gets a quick win in Game 2, and throughout the course of these two games Nick has misplayed a couple times in spots where he could have significantly improved his chances. With the series tied going into a third game where whoever takes the first prize wins, Arcanine looks to have the speed advantage. Here’s how it plays out.
Nick wins the opening flip and attaches to Squirtle. Devon hits an ER2 on the Squirtle and attaches to Growlithe, then passes to Nick.
Topdeck the PETM for Blastoise ex, Power Tree for the Water Energy, Candy Squirtle to Blastoise ex, Energy Rain x3, attach a Holon Electrode. GAME.
Donked. Devon walks away with 18 packs and no trip, but we still have Rockville. Look on the bright side if you’re reading this, Devon - now you can win 54 packs and a trip instead of 36 and a trip. There’s no way you whiff at Rockville. That was some serious lucksacking. Congrats to Nick anyway for the win. =)
So the 15+ Top 8 starts without my knowing it, and I run over to right down who’s playing who and what. Here’s the lowdown.
1st: Erik N (5-0) w/ Flariados v 8th: Tim F (3-2) w/ Eggs.dec
2nd: Jim F (4-1) w/ Queen v 7th: Danny M (3-2) w/ Eggs.dec
3rd: Mike P (4-1) w/ BLS v 6th: Greg C (3-2) w/ Medicham
4th: Stephanie B (4-1) w/ Queen v 5th: Josh R (4-1) w/ Flariados
2 Flariados
2 Queendom
2 Eggs.dec
1 BLS
1 Medicham
Interesting, to say the very least. Here’s how the Top 8 progressed:
Winners in bold:
1st: Erik N w/ Flariados v 8th: Tim F w/ Eggs.dec
2nd: Jim F w/ Queen v 7th: Danny M w/ Eggs.dec
3rd: Mike P w/ BLS v 6th: Greg C w/ Medicham
4th: Stephanie B w/ Queen v 5th: Josh R w/ Flariados
Top 4:
1st: Erik N w/ Flariados v 4th: Stephanie B w/ Queen
7th: Danny M w/ Eggs.dec v 6th: Greg C w/ Medicham
Finals:
1st: Erik N w/ Flariados v 7th: Danny M w/ Eggs.dec
So Erik wins with Flariados. I was expecting Mike to win it all, as he had the field covered best, but Flariados did a decent job of that, too. The 2 Eggs.dec were big surprises - I expected the people who played them to play them, but not to do so well in a metagame where Eggs.dec suffers as much as it does (or as I thought it did, I guess?).
So while I’m looking at the standings after Round 5, I’m writing down the eighth place player Tim’s name, and I look one down and THERE I AM. Ninth place! And what’s more, Tim and I had the exact same tiebreak percentage! It was the opponent’s opponent’s win percentage that separated us. That Aggron/Cradily d guy who went 0-5 or 1-4 ended up pulling my resistance down. If only it had been somebody else...
Oh well. I have Rockville, as do the rest of us. We had a good time. Ryan got some really nice cards in the booster draft, and each of the Conn kids won a door prize. Sadly, I won nothing, but I think my winning the Gamecube two years ago fills my luck quota for basically the rest of my life. Daniel’s Groudon hat is amazing. <3
We say our goodbyes and drive back home, arriving at nine-ish. I type this puppy up and go to bed pretty drained, but there’s still time for props and slops!
Props: :thumb:
- The tournament. It was well-run. There were no computer problems or mispairings, and the pod draft afterwards was really fun for Ryan after a very disappointing 4th place finish. Nice touch. Thanks, Totoro! =)
- Groudon hats
- Angus Burgers
- Devon’s 2nd place finish
- Erik for his win in 15+
- Nick for his win in 11-14
- Whoever won the 10-
- The Canada kid who drove 12 hours for the tournament. You’re hardcore, man.
- TrueGamerX for making it for his second to last event. (Oh yes. You ARE coming to Rockville.)
