Thursday marked the first day of official World Championship events for me. The Star Wars: Armada event was scheduled to start at noon, but I had a bye in the first round courtesy of my victory at the Canadian Nationals. So, our usual readers may have to bear with me for a moment as I divert briefly into Armada talk.
I was very nervous about the Armada event. It is not my primary event and I don’t spend as much time strategizing or practicing as I do for other games. And with the first round bye, that meant I would be matched up against other winning players in the second round. I didn’t want to embarrass either the Toronto scene or Canada in general by crashing and burning.
Thankfully I was able to pull off a victory in my first actual match of the day. Ironically it was against the player from New Mexico who had actually travelled to participate in the Canadian Nationals. I made a few mistakes, but I felt pretty good about my performance, even if was low margin victory that only netted me only 6 out of a possible 10 points for the round.
But a win moved me further up in the standings, so I was facing even stiffer competition. Unfortunately I didn’t write down the name of my opponent in the third round, but he was very friendly – even after having a long day at the X-Wing event the day before. He had actually made top 16, but was eliminated early enough Thursday morning to be able to play in the Armada event. I ended up with a full loss in that match. There were a couple key mistakes that would likely have turned the course of the battle, but I didn’t feel terrible about my performance. And my opponent was such a pleasure to play against, that I still ended the day feeling great.
I ended up with 15 out of a possible 30 points for the day, so it removed most of the anguish from the decision to drop from day 2 of the Armada event to play in the Warhammer 40,000: Conquest main event tomorrow.
Now I’m just waiting for room service to bring me my burger before I head back to the Fantasy Flight Games Event Center for a couple more hours of Conquest theorycrafting and deck tweaking before we get down to business in the morning. Many people have been talking about how the field with be bringing a lot of anti-Kith to the event to deal with the prevalence of Kith players, but even knowing that, there are still some top players coming over to the dark side and switching to Kith at the last minute. I think I may swap a few cards around, but I’m locked in to Dark Eldar.
Also, I want to take a moment to congratulate John Gobeil, a local Toronto Conquest player, for his 5th place finish in the Worldeater event today and his shiny new Broadside playmat.
Travis is flying out to the FFG World Championships in Minnesota next week to play in the Star Wars: Armada, Warhammer 40,000: Conquest and Android: Netunner events. Conquest is his primary focus and he is going to share some of his thoughts leading up to and during the event here on The Tactical Squad blog.