Origins 2019

Summarizing first:

I did what I wanted to do.  It was decent.

It would have likely been better if I wasn’t sick much of the time.  On Saturday, when I finally had a break, after Day 2 of the NAC, I stopped off at the pharmacy for drugs and lay down.

Observation – traveling, in particular flying, is harder on me than it used to be.  I actually think it’s not just the travel as, for instance, every time I take off from work my more urgent stuff isn’t done.  I took a work laptop to the con and, predictably, did very little work.  Normally, I don’t take laptops to cons as I know I’ll be too busy to do anything beyond what I can do on my phone (which is nothing workwise besides talk on the phone).

Still, getting up at 2:30AM to pack, spending all day flying (maybe having so many connecting flights is part of the problem), not eating during the day only to gorge after I arrive, immediately not going to bed when I arrive, not having breaks during trips (unless family trips), etc. are doing me in rather regularly.  I’m still not fully well after getting back from Origins 11PM Sunday night and I’ve had no nighttime activities this week – no, the cheerleader orgies will have to wait.

Before I get to problem number two, let’s sidetrack into an esoteric diversion to speak of something gaming related.

I played six V:TES tournaments.  I made zero final tables.  I had one GW … playing someone else’s deck.  It’s almost like recounting my experiences aren’t going to be that interesting to the kajillions of VTESites who read this looking for how to tablesplit their way to groupies and gold stars.

I’ll make some comments, anyway, because I might as well try to pop out another 3000 word post.

Problem #2 with Origins 2019:  I continue to be incompetent when it comes to managing True Dungeon token weight.

Sure, I hand carried such light things as CCG cards and plastic poker chip sized disks with metal slugs inside of them and neoprene rolled up into nine plus two rolls to play/run my events.  Because I’m only an upper peasant level flyer on my main airline, like a craftsman or farmer or something, I weighed my suitcase and pulled out some token bags to get down to 49 pounds.  My carry on was significantly heavier (my game carry on, also had my laptop bag stuffed with crackers and … uh … laptop stuff).

My hotel was not close to the con, being like 2 blocks or less from my hotel last year.  I still managed to consistently carry 40-60 pounds of cards/tokens every day besides Saturday.  Saturn’s Day, the day of no Traveller and no TD after I finally transmuted a bunch of tokens Saturday morning, was the one day I wasn’t worried about my man bag ripping when I’d lift it off the ground.

Bag with wheels for TD because if there’s one thing heavier than tightly packed cards it’s tokens.  That’s one not so much takeaway as I didn’t think a lot about it but suggestion from a couple of folks.

Also, just stop thinking I’m going to dump extra tokens on folks who might want them.  Sure, it’s possible I run into someone who wants Blessed Pants of the Hare, like I did in the hall outside the transmute room, but why is that worth carrying an extra 10 pounds every day?  I’m inclined to believe it’s not worth it.  Just as my conclusion after last year’s Gen Con is no more trading or buying that requires me to hunt TDers on Wednesday when I should be sleeping at 8PM, no more dragging around sheets of “blues” thinking I’ll somehow be able to move what was a gross overtransmutingfest of transmutingness on my part last year.

Not exactly a problem as it’s not terribly controllable, but I think I would have had more fun if I didn’t fly solo.  Could have distributed weight better.  Could have used rideshare more cost effectively (in a sense, in another sense the cost doesn’t change).  Probably just feel more relaxing.

So, let’s go back in time.  To the long long ago that was the weekend before my Tuesday flight to Ohio.

I had an open weekend.  I had a weekend of deckbuilding and token organizing.  When I was but a tyke, a callow youth full of vim and vis, I would have pounded out five V:TES decks.  I made two.  I jammed some extra cards from a broken down deck in to have some possibility of adjusting my Day 2 tournament deck.

I packed one long box of V:TES, essentially five decks and some extra cards.  I packed my Traveller decks box, my promo card box, nine playmats to give out (given away), two starter set boxes (brought back), various ship decks and expansion packs for demo use or prizes or to exchange for cloth (one might say “mystic cotton/linen”).  I packed some crackers, pistachios, clothes, toiletries, drugs, my hamburger (many of you know what this means), etc.  Two binders of tokens, two tupperware things with tokens, miscellaneous token bags.  Left dice bag at home.

And, so, it commences …

Tuesday was the usual awful early morning flight that happens when I fly West to East.  I rush over to Fabian’s to play in the Tuesday night tournament.  This was arguably a mistake.  Another possibility would have been to save money, take the cheap airport bus instead of an Uber, check in to hotel, drop off 100 pounds of stuff, casually wander over to Fabian’s to hang out and eat a salad while players gotta play.