- My ER2 flips versus Johnny. =D
Slops: :nonono:
- One of the judges made a terrible call where she let a player take back a completed Swoop! Teleporter play which would have KO’d the Pokemon he swooped into (a Jirachi DX w/ 50 into an Eevee from DS). The other player didn’t appeal to the HJ, though, so meh.
- Mulligans
- 9th place
- Tiebreaks (in this particular instance; live and die)
- Flariados for only really getting set up on time in one or two games out of my five.
- 2/13 on my SSU flips for the day.
- Ryan being paired up with all new players by the software. >_< Kthx, TOM.
- Lucksac Blastoise ex wins. =(
- COLLEGE!
LMK if I forgot anything or anyone, and I’ll add them to the Slops section right away. See you at Rockville.
May 20, 2006
This one will be pretty short, sweet and to the point.
I got up at 7 AM, and we drove to the Conn household and picked their three boys up. We make the three hour drive to Sandston, a town near Richmond, VA, if you’re looking for a point of reference. We have a bit of trouble finding the tournament site, as I read something on the thread about an airport, but on the way past a hotel I see a kinda geeky-looking kid and I mention out loud, “He looks like a Pokemon player,” so my mom turns around and hey - it turns out that the tournament IS at the hotel. How amazing is that?
So we get there, and Mike, Johnny, the Andersons, TrueGamerX, Gymbo, eriknance (who I didn’t get to meet because he was at Table 1 for the whole tournament and I was tending to go in the opposite direction), and some other cool people are there. Luke is conspicuously absent, and NOT conspicuously absent is CFK, returning from his extended hiatus from the Pokemon TCG (college is for poor people). So we joke around, and David steals my deckbox and sees that I’m playing Ariados, and since he’s NEVER online and doesn’t talk to anybody, he can’t figure out what I’m playing. He asks Mike was Ariados does and when Mike tells him, he sees me shuffling and sees the Eevee, and he STILL doesn’t get it. So I just tell them because I’m sick of making them guess. ><
Sean and Daniel (the other Daniel) get into a GMU v. JMU fight, and other randomness ensues. We shuffle and wait for pairings and I play a fun game versus Melody in which I make like two misplays. =/ Pairings come up shortly afterward. And of course I play one of my losses in Round 1. Thanks, software pairings.
Round 1 versus Mike P (SHPanda) w/ BLS
Flariados has an okay matchup versus this deck. Mike offers to do “best poker hand” so see who goes first, and he rolls three 6s and two 5s. He goes, “Flush,” and I kinda just throw my dice on the table haphazardly after that. But he offers to reroll since it technically isn’t “random,” which it turns out I should have declined. I roll a 10 with two dice and go first, just attach to Eevee and CFF for Spin. His start is Pidgey, but then he goes “Celio Candy QS for Jirachi DX retreat Wishing Star pass.” UGH. I kill the Jirachi DX, he puts up Pidgeot and Mentors for Jirachi HL, Squirtle and Voltorb. Voltorb to Jirachi, MaW for Wartortle, go. I think about killing the Jirachi HL, but then he just kills my Flareon and I can’t go for the SSU. I go back to Spinarak and PETM for Ariados, play Frontier and gust the Wartortle, but he flips heads on the sleep check. His three card hand makes me think he doesn’t have the Stadium. It turns out I would have made the right play - had his two card Steven’s Advice not gotten him one. He works his way out of the lock, and at one point I have a chance to Spider Trap his Pidgeot and if he gets tails on sleep, I can possibly turn it around, but he flips the heads and runs through the rest of my guys with Mew ex. GG. 0-1
First round losses usually mean you play somebody new second round, so I hope that I can bounce back. Almost everybody I know has won their first round, and nothing too funny happens between rounds, so I’ll just fast forward fifteen minutes or so.
