Shadowfist Tournament Report: GenCon UK 2004

Home > Tournaments > Reports > GenCon UK 2004
[posted 22 Nov 2004; updated 15 Jan 2005]

Summary of the winners, as far as I know:

One report for you from GenCon UK 2004; thanks to Ron Wheelhouse for permission to republish.

GenCon UK 2004 multiplayer championships by Ron Wheelhouse, originally posted to the Shadowfist-UK Forum on Yahoogroups on 27 Oct 2004. Anyone can read the original in the archive.

GenCon UK 2004 multiplayer championship by Ron Wheelhouse

Originally posted to the Shadowfist-UK Forum on Yahoogroups on 27 Oct 2004 by Ron Wheelhouse. Republished with permission, with a few corrections based on subsequent replies to his posts.

Let's see if I can do this.

We had 13 people for the event (a really, *really* poor number - I should probably have bowed out to make it 12, but I'd had a bad day with the Aberrations (D&D minis) Booster draft being cancelled due to (at best) incompetence or (at worst) wilful dishonesty by a WotC staffer. So I badly need to kick some butt.

To provide a change-up I decided we would have a round of 3 and 4 player games, and a second round of 4 and 5 player games. And then I would see.

Attending we had:
Mark Wheelhouse, with his 2003 winning Tank deck. [decklist]
Callum Finlayson, playing I'm not sure what (sorry Callum).
Richard Waring playing Jammers with TMWWBK.
Calvin Skentelbery (a Magic player) with a Dragon deck if memory serves.
Mark Morris, playing something else I didn't see.
Andy Holt, playing an Underworld Gateway deck (Lotus/Asc - Operation Green Strike).
Steve Bailey, playing Lotus/Monarchs cheese.
Joshua (protégé of SB) playing Dragons.
Colin Burton playing Jammers.
Felicity Challis, playing something I can't recall.
Tony Adams, playing Hand. [decklist]
Rob Lee, playing Jammer Monkeys.
Ron Wheelhouse (me), playing 'Manchu Fishing Lodge'.

The first round games were:

• Mark Wheelhouse, Mark Morris, Ron Wheelhouse - Mark Wheelhouse won.
• Callum Finlayson, Richard Waring, Calvin Skentelbery, Andy Holt - Calvin won this rapidly.
• Steve Bailey, Joshua, Tony Adams - Steve Bailey won.
• Colin Burton, Felicity Challis, Rob Lee - Rob won.

So to the second round. The games here were:

• Mark Wheelhouse, Callum Finlayson, Tony Adams, Rob Lee, Colin Burton - even though I let this run for 105 minutes it didn't look like finishing, so I called time with Tony in the lead spot.
• Richard Waring, Joshua, Ron Wheelhouse, Calvin Skentelbery - Ron won this.
• Mark Morris, Andy Holt, Steve Bailey, Felicity Challis - Andy won this (with the gateways!).

This left me with a bit of a problem (7 single winners). I organised what I thought would be a cunning way to generate a final, but Calvin had to drop out suddenly which threw my careful plans into disarray. So we ended up with the third round matches being:

• Mark Wheelhouse, Richard Waring, Tony Adams, Steve Bailey - Tony won this (becoming a sort of double winner).
• Callum Finlayson, Ron Wheelhouse, Rob Lee, Andy Holt - this went on for over 90 minutes, so I got Steve to impose a time limit - when it turned up there was a winning attack underway, so I allowed it to complete as is my policy, but it didn't succeed (perhaps just as well as it was me attacking), and the winner on points was Rob.
• Mark Morris, Joshua, Colin Burton, Felicity Challis - Joshua won this.

That meant there were two 'double' winners (Rob and Tony), so the 5 single winners got to play a semi-final. I decided this was going to run to completion, and I sent Tony and Rob off to seek food and entertainment (I also ran some consolation games for those not in contention). So the third place in the final would go to one of: Mark Wheelhouse, Andy Holt, Steve Bailey, Joshua, Ron Wheelhouse - Andy fancied his chances (he believed his deck was better in 5 player than 3). The game went on for over 3 hours, and finally (after many wining attempts by many people) Mark managed to push home a tank for the victory. He pleaded to play the final on the next day (it was midnight by now) but Rob had a competition then. So I grabbed him and Tony and set down to watch the final.

The final was: Mark Wheelhouse, Rob Lee, Tony Adams.

Andy Holt predicted that it would either be a quick win for Tony or a long grind-out win for Rob. He was right about the grind - the game lasted nearly 4 hours (which is pretty surprising for a 3-player game in my experience), and was stalled early by Rob having a City Square and a Fox Pass in play. Mark sniped with bobos in tanks, but took a long time to climb the power generation curve. Eventually the City Square was dealt with, but then Ba-Boom arrived to lock things down again. After much brain curdling Tony finally won by taking control of Ba-Boom and throwing in a big wedge of Hand hitters (he had been building up power solidly, while Rob had been accumulating a huge hand thanks to his Supercomputer). Even so if there had been one more stopper out there he would have failed*, but we were all pretty tired by this point, and happy to see it all over. (Mark didn't get up for breakfast the next morning, and claims he is 'Fisted out' for the near future after two gruelling games.)

[* Tony Adams posted this clarification to Ron's report: Err, actually I had a Confucian in hand, and 12 power with Derek Han, Killdeer, and Wind on the Mountain for the follow-up attack. Not that I wasn't a hair's-breadth from losing several times in the early game.]

So Tony Adams is the new UK champion, and went away with a fistful of promos.

I got up the next day to play in the D&D minis final (and come second to Steve Biggs, grrr), and then I spent most of Monday asleep to catch up.

Thanks to all of you who came and played, we missed several people from London (due to poor weather and journey times) and Manchester (ditto I suspect). I hear rumours that next year will be more accessible (and that would be a good thing).

back to top

Legal Stuff | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | About Me | Contact Me