Actually, if I think through rest strategy for Origins, blowing off the Wednesday morning tournament might have made more sense as I’m still on Pacific time so getting up at 4AM to get ready for V:TES is maybe not as condign as staying up to 8PM playing V:TES the night before.

I played a rush deck that my opponents didn’t think was a rush deck.  Let’s just say the deck could be called Secret Rising and I never played a King’s Rising …

I told my fellow airport-bound VTESite on Sunday that I didn’t even play a pickup game.  That wasn’t true.  I blanked out that I played one Tuesday night before one of the players drove me to my hotel.  I played my Aus/Tha/Vic deck where I played cards, so it was not a bad game.

Wednesday

The only con thing I plan on doing is to get some transmutes in since the TD volunteers are awesome and make Origins transmuting uberpleasant.  No rush, here.  I’ll get ousted early some round and have plenty of time to pick up my badge and try to convert more tokens into fewer tokens.

I actually couldn’t remember which deck I played in which Wednesday tournament until I remembered my hamburger with tater tots.  I played casual stealth vote in the burger tournament and played Blessed Resilience (minus all of the disgusting Legionnaires, of course, need to update my personal banned list one of these days) in the stromboli tournament.

Keeping with the idea that my tournament results are so tres pathetique that nobody actually cares about who went first or what round I used two counters off of Polaris Coach, I’ll just mention some random events.

Round one, I play The Parthenon and Dreams on turn one.  I put out Pelletier the Justicar.  I play Info Highway on turn two and play Hardestadt pretty quick.  I end up with Breidenstein, Una, Ubende before I call Anarchist Uprising to do 14 pool damage to myself, killing my predator, and pretty much guaranteeing the GW to my axe.

Pretty sad when you have 42 pool worth (arguably 45 pool worth) of minions in play and are stymied by a Demdemeh deck that never got above two intercept.

Round two, Falhu learned Protean, but my game was less scare-inducing.  My burger got cold over the rounds.

I remember the second round of playing Blessed Resilience that day.  My ousting bleed mod got DIed by my predator.  Gee, that sounds like something I might do.  Of the three Harbinger decks at the table, I was the only noble and pure Emeraldless one.  So, I lost.

I can’t remember the first round.  I don’t remember opponents.  I don’t remember seating.  I don’t remember what I did.  I vaguely recall putting out Erlik and using the counters for Erebus.  I think Nicomedes was my first non-Tupdog minion, looking through my crypt and remembering that Nicomedes use was non-trivial.  Some massive block for this game.

Thursday

I thought about throwing something together from what I had, but I thought it made more sense to borrow a deck from Darby.  Since I don’t own all of the various promo 11 caps and don’t proxy, I borrowed Baba Yaga.

First round, my Jake gets J.S.  Since this isn’t Tasha, Jake gets contested immediately.  My prey is playing Darby’s War Ghoul deck.  My predator actually bothered to meta against allies and I see a hand full of Entrancements before I’m ousted.  Didn’t do a whole lot.

Second round, Darby is my grandpredator playing Tupdog.  I thought about rushing crosstable one turn when it wouldn’t have been too spite-inducing for Darby, but my predator was playing DOM/Obt and had a second minion the turn I thought about it.  My grandprey reduced my ousting bleed only to get ousted by my prey on his next turn.  I stealth bled Darby out for my one GW in 14 rounds of V:TES.

Well, you know what I always say, the only thing that matters when it comes to multiplayer CCGs is deck strength.  Next year, I’ll leave the Gargoyles with Daimoinon decks at home and play nothing but … er … well, when I figure out what the good decks are in the game, I’ll play one of those and I’ll eat the big tamale in the sky.  Maybe I’ll fly solo again next year, just knowing I’ll be swimming in groupies.

Finally, the TDForumite comes back to joining someone else’s Nightmare run.  We are six adventurers playing a dungeon we’ve played before.  I get asked what weapon I’m running as paladin and comment “Thor’s Hammer” to which the asker notes the entire party is running legendary weapons.  Truly, I have found my ilk and it is less than 1%.  Have I graduated to being a .5%er?  Is it even possible that since I was lending out three Charms of Avarice for us to ghost the other four players at max treasure that I’m *gasp* a .1%er.

It’s almost like games I invest in I get a lot of harder to get components.  Almost as if.

I took damage; I think I got down to 47 hit points and used Crown of Expertise on my Lay On Hands.  Honestly, my ilk really should be running Epic rather than Nightmare unless the party is really small or we don’t play maxed out builds.

My favorite way to play TD remains Hardcore with 12 token builds.  I realized how annoying it was to carry around a bunch of conditional crap when we just don’t need it, including such low yield tokens as healing potions.  Jumping ahead, I see Nightmare being too easy in a lot of cases at this point, so I’m likely to make more interesting builds.  Maybe actually run Boots of Might again and level up not through eldritch.