Round 2 versus ? w/ Aggron/Cradily d
Sorry I can’t remember your name. This is this guy’s first tournament, so when I see the Fossils and the Aron T1, I’m like, “Huh?” He was cool, though. I had to explain status to him a lot, but he got the general idea. Status from Flareon killed his Aggron, which was basically impervious to Ariados’s grassiness. With 2 metal and resistance, Reactive Poison would have done next to nothing, and I couldn’t draw energy to save my life, so I just let my Full Flame sit. I managed to get him to reveal that he didn’t play any switching cards, so Aggron’s 4 retreat cost made it impossible to shake the burn and confusion. Eventually he KO’d himself and brought up his last Pokemon, a fossil, which can’t be affected by Special Conditions, but after a couple turns I topdeck enough energy for Heat Tackle. 1-1
Lunch breeeak. The four of us cool kids trek on over to BK, where I am thinking of getting a job ... locally.
So anyway, I get their ownage Angus Burger with bacon. On the way over, Pramawat and the Andersons are heading to the BK, but they see the Arby’s across the street and jaywalk for the win. Pfft, I’ll take BK’s Angus Burger over Arby’s Curly Fries any day (the curly fries are still quite good though). On a side note, the Burger King’s bathroom was one of the cleanest public restrooms I have ever used in my life. Score. We head on back to the tournament site and Jon and Mike have their cell phones out and do this amazing trick where they dial each other’s numbers and their cell phones make this cool siren sound. Everybody in the room turned and looked. The pitch kept getting higher and higher until it sounded like a bomb was about to go off, and then it suddenly stopped. =(Round 3 versus Johnny R (Time For Pain) w/ <3.dec
Johnny was playing a weird version with Holon GL over Multi and no Misdreavus. It would have worked well against my Flariados ... had I not flipped 2 straight heads on ER2 on his Grass Energy that stopped him from ever playing Holon GL. He never had more than 1 energy on the board. The game only lasted 3 turns - we both had bad starts, but I get an Ariados out T2 and poison and sleep him. He wakes up from sleep and I figure he has the Fluffy Berry, but nope. It’s still just the one lone Koffing. He confuses me and I have nothing, so I’m debating whether to pass for flip FTW. Ariados is my only in-play Pokemon, so he could evolve to Weezing DS and DRE for the win if I flip tails, but I decide to go for it since his hand is atrocious. Heads. Sorry Johnny. =( 2-1
We finish in about five minutes, so we get chosen for “random” deck checks. I get my deck sorted and head over to where CFK is chilling out. He’s 1-2 with Mike’s Arcanine ex, his Round 2 loss coming off a Flariados. Tough break. Anyway, he has some amazing cards, including a Saddam Electrode HL and Mexican Dunsparce by Pablo (I think). There’s also a bunch of cards signed by Japanese artists. The Slaking was MIA. (Or is that Luke’s?)
Devon and Ryan are both 3-0 in the 11-14 and 10-, respectively, both of which are playing 4 rounds. Top 4 will be played in 11-14, and Top 4 in 10-, so it looks like they’re both going to make it in as they usually do. Dan is 1-2 coming off a tough loss to Daniel’s Dustox ex with his Mewtric deck. Ewww, who plays Dustox? JK, love you like a brother TrueGamer. ;p
So pairings are up for Round 4 and I play against somebody who I’ve never heard of. I breath a sigh of relief that it’s not Gymbo or Jon, but I wasted my breath.
