/var/log/orava

Well, even though I’m on vacation somehow I haven’t had much rest or idle time. Part of that is due to my decision to start each day off with a 2km swim at the stadium, and then see what else I need to do… that cuts out a large chunk of the day. The weather had been great, so swimming outdoors is wonderful. No complaints.

Anyway, seems I haven’t gotten around to writing my EC impressions yet, and they will have to wait till after Ropecon (which starts today, with the big VTES tournament I’m running kicking off at 18:00). I’m starting to have everything ready now, but I continually have a feeling that I’ve forgotten something.

I do intend to write about EC, too. Until that point in time, Marko Saari has some pictures available from the trip.

Now off for a swim, then back home to do a last check on email and then off to Ropecon. I don’t expect to sleep much during the weekend, since I have the 03-07 (yes, AM) info shifts on both days, and the VTES tournament will run until 1-2am. Sleep is for the weak.

Back from the EC tournament long weekend in Gothenburg, Sweden. Great trip, huge amount of fun. Not all that much sleep, though. More reports when I manage to rest and unwind.

Not much luck in the Tampere ECQ last Saturday, but it was a lot of fun. Got a grand total of 1.5 VPs, which surprisingly enough almost got me a qualification – as far as I know, I was just below the cutoff point for that. Surprising for such a low VP number, but of course we had a few already qualified people there and they also made it to the finals, bringing the qualification barrier down. Oh well, I guess my last chance to qualify is the aptly named Last Chance Qualifier at the EC.

Can’t really blame my deck this time, it’s working pretty well (though I do have a few small tweaks I still want to do, I need to add a bit more bleed power still). It was more a matter of game luck and how I played… I didn’t catch myself making many mistakes, but just didn’t get lucky enough – the first game gave me ridiculously few wakes and deflects in the beginning, and with a stealth Presence bleeder as my predator I was forced into defensive mode, letting my prey grow strong. Things would have worked a lot differently if my grandpredator had gotten his rush deck to work, but he didn’t. The second game had my prime vampire get torporized and diablerized early on, which seriously put a spanner in the works and lost me a significant amount of forward momentum. The third game actually (barely) got me a VP, plus half for timeout. In this game I finally managed to put real pressure on my prey, which made all the difference.

I was at a friend’s “polttarit” (would be “bachelor party”, but this was a girl so I’m not sure what term to use here) on Friday, that proved to be a lot more fun than I expected – my plan was just to drop in quickly, since I had the ECQ the next day. We had another friend as DJ and he did a really good job with a great playlist, I ended up dancing and socializing until pretty late… which resulted in me getting just 6+ hours of sleep before driving towards Tampere the next morning. Yawn. All that combined led to a Sunday spent in recovery – I didn’t do much except watch videos, plan Wednesday’s game a bit, made some lunch, and read a bit. Finally got around to watching the season end of Battlestar Galactica, which was very cool; some surprises there and I’m looking forward to seeing what direction they take things for the last season. Also watched some of the last episodes of Veronica Mars, which continues to entertain… it’s a real pity that this show didn’t get renewed, leaving the third season as the last one. Sigh. Why do all the good shows get cancelled, and the crap get s renewed?

Nice weekend. Even though it was pretty busy and at times exhausting, I had a lot of fun. We headed out Friday evening to Janne’s summer place, packing some VTES tournament decks and lots of card trade folders. Sauna and swim in the lake (about 10 C, brrr), was nice – first lake swim this summer for me.

Anyway, after an soundly slept night at the cabin and some breakfast, we headed to Turku and the EC qualifier tournament. Lots of people there (56 players I think), with people coming from all over Finland.

All in all, I did poorly; only got 0,5 VPs due to a timeout – a combination of my deck not being quite good enough (yet) for that tournament environment, some bad luck, and some mistakes on my part. On the other hand, all the games were lots of fun and the general atmosphere was nice and relaxed. I also got lots of ideas to improve my deck, which is also good.

I was playing my Serpentis/Temporis Temptation machine, which might have been a mistake (or not, hard to say). The first game started up very nicely and I was just about to get to speed when my predator (who had looked about to get ousted by a Lasombra s+b deck) suddenly played Palla Grande and I found myself facing 5 minions, all of which bled for 2 at stealth. In hindsight it was obvious, but I really didn’t see that Palla Grande coming. I had also overextended myself a bit, should have played a bit more conservatively. Oh well.

The second game had me in a nightmare position: predator was a pure Obf/Dem stealth bleeder, and prey was a Tzimisce intercept wall. Between a rock and a hard place, I managed some delaying action (partly thanks to some nice Banishment action from across the table), and almost managed to hold on enough for my Temptations to activate on all of my predator’s vampires (which might have changed the situation a slight bit). Almost doesn’t count, and I got ousted. No real mistakes on my part here, it was just a really crappy starting position for this deck.