Then, had a 9PM run with some of same guys and Laz’s group.  Laz’s family iz gut at puzzles, and I didn’t really need to do anything ever, though I healed some playing druid in the boss fight.

I’m increasingly less interested in 10 player runs.  I’m thinking maybe our next evolution is to buy out runs and run double downs or something.  I’m already very hit or miss at puzzles, but when I can be miss, miss, miss at combat and it doesn’t make any difference, combat is kind of worthless.  This is a major factor in us getting away from PUGs in the first place, to set a difficulty level that isn’t pointless.

I keep doing a horrid job of explaining the irony of TD – the players think they want more and more powerful tokens and, yet, the more fun runs are the runs that are challenging, which more powerful builds defeat.  Was talking to a friend of mine about his runs and he mentioned all of the variant stuff where optimized builds were eschewed.  I don’t want to do greedy sealed at Nightmare.  I want to do ranged monk, 12 token at Hardcore.  But, since the rewards for NM are better, means doing something like maybe 15 token or doing thematic builds like damage reduction or retribution.  Or, double downs and see how they go at NM.

Friday

NAC Day 1.  My first round is set up fantastically for me with turbo Erlik to my left and stealth bleed to my right.  Well, my grandpredator’s bleeding was easy for me to handle.  My predator kept bleeding me with an 8-cap, which was a problem for my bounce.  I screwed up the three-way …  I only ended up with a table split.

My second round, my prey contested my first vampire and did everything possible to get me ousted.  I didn’t do much.  My third round, I had a promising game, but I took too long ousting my prey, sitting on wake bounce most of the time with my second predator not being cooperative even though all his deck did was bleed at stealth.  My grandprey turned the pool/minion count corner, my predator didn’t try backousting with Kindred Spirits, so we didn’t survive.

I qualified easily enough for Day 2, but I was just taking up space in these tournaments.

Last TD run, with Laz hosting again.  Played druid again.  Did actually deal damage with spells.  Did 80 with one spell in boss fight and elf wizard commented “only 80?”, further supporting the idea that trying to get the challenge level right in TD is actually really hard once people have token collections.  Don’t look down on starter pack level play at Normal.  Normal is a better technical game most of the time, IME.

Saturday

After forgetting key transmute components Friday leading to carrying an extra 25-30 pounds of tokens all day Friday for no reason, I put together the last two transmutes I was going to do at Origins and got to leave everything else in a highly secure black ops facility.  Well, and I had my V:TES decks.

Round one was a tedious game.  There was so much talking about nothing.  I should have probably done something about the table talk in a language besides English, but I didn’t really care and didn’t find the end result offensive.

Round two was fine from a table setup situation.  My prey got beaten down a lot by my grandprey.  Time ran out to complete the game, where I would have been in trouble against a wall deck.

Round three, I worried my predator, so he bled me for 9, then for 6 to oust me.

Nap time.  Well, eventually get back to room and turn on ESPN and hope to get over chills time while worrying about packing the next day and running Traveller demos the day I fly out.

I suppose I could mention that I’m such a “_” player that my first VP at Week of Nightmares was my prey transferring out to spite my predator and my second VP was from playing Golconda and my prey just no longer caring what happened.

Sunday

Traveller and traveling.  My demos went fine.  I got rid of playmats but very little of my decks.  I forgot to take pictures (predictably when I have lots of things on my mind).

My flights were much later than I thought, so I hung out briefly in V:TES zone.  Then, recycled air and tight seats for hours.

Oh, what decks did I play Day 1 and Day 2?  Loser decks.  Decks that can’t oust fast.

Thank you to the VTESites for doing WoN, NAC, for hanging out or chatting or whatever.  Thanks to Laz, Matt, et al, for transmuting and hosting my runs.  Thanks to those who talked to me about Traveller, John also helped me have enough playmats to give out to everyone who wanted one.

I did what I planned to do.  Did what I wanted to do.  Did what I was obligated to do.  I hope I enjoy Gen Con 2019 more, though, and Origins 2020.  Sadly, while it was my intention for more than a year to go to the EC this year, work makes that not a possibility.  Guess I won’t take up space in those events, either.

Not quite 3000 words.  Hmmm … my Columbus Airport food experience was vastly inferior to the year before.  I don’t know why I bothered getting anything before my flight.  In the next 200 words, I’ll get into the math of how many Polaris Coaches to run in a 75 card deck …

Oh, just had one last thought.  Hugh, maybe I would use a V:TES playmat if I could win one sometime, also might give me a reason to endeavor more vigorously at the whole winning a tournament thing, which just means ending up feeling disappointed by failure rather than reveling in it.