Round 4 versus Josh R w/ Flariados
Haha, the mirror matchup! I have no idea how the mirror works. I guess you just KO all their Ariados, because Spider Trapping Flareon is worthless due to SSU. Anyway, it doesn’t matter how the game plays out, because I lose T2. Lemme diagram this game for you. I mulligan five times. So he has 3 basics down and 9 cards in his hand. I finally draw Spinarak on my sixth hand, but there’s no energy in my hand, so I pass. He Double Great Balls making his bench one card from being filled, attaches to Spinarak and Collects. I draw and get no energy, but I have a Copycat. I used it and draw four gyms, two Flareon ex and a couple energy. No basics. I lose next turn, as he has the Ariados and Flareon ex in his huge hand. Five mulligans for the win? 2-2
UGH. This tournament is not going so well. There’s only one more round, and my prospects look pretty bleak. After Round 3 I had the sixth highest resistance of the 2-1s out of eight of them, but my opponents all do well in Round 4 so my resistance goes up. I check in with my Round 2 opponent and he’s 0-4, which is killing my resistance. I like free wins, but I don’t like it when they hurt my resistance. And I don’t like mulligans all that much either right now.
So while I’m already in a pretty bad mood, they announce the prizes for the players that didn’t make the top cut in 11-14 and 10-. Ryan’s only loss was to the 2nd place person in the last round, but somehow, he ends up in FOURTH PLACE out of nine people. What?! I ask to look at the pairings sheet while he’s calling out pairings, which I suppose was rather rude of me, and I’d like to apologize for that. I figure out that all of Ryan’s wins were versus kids who went 1-3 or dropped, so he got 4th with a 3-1 record. I couldn’t believe it. Ryan was unquestionably the best 10- player there, but because a bunch of younger kids who didn’t know how to play showed up and he had to play all of them because of software pairings, he ended up getting fourth place in a Top 2 cut. I was pretty frustrated because TOM screwed him out of a trip he would have won. Nobody else in 10- really knew how to play the game that day.
Devon makes the Top 4 in 11-14 along with Nick, Hunter and some guy from Canada who traveled twelve hours to come to the VA Gym Challenge
. I quietly shuffle my deck, thinking about my chances for getting Top 8. I have the Maryland Gym Challenge, but I prepared a lot for this one, thinking a lot about my deck choice. I had heard Luke might not be there, and he had been the one I had expected to play Arcanine. Instead, Mike gave it to CFK, who was sitting at 1-3 with it. Dustox, Mewtric and other stuff looked good for me. I figured I might make it in since my only other really bad matchup in the field was Arcanine, which I wouldn’t be playing. Pairings go up and I let out a sigh of relief, as it’s somebody whose name I don’t recognize listed across from mine.Round 5 versus Brandon w/ Deoxys Form Change deck
I win this game Turn 4-ish. I find out that you can use Deoxys’s power while it’s affected by a special condition, which doesn’t really matter because I paralyze him anyway, and he has no answer to that. I never really get set up, but Ariados single-handedly delivers it for me. GG. 3-2
We sit around and I play a practice game versus Dan’s Mewtric. I forget to take 2 prizes for the first Mew I kill and I still beat him. Rofl. The matchup is ridiculously slanted in Flariados’s favor. They can’t compete with 70 for 1 or the status either, for that matter. They still haven’t announced the Top 8 for 15+, so we’re chilling out and listening to Devon’s finals match in 11-14 (he beat Rock Lock in the Top with Arcanine ex). In the finals versus Nick, who is playing BLS, they play a grueling first game, taking up a good portion of the one hour time limit, with the prizes going down to 1-1 before Nick takes his last one. Devon gets a quick win in Game 2, and throughout the course of these two games Nick has misplayed a couple times in spots where he could have significantly improved his chances. With the series tied going into a third game where whoever takes the first prize wins, Arcanine looks to have the speed advantage. Here’s how it plays out.
Nick wins the opening flip and attaches to Squirtle. Devon hits an ER2 on the Squirtle and attaches to Growlithe, then passes to Nick.
Topdeck the PETM for Blastoise ex, Power Tree for the Water Energy, Candy Squirtle to Blastoise ex, Energy Rain x3, attach a Holon Electrode. GAME.