The third game went on the longest and gave me my meager half VP (which almost became 1,5 VPs). It also uncovered my stupidest mistake: I had misread a certain Temporis action mod and hadn’t noticed that it also requires Auspex. Head, meet wall. Since my bleed power was based on that card and it was suddenly partly unusable (bleed reduce still worked), I was badly lacking in forward momentum. My predator was Teemu’s Imbued deck, which went on to win the whole tournament – and to my suprise my deck did pretty well against him, staying in the game until timeout. However, because of my lack of bleed power I was unable to oust my Dominate bleed + voter prey, even though I had him on the ropes and he was down to 2 pool when the game ended and I had Temptations ready to activate on his minions; had I gotten my turn, I would have ousted him without problem.

This game also had me do all sorts of mistakes, some stupid and some sort of understandable:

• I forgot to take pool from the edge twice. Stupid.
• I forgot to put Temptation counters on the cards once. Slightly stupid, but no big deal in that tactical situation.
• I totally forgot about Carlton’s special ability (burn Carlton to burn diablerist), and went on to diablerize Marcus Vitel so I could get his Helicopter. Poof goes Hesha, next round. Annoying, but I don’t blame myself that much for it – not many people remember that special, and at least it got rid of both Vitel and Carlton.
• I tried to steal one of Teemu’s Imbued with an Entrancement, even though I fully knew that he had the Conviction card that prevented stealing. No idea why I did that, total brain fart. Stupid waste of an action and an Entrancement that I could have used to bleed.

Sigh. The good thing is that I probably won’t make the same mistakes again soon. Some different ones, sure…

Kudos to Teemu for excellent play, as always, and especially for playing Memories of Mortality on my Synesios. Due to the card wordings, it actually prevents Touch of Pain also, which Teemu realized when he played it and I found out when I tried to use Touch of Pain. Nice (well, not nice for me, but a clever thing to realize).

Janne also did pretty poorly (1 VP total I think), so we decided to call it a day and head back towards Helsinki instead of staying to watch the finals.

The next day I slept pretty late, did some stuff in the garden, and then headed toward town with Janka. We tried to go to see Footlight’s student show (some friends had an acrobatics performance there), but it turned out we had the wrong place; we were at Aleksanterin Teatteri when we should have been in Hakaniemi. Duh. We didn’t have time to make it across town, so we went to Plan B and walked to see the remnants of the “World in the Village” festival, had a few drinks at the Kaisaniemi terrace, and finally walked to Jäähalli to see Placebo in concert.

The concert was ok, but not great. The song selection was ok; Janka liked it but it was missing many of my own favorites and concentrated on their newest album which is ok but not my favorite. The biggest problem, however, was the volume. Either by mistake or by some misguided purpose, everything was turned up way too loud, and Molko’s distinctive voice tended to get drowned under the distorted wall of guitar and drum; the end result was a sonic mush, much of the time. Earplugs would have been a good idea. Some nice moments, though, I really like their version of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill”, and at times things rocked nicely. Mostly, however, I much prefer them on CD compared to this. Nine Inch Nails proved last time that you can do a wall of sound without everything getting distorted into mush, at precisely the same concert venue. For generally melodic stuff like Placebo, I think going the “this one goes to 11!” route is/was a mistake.

In any case, it was a fun day and it really felt like summer in many ways. When the concert ended the heavens opened, with a major thunderstorm and heavy rain crashing down. We got a taxi after some small hassle but were still soaked. Soaked and not minding it much, since the rain was warm. Another sign of summer, I guess.

Been playing and designing decks for VTES a lot lately, largely thanks to the upcoming European Championships Qualifier tournament, to be played this weekend in Turku. The top 25% of the players there get EC qualifications, we’ll see how it goes. I’m going to the EC in Gothenburg in any case, if I don’t manage to qualify now there’s a second chance in Tampere this summer, and of course the last-chance qualifier at the EC itself.

The EC will be full of quality playtime even if I don’t qualify at all, the side tournaments should be pretty fun too. Perhaps even more fun that the EC itself, where people tend to play very, very seriously. So, I’m not too bothered by the qualification or lack thereof. Would be nice, of course.

Still haven’t decided on a deck, at the moment I have three candidates:

One is a fun Serpentis/Temporis toolbox, with a lot of multifunction cards and a pretty solid core strategy (which I’m not revealing here :). A bit slow, but it should be able to keep others guessing since it uses some fairly nonstandard strategies. Won’t instantly die to any one deck type, but a good rush deck would probably kill it dead, as would a fast power-bleeder. Doesn’t look too intimidating until it gets rolling, which can be good. Not sure if it has enough forward pressure – I’ve added some after my last playtest, but…

The second is an aggravated damage -oriented affair that makes heavy use of Sebastian Goulet in both of his incarnations. Dominate bleeds + bounce, with aggro-poke for defense and intimidation. Vulnerable to votes, and to anything that can kill off Sebastian of course – losing him would put a major dent in my plans. Needs a bit of setup, but I’ve tweaked this to hopefully get off to a faster start thanks to ideas I got from the other players after my previous game with this (thanks, guys!).

The third one is the latest incarnation of my anarch Daughters of Cacophony vote deck (“Anarchy at the Opera”), which I also played last EC. This version features better card and vote flow (one hopes) but otherwise keeps the same idea – lots of actions, lots of votes, some amount of toolbox. Dangerous if it gets going, but can have a hard time establishing vote dominance and a good intercept deck can seriously hurt this one… I have some amount of stealth, but it’s not a true stealth voter deck.