I've been pretty busy this past few days with the usual festive real-life nonsense, so I'm just going to drop in with a quick roundup of what's been going on in WoWTCG land over here.
Chase the Can
On the 22nd of December we chased some cans at Chimera Ripley! Owing to the success of the demos we did the week previous with the Class Starter Decks, we enforced a Class Starter only theme to the tournament. Unfortunately none of our demoees turned up, but we had a turnout of seven plus one of our regulars who came along to donate cans despite being unable to play due to Christmas errands.
I dug out my Horde Priest that had been so flaky back in the Spectral Safari days, taking me to a not entirely convincing 2-2 finish; this time things were much better, I finished first with a 3-0 record and took home four of each promo card for my troubles (Blade of the Empty Void and Life-staff of the Web Lair).
I took the cans to the Arena Church food bank in Ilkeston, about seven miles from Ripley. I was feeling pretty rough in the run-up to Christmas with a cough and cold, hadn't shaved for a couple of days and felt generally a little under the weather; this must have been pretty obvious as when I got there, the staff asked me if I was there for the food bank, before sitting me down with a form to fill in to claim some food for myself...
Post-Christmas Battlegrounds
There were only four of us for the Battlegrounds between Christmas and New Year, so we decided to get one final use out of The Reason for the Season for the year and play some Classic. Unfortunately I'd spent a bit of time preparing a deck for us to play Arena with, so I dug something else out of my bag, chucked Reason and a new card from Worldbreaker in, and went to work:
4 Lady Bancroft
4 Hurdan the Everlasting
4 Adam Eternum
4 Crusade Engineer Spitzpatrick
4 Dimzer the Prestidigitator
4 Shadowfiend
3 Signet of Manifested Pain
4 Divine Fury
4 A Taste of Divinity
4 Lesson of the Light
4 Mist of Corrosion
3 Tuskarr Kite
4 Eye of the Storm
4 Light Within the Darkness
4 Tabards of the Illidari
4 The Reason for the Season
I'd given a similar version of this to Josh for the Feast of Winter Veil event, and he piloted it to a 2-2 finish, which was pretty good for something I'd thrown together a couple of nights prior. I'd tweaked it a little, removing the Merciless Gladiator's Raiment and Searing Light, replacing them with Divine Fury, and adding in The Reason for the Season (which I didn't complete once!). I faced two opponents - a classic Grennan Stormspeaker Shaman burn deck, and a Ringleader Kuma deck that was tuned for Arena play.
The deck was largely built around the fact that Priests tend to suffer a little with card draw, but with the release of Tilly, the first Gnome Priest hero, you can now play Dimzer the Prestidigitator - enough to give any deck a little gee-up as the game goes on.
What I didn't expect was how relevant Tilly's flip would be - it costs 3, and gives allies in your party Mend 1. When you're churning out a Signet token every turn and pushing Hurdan the Everlasting back on to the field as often as possible, the flip works really nicely to let you keep pumping those tokens out without having to worry too much about your health total.
The deck was a moderate success. Having the curve top out at 5 means you can remain aggressive throughout the game, and it is pretty easy to deal with an early onslaught thanks to the Signet and Lesson of the Light, which works not only with your tokens, but also your standard one and two drops.
Unfortunately, no matter how I tried, there were two cards I really struggled against: Feral Spirit, and Nathanos Blightcaller. Nathanos was easy enough to deal with, but obviously involves sacrificing three cards/tokens just to kill the spawn of one; Feral Spirit could be dealt with by a Divine Fury and two Signet tokens, but even then, it's not ideal. Somewhat depressingly, the answer lies in the Blue Man Group - Mikael the Blunt.
I'm already playing Eye of the Storm, so with a little cutting, Mikael would fit right in and likely alleviate the two problems I came up against.
The draw issue was largely moot - I rarely ran out of cards, in slower games I was able to churn out a token and Kite it immediately, Dimzer worked as expected and the Adam/Spitzpatrick draw engine will normally net you two or three cards, not to mention giving you the option of not removing Adam in preparation for a five damage beat to the face.
Some tweaking is required, but this performed much better than I expected it to. I finished 1-1 after failing three times in a row to deal with Feral Spirit (double Feral Spirit on one occasion).
Chimera Championships 2011
This came as something of a pleasant surprise to hear about - next year, the two Chimera stores are running an inter-store WoWTCG championship, with monthly qualifiers and a final to be held at some point at the end of April. The first qualifier is on the 8th of January 2011, the entry is a fiver and there's prize support in the form of one pack per player, various EAs and free entry to any Chimera sessions for a month to the winner.
More information can be found on Facebook.
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