Donked. Devon walks away with 18 packs and no trip, but we still have Rockville. Look on the bright side if you’re reading this, Devon - now you can win 54 packs and a trip instead of 36 and a trip. There’s no way you whiff at Rockville. That was some serious lucksacking. Congrats to Nick anyway for the win. =)
So the 15+ Top 8 starts without my knowing it, and I run over to right down who’s playing who and what. Here’s the lowdown.
1st: Erik N (5-0) w/ Flariados v 8th: Tim F (3-2) w/ Eggs.dec
2nd: Jim F (4-1) w/ Queen v 7th: Danny M (3-2) w/ Eggs.dec
3rd: Mike P (4-1) w/ BLS v 6th: Greg C (3-2) w/ Medicham
4th: Stephanie B (4-1) w/ Queen v 5th: Josh R (4-1) w/ Flariados
2 Flariados
2 Queendom
2 Eggs.dec
1 BLS
1 Medicham
Interesting, to say the very least. Here’s how the Top 8 progressed:
Winners in bold:
1st: Erik N w/ Flariados v 8th: Tim F w/ Eggs.dec
2nd: Jim F w/ Queen v 7th: Danny M w/ Eggs.dec
3rd: Mike P w/ BLS v 6th: Greg C w/ Medicham
4th: Stephanie B w/ Queen v 5th: Josh R w/ Flariados
Top 4:
1st: Erik N w/ Flariados v 4th: Stephanie B w/ Queen
7th: Danny M w/ Eggs.dec v 6th: Greg C w/ Medicham
Finals:
1st: Erik N w/ Flariados v 7th: Danny M w/ Eggs.dec
So Erik wins with Flariados. I was expecting Mike to win it all, as he had the field covered best, but Flariados did a decent job of that, too. The 2 Eggs.dec were big surprises - I expected the people who played them to play them, but not to do so well in a metagame where Eggs.dec suffers as much as it does (or as I thought it did, I guess?).
So while I’m looking at the standings after Round 5, I’m writing down the eighth place player Tim’s name, and I look one down and THERE I AM. Ninth place! And what’s more, Tim and I had the exact same tiebreak percentage! It was the opponent’s opponent’s win percentage that separated us. That Aggron/Cradily d guy who went 0-5 or 1-4 ended up pulling my resistance down. If only it had been somebody else...
Oh well. I have Rockville, as do the rest of us. We had a good time. Ryan got some really nice cards in the booster draft, and each of the Conn kids won a door prize. Sadly, I won nothing, but I think my winning the Gamecube two years ago fills my luck quota for basically the rest of my life. Daniel’s Groudon hat is amazing. <3
We say our goodbyes and drive back home, arriving at nine-ish. I type this puppy up and go to bed pretty drained, but there’s still time for props and slops!
Props: :thumb:
- The tournament. It was well-run. There were no computer problems or mispairings, and the pod draft afterwards was really fun for Ryan after a very disappointing 4th place finish. Nice touch. Thanks, Totoro! =)
- Groudon hats
- Angus Burgers
- Devon’s 2nd place finish
- Erik for his win in 15+
- Nick for his win in 11-14
- Whoever won the 10-
- The Canada kid who drove 12 hours for the tournament. You’re hardcore, man.
- TrueGamerX for making it for his second to last event. (Oh yes. You ARE coming to Rockville.)
- My ER2 flips versus Johnny. =D
Slops: :nonono:
- One of the judges made a terrible call where she let a player take back a completed Swoop! Teleporter play which would have KO’d the Pokemon he swooped into (a Jirachi DX w/ 50 into an Eevee from DS). The other player didn’t appeal to the HJ, though, so meh.
- Mulligans
- 9th place
- Tiebreaks (in this particular instance; live and die)
- Flariados for only really getting set up on time in one or two games out of my five.
- 2/13 on my SSU flips for the day.
- Ryan being paired up with all new players by the software. >_< Kthx, TOM.
- Lucksac Blastoise ex wins. =(
- COLLEGE!
LMK if I forgot anything or anyone, and I’ll add them to the Slops section right away. See you at Rockville.
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