Tournament report for the Celle Regional 2009 | openCards

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Tournament report for the Celle Regional 2009

    This Tournament-Report article was written by openCards user Jaglom Shrek at Apr 6th, 2009.

    Tournament-Report from the Tournament "Regional 2009: Celle (L2)". (imageBig-Event Regionals 2009)

    Last weekend’s European Regional took place at April 5th in Celle at the traditional location of the annual Grand Prix Convention. Again the tournament took place in the InterCityHotel where we’ve been running tournaments since 2nd Edition began its rise. Together with two players from Hannover, Daniel Sinner and Mark Preusse, I arrived at the location short before official registration was about to start. With 10 pre-registrations of both well-known and less regular players I was positively surprised to found some additional guests waiting for me in front of the hotel: Team London members Johannes Klarhauser and Will Hoskin on their Regional trip. One a Vice-Champion of the last World Championship, the other a player directly from the big city. What else do we need to run a high-class tournament?

    Right, a deck that can keep up with that kind of competition. Sebastian Kirstein, returning Champion of the Grand Prix brought a Vacation from the Continuum/Subliminal Signal deck, better known as „Tyler’s New Deck“. But where we have an antagonist there also should be a protagonist: Tobias Rausmann had already tried to find a way to defeat Tyler’s deck at the last two tournaments in Koblenz and had been successful the day before. Would he be able to defeat the same deck played by a different player?

    The first round started with a top match between Sebastian and Johannes. With Klingons dominating this spring’s tournaments Johannes had also decided to bring a 60-cards Klingon battle deck in accordance with a Tragic Turn dilemma pile. Sebastian had prepared his deck with various event-saving stuff which resulted in a two-HQ strategy. Mostly the abilities of Nog, Eager Cadet and Miles O’Brien, Repair Technician translated to an undestructable combination of long-time underestimated Subliminal Signal and the looping Vacation from the Continuum. The brand new Defensive Upgrades were just the icing on the cake. As expected Sebastian managed to lock-out Johannes’ mission completely but in the end wasn’t quick enough to reach a full win.

    The next game Sebastian won straight against Tiemo Mittelstedt’s Starfleet solver. In round three he faced Will who had lost the game before to Michael Mittelstedt’s Dominion Defiant solver. This time Romulans empowered by Wariness were able to overcome the obstacles of Sebastian’s dilemma pile (which emptied quite soon due to the ongoing effectiveness of Vacation). The ability to exclude personnel from random selections proved to work well considering the random killers among Sebastian’s dilemmas. Far Seeing Eyes also helped to weaken the recovery resources of the combo-deck. Full win for Will.

    Playing at the tier one table Tobias brought a Bajoran Putsch deck which in the beginning seemed to work solidly against Michael’s deck although the Putsch nearly had no effect on the slim solver. Finally Michael was able to win his third game in a row this day.

    In the following two rounds Michael showed stamina and won both against Johannes and Ulf Benjes. It seemed ironic that Michael nearly lost the last game where Ulf repeatedly attacked him with the I.K.S. Qam-Chee just to overcome dilemmas using The Dominion Will Prevail. As he played both Qo’noS and Founders’ Homeworld he then was able to use his own commandeered Defiant.

    In the meantime Sebastian had lost a second game to Timo Catterfeld who had brought his Decipher-era Cadet deck. In his own words that game went wrong because of his „stupidity to remember to play the right cards at the right time“. In fact instead of playing Defensive Upgrades he rather drew a card and the first Vacation was gone and so on… His last game was against Hagen Wendt which he won by one round as Hagen kirked through key dilemmas and used Helen Noel multiple times to filter out a good amount of killers.

    Other notable confrontations were between Tobias and Ulf in round four and against Will in round five. Both games the Putsch deck eliminated fundamental resources and led Tobias to a runner-up position next to Michael. Will who just lost against the two top-ranked players went third followed by Sebastian. Michael’s brother Tiemo went fifth and Johannes ended up eighth losing three games in total.

    Everyone was happy to receive their unique Worf, Chief of Security virtual card and top eight won a limited Earth, Lush and Beautiful Home foil in addition. Some boosters and foils cards and a quite special Regional pin rounded up the prizes for this day and every one left happy after having a great day of Trek!
     

    Addendum:

    Headquarters played at the tournament:

    Qo’noS, Heart of the Empire x4

    Founder’s Homeworld, Home of the Great Link x2

    Mouth of the Wormhole, Deep Space 9 x2

    Romulus, Seat of Power x2

    Bajor, Gift of the Prophets x1

    Earth, Cradle of the Federation x1

    Earth, Humanity’s Home x1

    Earth, Home of Starfleet Command x1

    Earth, Lush and Beautiful Home x1

    Double-HQ 3 (Earth / DS9, Romulus / DS9, and Qo’noS / Founder’s Homeworld)
     

    Top 5 rated players at this tournament:

    Johannes Klarhauser (#2)       1772    Klingon Klingon

    Tobias Rausmann (#3)           1770    Bajoran Bajoran

    Sebastian Kirstein (#15)         1668    Federation Federation

    Michael Mittelstedt (#47)      1590    Dominion Dominion

    William Hoskin (#44)             1594    Romulan Romulan
     

    Most popular Raise the Stakes cards:

    7x Self-Sealing Stem Bolts

    7x He Wasn’t Nice

    Eight out of 12 players used cards from Raise the Stakes, most had Hagen Wendt (22) followed by Sebastian Kirstein (12).